Why Did I Change So Much From Fourth to Fifth Grade?

Fighting depression, binge eating, and friendship loss

From third to fifth grade, I attended school in Arco, Idaho, a desolate outpost in a land of sagebrush and ancient lava flows. My weight drastically increased during that time, rendering the tight fabric leggings I wore rather unattractive.

One day when I entered my fifth-grade classroom, a boy named Lake who I had a massive crush on exclaimed, “It’s the Jolly Red Giant!”

“Don’t!” said another classmate, Julie, like I needed someone to defend me.

“I was just saying it because her shirt and pants are red,” Lake protested.

But I knew he meant that I was big. I was taller than the other girls and all the boys but one, and overweight.

I don’t belong, I thought. I don’t have any friends.

Sure, when I moved to Montana shortly afterward the other girls glommed onto me on my final day and gave me their contact information. Julie cried. But I hadn’t hung out and played with anybody in a long time.

Things had changed so much for me since fourth grade.

In the summer between third and fourth grade, my parents threw a big birthday party for me. Six girls, including my best friend Ashley, and I played miniature golf, whacked a piñata, and befriended a three-legged dog. I wore a cute cowgirl outfit with a short denim skirt.

All of my friends were in Girl Scouts and my mom was the troop leader. We would gather at my house to work on our badges and play with my toys. When one of the girls pulled hair from the tail of my black toy horse, I was incensed.

But I was part of the group, a normal kid. Ashley and her older sister, Danielle, lived an easy bike ride down the road from me. One day a dog chased me and took a big chunk out of my butt. Damn, that hurt.

Despite my apprehension at riding past the dog’s yard, I loved to play at Ashley’s house and visit her real-life black pony, Toby.

During winter, Ashley and I went to the frozen-over park to ice skate. She had skates, I didn’t, so I slid on the ice on my boots. We had a grand time.

One sunny afternoon we tripped through the dry desert grass in the scorching heat, collecting rocks and pretending we were looking for dinosaurs.

Soon after, Ashley moved away.

We wrote to each other, but it wasn’t the same. I’d lost my best friend and didn’t have a replacement.

I tried to forge connections by going over to my schoolmate Lindsey’s house with a group of girls. She gave us a tour of her upstairs bedroom and we oohed and ahhed at all the space she had. I was impressed with her swiveling desk chair.

Lindsey, though, didn’t become my friend.

I heard a rumor that Lindsey had kissed Lake on the playground. Being an immature fifth grader, I passed it on. While I stood in the lunch line, Lindsey and another girl rushed up to me, furious.

“Why did you tell people I kissed Lake?” Lindsey demanded.

I was shocked. I had only repeated the rumor! I didn’t originate it.

Clearly, I didn’t know how to find and keep friends. After Ashley moved away, I felt further away from people. It was like I was looking at life from a distance — something I still feel today.

My binge eating also began at Arco.

It all started when I caught a cold. For a few days, I didn’t eat much. When my cold cleared up, I developed a ravenous appetite.

I was sick, I thought. It’s okay to make up for all the food I didn’t eat.

But my eating ‘recovery’ went on and on. I remember wolfing down a lot of white bread, and my dad commenting on my appetite. My body ballooned from being big but healthy to overweight.

So began my lifelong struggle with the scale.

The changes in my body could have been caused by early puberty, I suppose, but I’m more inclined to believe my mental health was the culprit.

One day in Arco, I had a vision of my dog Snowflake lying dead, stabbed to death by a neighbor. Other times, I imagined her dying of old age, though she was only six at the time.

It took a mighty effort to push those images to the back of my mind. I knew that if I stewed on them for years, my time with Snowflake would be unnecessarily clouded with grief. If I didn’t worry about her death, it wouldn’t be as bad when it finally came.

I was right. Snowflake lived to 16, and after her long illness, it was her time to go.

Accompanying these death thoughts was an anxiety so severe I found it hard to breathe.

After Ashley moved away and I started eating copious amounts, I would get such terrible pains in my chest that I could do nothing but sit or lie prone, frozen in the position I’d been in when the pains came on. To move would have made me scream.

Don’t get me wrong, I was a happy little kid — at least when I was away from the loneliness at school. Sometimes even there, my solitude didn’t disturb me.

The year after my cowgirl birthday party, I celebrated with just my parents, no friends. I have a picture of me sitting on my mom and dad’s bed as I opened my gifts.

That day, I didn’t care about my weight. I basked in the family love that surrounded me, as I still do today.

But depression, anxiety, and the inability to make friends have stayed with me, becoming indelible parts of my personality.

When I moved to Montana, I made a new best friend on the first day of school, just like I had befriended Ashley on my first day of school at Arco. I also found a best friend on the first day of high school and the first day of college, but after that, I didn’t really make friends at all.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable with myself, but I still feel Lake grinning at me, ready to comment on my strangeness.

My chest pains continued up until 2015 when I was 29. One night I got up to go to the bathroom and refill my bedside water cup. As I was stumbling back to bed, my chest clenched up.

I sank to the floor in agony and sat in spilled cold water for an hour and a half before I could finally move again. Then I went to the emergency room, where they ran a myriad of tests and concluded that my problem was anxiety. I was promptly referred to a therapist, who diagnosed me with Bipolar disorder.

Binge eating caused me to gain 100 pounds in 2022. And this year, at age 37, it’s like I’ve run out of strength to push back the bleak thoughts. I’m constantly envisioning my parents aging and dying, just like I did with Snowflake.

Bipolar disorder is a disease of the brain, existing in the brain’s chemistry from the day a person is born. I was destined to suffer from Bipolar disorder, but the onset of the disease can be triggered by stress.

Maybe that’s why the changes I experienced between fourth and fifth grade were permanent.

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