I Promise You, You’re So Much More Than a Body

Sister Cate Casparius shares an inspiring story about finding self love and hope through the sorority recruitment process. Read all about it below.

This piece was first published on 28 Row’s Blog, Study Break, on March 11, 2020.

I am the heaviest yet most confident I’ve ever been in four years. I’ve struggled with multiple eating disorders for years and when I look back on how unhappy, self-conscious, depressed and anxious I used to be I am truly shocked that this amount of joy and happiness is now possible. This is SO uncomfortable for me to write about. I’m not looking for sympathy - far from it - I’m just looking to share some strong thoughts that I know will benefit others. 

I’ve always considered myself to be a happy person. A positive person. An optimistic person. A strong person. But this battle for the past few years, that truly felt like an eternity, really dragged me down and made me forget who I was as a person in so many ways. As someone who deprived their body for months to the point where my organs were shutting down, as someone who lied about eating and my feelings and everything going on, as someone who relearned how to eat as binge eating rather than “normal” eating, as someone who didn’t go out so many nights in high school because I was ashamed of how I looked and felt constantly, as someone who couldn’t get out of bed this summer because I was so depressed, as someone who never showed negative emotions to the outside world, I now wake up happier than I could’ve ever imagined. I seriously considered not leaving for college this summer because I was in such a bad place. I didn’t think I’d ever be happy to be me again. Huge accomplishments that I should have been so proud of like getting into college, graduating high school, getting into a marketing agency as a freshman at Tech, never felt good. They all felt dull.

I was never proud to be me no matter what I had accomplished because I only ever cared about being small. My mom (pictured with me on the “Dive In” page for this piece) constantly told me that I am so much more than a body, but it never meant anything to me. If anything, it angered me that she, and so many others, didn’t understand my feelings.

Going through rush I truly changed as a person. Rush has such a negative stigma around it, but for me it was life-changing. Girls stress over their looks and outfits for hours, but the process of rushing a sorority was one of the least artificial experiences I’ve ever experienced. It was the first time I didn’t care about looks and neither did anyone else. It was my personality alone that got me into the sorority I wanted. For the first time in so long I was proud to be me because I realized I am so much more than a body - and so is everyone else. 

As different as I feel now though, I’m not 100% healed. I’m not going on spring break with some of my best friends because that means wearing a bathing suit which I am not ready to do, but it’s all big steps in the right direction. These days,I finally feel like I’m living because I most definitely wasn’t these last few years. It kills me to think I wasted so many good times on being fixated on food and how I felt so terrible inside my body. It hindered me from so many relationships and that hurts to think about too. Again, I never thought I’d be able to be so happy, but I am and it is possible. I’m not perfect, I still get self-conscious and I have good days and bad days BUT it’s what you do with those days that matter. You can’t let the bad days take over and throw you backward. You have to take control of your thoughts and busy yourself with something else. Yes, I still eat shitty sometimes (which for me means eating too much or too little) but honestly no matter what social media portrays, there’s no such thing as “perfect” eating. There’s so much more to life than looks and I really hope everyone is able to come to terms with this one day in their lives before it’s too late.