How do you know when something is causing you anxiety? Are you always aware of it?

I’m not. Sometimes my own brain fools me into thinking there’s nothing to worry about, there’s no subconscious crisis, and it takes a series of oddly coincidental but somehow related events to show me the light.

For me, it was once a dream that did it. Yes, a dream.

Let me make it clear—I don’t usually remember my dreams. I used to swear I didn’t dream at all because I never could recall anything other than the occasional nightmare. But a few years ago, on a Thursday night, I had a really clear dream, one with obvious personal implications.

I was, in my dream, a teacher at my old high school. Apparently, I had been teaching there for a while, because I was coming into school for the first time to start the new school year as if I’d been teaching in that building for years. I walked into the building with a colleague, discussing our summers and our new school year as if this was an annual ritual. And I got to the second floor and turned on to a hallway toward a classroom as if I knew exactly what classroom I was going to enter.

When I got to that classroom and took out my key to unlock the door, I realized, as I looked through the door’s window, it was my old Math classroom—the room of my favorite high school teacher, Mr. Soffin, the man who originally inspired me to choose teaching, the man who signed my yearbook at the end of senior year and wrote that I was like a daughter to him, the man who was so influential to me that I spent 2 years tutoring his Algebra students during my study halls after I’d already moved into Pre-Calc and AP Calc with another Math teacher.

As I looked into the classroom from the outside, I saw that everything in his room was exactly as I remembered it—the teacher desk was where it always was, the desks were overcrowding the space, and the rows were exactly as he’d have them. It was still his space, not mine, and I immediately felt I wasn’t worthy of using it. I couldn’t, in my dream, even unlock the door—instead, I stood outside his room and bawled my eyes out, mourning that fact that I wasn’t the teacher that he had been, that I hadn’t lived up to my ideal.

That’s when I woke up.

Obviously, my shift away from teaching high school full-time to pursuing a nutrition-related degree was causing me some subconscious anxiety that summer. Somewhere, in the back of my head, the possibility that this pursuit of fitness & nutrition might cause me to leave teaching behind was akin to saying I was an unsuccessful teacher, akin to saying, by pursuing something else, that I wasn’t a good teacher. In my dream, I wasn’t worthy of inhabiting the same space as Mr. Soffin, and I was, therefore, a disappointment to both myself and everything he represented.

I woke up that Friday morning and felt kind of sad. I had been having a great time, all week, pursuing my non-teaching interests. I’d had great workouts all week, I was finally genuinely enjoying my Chemistry labs, and I managed to get my best grade of the course on my last Chemistry unit quiz that week. It all made me look forward with excitement to the Nutrition classes I’d be starting at the end of the month. But the dream seemed to crush it all—what good was my enjoyment of all those things if I wasn’t living up to being the person, the teacher, I’d always thought I wanted to be?

I spent Friday feeling kind of numb. I wasn’t really sure how to make myself feel better, other than to just wait. And think a lot.

The next morning, as always, my alarms (I have 3!) went off, and I rolled over to hit snooze on all of them. Even my phone was set with a daily alarm, and I hit snooze on that as well. I happened to have a few emails and Facebook notifications, too, so in my half-asleep daze, I read through what was on my phone. One message, in particular, sent late Friday night from a reader of my blog, woke me up in a hurry:

I really need to say thank you to you. You have no idea what your blog did for me. I read your period post, and it got me thinking. I have not had a regular period for a few years and have always contributed it [sic] to my exercise. However, this summer I have been getting bad acne right around my period time—which is very strange for me. After reading your blog, I decided to see what my options were with the doctor. The last thing I wanted to do was go on birth control, but I also wanted my hormones to be under control. So last Tuesday, I went to my regular doctor who sent me to an OB/GYN. I went there on Thursday, had blood work done on Friday,then two days ago (Wednesday), I had a sonogram which showed that I had a massive cyst—14 cm. After more blood work yesterday, it showed that I really needed to get that sucker out. So this morning I went in and had it removed. While they were in there, they found another 14 cm cyst right next to it. Unfortunately, through all this, I lost one of my ovaries. However, if this had not been caught sooner, there could have been a lot worse results. I am sorry for giving you my medical history, but as I am trying to get comfortable with the stitches, I was reminded how I probably never would have gone to the doctor if I had not read your post. So thank you, for real.

I almost cried.  

For real this time, not in a dream, and not because I was mourning what I thought was a lack of achievement on my part.

This time, I almost cried out of genuine satisfaction—something I had done, something I had decided to write, had helped someone in a truly significant way.

Even more significantly, the blog post this message refers to was a difficult one for me to write—I was afraid, when I wrote that post about my own problems with amenorrhea, that I would be lambasted with comments advising me to “get healthy” or insisting I absolutely MUST change my diet or training. Just as I was reluctant to post all of the details of my food plans because of the critiques I’d seen other bloggers deal with, I was reluctant to discuss my problems with amenorrhea for similar reasons.

In the end, however, discussing the issues surrounding exercise-related amenorrhea was far more important than possibly taking some critiques in reader comments. I was sure of my body, my diet, and my training, and I was confident in the treatment course I’d chosen with my doctor. I knew I could stand by the personal decisions I’d already made and that writing that post was more about bringing up an often undiscussed issue than it was about defending myself.

Once the amenorrhea post was published, the comments I received from readers reassured me right away that I’d made the right decision in posting it. And the heartfelt email from that reader sealed that confidence.

But that reader email happened to come at the exact right time—right in my moment of existential crisis—and showed that, even if I was not a classroom teacher, what I do could still have a profound effect on the lives of the people around me.

I still had no idea where my pursuit of fitness and nutrition, or that Nutrition degree, was going to lead; I could, in a few years, still be a teacher. Or I could not be.

Regardless of what I actually was, though, the dream and the reader message made me see what was really at issue was what I “do”—whose life changed as a result of my guidance or experience. In the end, isn’t that what I wanted, at heart, when I became a teacher?

I had always thought my goal in life was to be the “teacher” Mr. Soffin had been in the classroom.  

Today my goal is to be the “teacher” he was in life.

And I can do that under whatever title, teacher or otherwise, I choose.

Following Fit: My Ongoing Journey to Understand All Things Fitness and Nutrition is available in paperback and Kindle now. Get your copy here.