Why Catholics are Crazy (Or, when Willpower bites you in the Butt)

Like a lot of people, I was born into a certain faith. Like a lot of people, I'm not actually practicing. As a French Catholic, I would be expected be really into holy relics, to avoid the Seven Deadly Sins (most of them being really fun and part of my day to day living) and completely against birth control (Ha!).

Though I don't go to church and only use my rosary as a good luck charm for when I had exams, there is one tradition that I just can't seem to shake: Lent. For all you non-Catholics out there, Lent is the six week period before Easter when Believers prepare themselves for Christ's resurrection. Although hardcore people will pray, fast, repent and abstain, etc., most go straight for the “Self-denial” part. That means giving up something for Lent, usually something you pretend is really important, so you look all pious, but in reality you don’t actually care about. Lots of people go for stuff like pop or chips, or Facebook between the hours of 3 and 6am.

I, every year, foolishly choose chocolate. I equate that to a crack head with a stolen stash being sent to Disney Land. Imagine the agony of sitting through “It’s a Small World After All” while going through withdrawal. Anyways, I digress.

Because of my choices, my yearly spring tradition is to be a total bitch.  But I actually make it through without touching any chocolate. Because of my tendency to go way over my own head, in 11^th grade I decided that hell, if I could do no chocolate, I could do no sugar. Now, looking back, I see I was a total idiot.

No sugar meant no fun cereals, no brown sugar in my oatmeal, no good granola bars, no juice, no desserts of any kind, nothing. The only sugary thing I allowed myself to eat was peanut butter, which I ate by the pound. This made me completely impossible to live with. To stop myself from punching people out of sheer frustration, I basically kept to myself and played a lot of Sims 2.

The crappiest thing about Lent every year is that most of my friends have their birthdays in that period of time. That meant I had to go to parties where everyone was drunk on cake and gummy bears while I was "enjoying" my pretzels and water. One of my friends had her birthday about four days before the end of Lent and had the best homemade cake ever (RAINBOW BITS ICING). In desperation, I begged her to pack me a piece for the end of my self-imprisonment.

Then, Easter morning came. I had actually, somehow, made it through without resorting to murder.

I woke up that morning at around 6 am and made a beeline for the kitchen. I ate that cake like I was in a hotdog eating contest. From there, I went to the cupboard and ate some fluffer nutter and nutella, which I washed down with sweet, sweet cranberry juice. In my choco-lust, I think I had also found some hidden Cadbury cream eggs and scarfed those down too. I was in heaven, I was feeling pure ecstasy, I was feeling... sick.

From the month and a half of no sugar, my body seemingly forgot how to process it. When it had to deal with about 7 pounds of the stuff all at once, it could only do one thing: prepare for attack.


But definitely not as cute.

  This is what I ended up looking like, but with a few differences:

1. Picture it as me, with no makeup and looking green in the face
2. I'm on the bedroom floor
3. Rocking back and forth.
4. Making strange high-pitch noises.
5. for about two hours.

I can't actually remember what happened afterwards, but it was a dark, dark time of my life.