Tag: wisdom
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Love Doesn’t Mean Being a Hero or Being Saved
Most of us grow up believing that one day a handsome prince or beautiful princess will come our way and lead us into a life of “happily ever after.” No one knows what’s going to happen, but we’re certain it will be magical. We spend our childhoods desperate to grow up so that our lives can finally start when we meet “the one.”
The one who will make us happy. The one who will take all our cares away. The one who will love us, and only us, forever and ever.
Finally, we will be wanted and desired. We will be happy and feel great. Now our lives truly begin.
Only it doesn’t quite work out like that. I found out the hard way.
The Reality of Relationships
Relationships work well when two people take responsibility for taking care of themselves and their partner. Together they create a great life. They discuss what each of them wants to do and make plans on how they can make it happen. They support each other in achieving their couple goals as well as their individual goals.
No one expects the other person to make anything happen for them while they do nothing.
A healthy relationship requires two individuals who both give their best efforts to being the best and most loving version of themselves. This requires action with a sense of purpose and agency.
The Notion of Romanticized Love
The notion of love we grew up with is unhealthy. It portrays one partner—usually the female—as the victim that needs rescuing, while the other partner—usually the male—is the hero that saves the victim from tragedy or from herself.
This model serves no one. It is an outdated fairy tale that instills unhealthy beliefs in us that don’t match the realities of human relationships.
I grew up believing that I was lacking and had to wait for someone to give me worth and purpose. I believed that I had to earn someone’s love and that then, they would take care of me and provide me with a good life.
At no point did I ask myself what kind of life I wanted. In my mind, this was up to whoever was going to choose me. I took a completely passive position in life. I didn’t need to have visions or make plans because why would I, if my life was going to be provided by someone else?
Now, it might sound ridiculous to put it all like that, but it’s true, and not just for me. I see it over and over again in my private practice as a psychotherapist.
We may say that we are fully functioning individuals who don’t want to be rescued, but this is not what is happening within the adult relationships we are actually experiencing.
The Problem with Romanticized Love
Countless men and women come to me feeling disappointed, sad, and angry. They played out the roles they were given perfectly, and it did not lead to “happily ever after.”
Instead, there is relationship conflict, high drama, and painful disconnection. Eventually, there is nothing left but disappointment, bitterness, resentment, and hopelessness.
“What is wrong with me?” or “What is wrong with my partner?” they ask, but I can’t answer those questions because it’s not the people that are at fault; it’s the roles they unconsciously play.
Many of us do well when we’re single, but once we enter a relationship, we naturally drop into the roles of our unconscious relationship blueprint: the way we believe relationships work. And for most people this consists of either the role of the helpless victim or that of the enduring hero.
Sadly, both roles are highly disempowering, disrespectful and, in essence, unloving. This means that a healthy relationship is impossible.
The Unloving Roles of Romanticized Love
When I saw myself as someone who had to wait for someone else to make my life worthwhile, I didn’t realize that I was disempowering myself. I didn’t realize that I believed something that was untrue. I never questioned it. I just acted it out, by waiting.
I was miserable and far from able to create a happy and healthy life for myself. What can you learn from sitting around and waiting? I didn’t engage in life. I didn’t seek out opportunities and experiences that would have taught me new skills.
I stopped myself from learning, developing, and growing by sitting around and waiting, because what if I was busy doing something else while “the one” came looking for me? Then I would have messed it all up! It just didn’t seem worth the risk.
But also, I didn’t really have any ideas of my own. I followed my career plans, but apart from that there was not much going on in my life.
Believing myself to be a person who would find her worth and happiness in someone else utterly disempowered me. I did not see it then, but I can see it now as clear as day.
I also never realized just how much my expectations burdened my partners and how these expectations ultimately ended the relationships I had with them.
The Fallen Hero
I believe that my past partners wanted to be my hero. I believe they tried.
I know I wanted to be good for them and earn their love. I know I tried.
But life just doesn’t work that way. Relationships don’t. Love certainly doesn’t.
But we don’t know what we don’t know. And I didn’t know that 1. I wasn’t incomplete or broken, and not in need of fixing and 2. no person can gain their worth or happiness by saving or fixing another person. I’m pretty sure you didn’t know it then either.
We got the rules of love all wrong, and the roles we play made it impossible for us to connect and relate to our partners in healthy ways.
You would not believe how many fallen heroes I see in my practice. The majority of them are men, but the victim and hero roles are not gender-specific. They depend on the dynamic each couple creates, and some couples take turns in being the victim and each other’s hero.
When I sit with a fallen hero, I sense utter deflation. They have tried everything they can possibly think of. They have taken responsibility for things that weren’t their responsibility to start with. Very often, they neglected themselves in an attempt to make their partner happy, to stop them from complaining, to please them in whichever way they possibly could think of.
They are exhausted. They feel utterly drained by all of their attempts to be the hero not only their partner wishes they were but also who they wish they were. They’re disappointed in themselves and they feel like a failure, while also secretly—and sometimes not so secretly—seething with resentment toward their “difficult-to-please” partner.
I relate well to these clients because I have also taken on this role in some of my relationships. I have tried to be the best person I could possibly be for someone else.
The person who tries to fix all of their problems. The person who will go above and beyond to help them get what they want. The person who won’t say no and who is friendly to everyone. The person who is available at any time and will do anything—whether they feel like it or not, whether it’s a reasonable request or not, whether it’s good for them or not.
Because the thing with heroes is that their sense of worth comes from making others happy.
And so often it actually seems to work, which is why we keep trying. But it’s a self-perpetuating problem that eventually eats you alive. It consumes you so much you completely neglect yourself. You become a slave to the hero conditioning. You become cocooned within your role while all your dreams and wishes and desires silently suffocate.
And that is just sad and unloving.
No man or woman should have that pressure put on them. No one should ever accept that burden. There is no room for these kinds of unrealistic expectations in healthy relationships.
Our romantic partners are not our saviors.
They are not meant to fix us.
And after all, we don’t need fixing because we are not broken!
But we will play these roles because that’s what we think love means. We play them until we know not to, until we understand that they can never work and that they will only ever lead to two things: losing ourselves and losing our relationships.
Letting Go of Relationship-Hostile Beliefs
It’s not our fault that we play these roles. These roles are incorporated in our relationship blueprint, which consists of mostly unconscious beliefs about relationship roles and rules. Roles and rules we observed as children. Roles and rules that have also been culturally reinforced for decades.
But awareness and understanding spell an end to these unconscious beliefs and patterns. It doesn’t matter which roles we assumed or which dynamics we co-created. We do not victimize ourselves to anything anymore, not even our unconscious conditioning.
Instead, we let go of what no longer serves us and learn new, healthy, and loving ways of connecting and relating to our partner.
Change happens when we see how what we have been doing makes no sense.
If I am not broken, then why would I want someone to fix me? How could they even do that?
If I don’t need to earn my self-worth, then why I am people-pleasing? Why am I doing things for others they are perfectly capable of doing themselves?
If I want a healthy relationship, then why am I doing things that are disempowering and disrespectful? How can I expect to create something healthy when the input is unhealthy?
What we believe about love, relationships, and our roles in relationships is what makes us miserable and costs us our relationships.
We need to find those beliefs within ourselves and realize that they are not and never have been true. At the very least, they are not helpful and keep us from getting the one thing we really want: a healthy and loving relationship.
And so, if the problem lies within us, then so does the solution.
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How to Free Yourself from the Burden of Your Potential
“Changing directions in life is not tragic. Losing passion in life is.”
We all have natural talents, and in some cases, we may have devoted years to honing our skills and turning them into a career. As we’re on the road to achieving our goal or fulfilling our potential, there may be this invisible weight that starts to bear down on us.
That’s because there is a burden of potential. The burden is that fear that we’ll never reach our full potential, and the obligation and pressure we feel when we don’t want to continue on the path we’re on.
Sometimes we tie our sense of self-worth to making this one dream come true, because we’ve told people that we’re trying, and we don’t want to seem like quitters or failures if we consider changing course. That fear can keep us glued to the track, even if we have a sense that we would be happier doing something else. It can be hard to believe there might be more than one way to reach our potential and live a satisfying life.
My Own Struggle with The Burden
I moved to Los Angeles to become a stand-up comedian.
Once I got over my initial fears of getting on stage, the fear train just kept on coming. (This is one of the few forms of transportation that shows up with any consistency in LA.)
The problem was that I was not a lost cause. I have memories of making packed rooms laugh and getting positive feedback from not only my friends but other comedians whose careers I had followed. I had potential.
Did that mean I had to keep trying? Even on the days I bombed, or no one showed up because I was performing at an art gallery/coffee shop at 1am? Did I have an obligation to fulfill this potential?
At the time I was getting into psychology and seriously considering changing tracks and becoming a therapist. I was afraid I was abandoning my dream and my potential. But my own therapist at the time reminded me that my own unfolding into my potential wasn’t done. I could be just as creative being a therapist as I could when I was doing stand-up.
At the time I kind of rolled my eyes internally and prepared myself for the slow descent into mediocrity. I probably said, “Oh yeah, that’s a good way to look at it” while my doubts lingered. But now I know she was right.
Though I still feel “in process” on my path, I’ve not only increased my creative output, I don’t feel that I’ve compromised on my dreams at all. Every day isn’t easy, and doubts still creep in, but I feel much more at peace with my choice.
So how do you release the burden? Here are a few things to consider if the weight of your dream feels more like a shackle.
1. Pick the path you won’t mind walking for a while.
We all have heard the old adage “Life is about the journey and not the destination.” It’s frustrating but true. Nobody knows when their life might change or when they might reach their goal. Between the big achievements, there’s the slow meandering of everyday life. Pick the life you can love between the big achievements.
What I loved about stand-up was the creativity, finding humorous ways to point to larger truths, and having a voice. What I didn’t like about stand-up was open mics, late nights in bars, drinking, most male comics (sorry, but there’s a lot to this for another article), and constant financial insecurity. So basically, most of it outside of being on stage. I didn’t like the day-to-day.
You need to at least get some joy from the in-between stuff.
These days, I like my day-to-day. Even on the days something “big” isn’t happening, I love that my day is filled with interesting conversations and making my own hours and being in bed by 10pm. Every day certainly isn’t perfect, and I still struggle some days but overall, I can do this for a while, in between accomplishments.
2. Allow your dreams to evolve.
Sometimes, we can get so attached to a certain idea of success that we don’t allow our vision to expand as we change and grow. If you play basketball, you might dream of playing in the NBA. If you are a dancer, it may be Julliard. But those aren’t the only ways to a happy life. In fact, there have been enough biopics to show that reaching the pinnacle of success isn’t always the path to happiness.
In the Netflix show Losers, they show how a big upset or “loss” could lead to an even more successful outcome, one the athletes at the time couldn’t have imagined for themselves (like boxer Michael Bentt, who goes from defeat and despair to a successful Hollywood boxing coach for movies like Million Dollar Baby). “Success” seemed like a trophy, but it can morph into this whole wonderful life you couldn’t have predicted for yourself.
3. Question why you have this dream.
Sometimes a dream may not even be ours. It could be something our parents wanted to, but never did accomplish. It could be something we think society wants us to be, or we’re seeing someone else’s life and thinking, “If I could be like him/her/them, then I’d feel great about myself.”
We need to investigate our chosen path and make sure we chose it for ourselves. Working with a mentor, coach, or therapist can help us look under the hood at our life path and see if it’s really where we want to go.
Ultimately, it’s about learning to hang out between your ideas for your life and where you are now and understanding that how you feel now is the biggest indicator of how you will feel then. The accomplishment won’t be what makes you happy. The goal is to cultivate happiness wherever you are so it will be there wherever you end up
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Why I Now Complain Less and Appreciate More
“It is not happy people who are thankful. It is thankful people who are happy.” ~Unknown
I used to be a complainer, a fault-finder, a grumbler. I would grumble a hundred times a day about mundane issues, be it the weather, the traffic, or my husband.
I complained when my husband didn’t help me around the house, and grumbled when he helped. It took me some time to realize that it was not him or his lack of housekeeping skills that made me unhappy. I was unhappy because I was turning into an ungrateful person.
I have some fond and not so fond memories of my childhood. When I was a kid, my parents force-fed me green vegetables and limited my television and playtime. They wanted me to study and do my homework, and made me go to sleep every night at 8:30 PM. But all I wanted was freedom, freedom from homework and freedom to do whatever I wanted.
I was nine years old when I first expressed my ingratitude to my parents. One day, after school, instead of boarding the school bus that would take me home I boarded the one that took me to my friend’s house. I thought this would be the end to the horrible veggies and boring homework. But things didn’t go as planned.
My friend’s father got in touch with my dad, who drove down to take me back home. As I nervously watched my dad step out of the car I noticed worry etched on his face. He gently put his protective hands around my shoulders and said, “Come, let’s go home.” We drove home in silence, and gradually guilt found its way into my heart.
When we approached home, I peered through the windows of the car and spotted a tired, lean figure standing by the gate of the house, my mom. I got down from the car and tentatively took one step toward her. Gazing into her moist eyes I gingerly called out, “Mummy.”
She took me in her arms and hugged me tightly, while crying into my school shirt. As my tiny hands held her I realized my mistake.
Today, when I look back to that incident, I realize now that as a child I took for granted all that my parents did for me.
In a world where girls are denied education, at times buried alive, where orphanages are filled with children abandoned by their parents, here were my parents who catered to all my needs and prepared me for the future. In this unfair world, I was blessed with parents who gave me a fair chance at life, to grow and to prosper.
My parents indeed planted the first seeds of gratitude when I was still a kid. But it wasn’t until I attained motherhood that I truly understood the importance of showing gratitude.
Like every first-time mother, I went through anxious moments looking after and raising my baby. With my hyperactive daughter, things just seemed like a never-ending battle, with crayon painted walls, carrot juice stains on the carpet, moisturizers and lipsticks tested on every piece of furniture, and toys scattered around.
I longed for peace, I longed for rest, and I longed for a clean house. I complained and cribbed about how being a mother was the toughest job in the world.
Until one day, I visited a friend whose six-month-old son was admitted in the hospital, as he was diagnosed with Muscle Dystrophy, a genetic disorder that affects all the muscles including the muscles of the heart.
That tiny baby lay on a bed motionless, strapped to a heart monitor. It was heartbreaking to watch the grieving mother coax and beg her frail baby to wake up, to cry, to whine, to do something, anything, while he did nothing. He just lay there, motionless.
As I stood there, watching helplessly, an image of my little devil—my daughter—scribbling on the walls flashed through my mind.
What had I been complaining about? An active child, a healthy child? Isn’t this what I had prayed for when expecting her? Surely, there would be plenty of women out there in this world who would give anything for my sleepless nights and messy house.
From that day on, whenever my daughter was unable to go to sleep even at two in the morning, I didn’t complain. In fact, as I held her and kissed her forehead, I was thankful knowing I have such a wonderful gift.
It’s human nature to forget our blessings and concentrate on our problems, but when we complain, our mind plunges into negativity, and like a domino effect everyone around us gets impacted by it.
Panasonic founder Konosuke Matsushita would often finalize a candidate selection by asking his famous concluding question. “Do you think you have been lucky in your life?”
The purpose of this question, according to him, was to comprehend if the candidate was thankful for the people who helped him in his life. He believed that this attitude of gratitude in employees leads to a happy work environment, which in turn boosts company productivity.
Most of us tend to connect happiness to major events, like a promotion or winning the lottery. But these events don’t happen often. Gratitude is what makes our life richer, more beautiful, and a lot happier as we start to enjoy the little things in life.
We often take people in our life for granted, or get caught up in complaining and grumbling. It’s true, my husband can be lazy sometimes, my parents keep nagging me, my teenage daughters never listen to me, and I have some crazy friends, but you know what? My life is incomplete without all of them.
Life is a celebration. When we love everything we have, we have everything we need. So, let us make this journey of life worthwhile and take that huge leap from grumbling to gratitude.
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My Life Will Be My Message
“Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ~Gautama Buddha
I have meditated for over half my life. It didn’t always look like meditation, and I didn’t always refer to it as such, but the driving need to introspectively understand my universe has been an ever-present presence,.
For a long time, there was a certain guarded nature to my practice. It was intimate for me. I didn’t have words to explain what I was doing in a way that didn’t seem crazy. I didn’t realize that there were other people who were pursuing the same path. And so, I remained solitary.
A series of fortunate events led me to spend the past fifteen years working in alternative education.
I spent thirteen years working with adolescents living with the challenges of addiction. As a result, my practice began to take on new elements. Self-care became paramount, and I used the refuge of meditation to handle the day-to-day heartbreak.
My introspection became a way to get a shore leave from the battle against addiction. And still, it was solitary.
Then one of my coworkers, a wonderful mentor, took a course on mindfulness meditation and began using it with the students. Amazingly, many of them gravitated toward the practice and began to look forward to the time carved out during the day for relaxation and mindfulness.
I stood on the outside, wanting to participate in a more active way but still feeling a sense of almost shame of the weirdness, the apartness that I had unconsciously associated with my meditation practice. When my mentor left he took that time with him. I didn’t feel qualified to continue it. So we let it lapse. I didn’t even offer.
Over the next few years my practice continued to deepen and take on a central role in my personal development. I began to talk more openly about my meditation with my colleagues at first, and then with a few students who I felt close to and thought might be receptive. I invited them to come sit with me during lunch.
Our cafeteria was often an incredibly negative place for both the students and the staff. I thought I would offer an alternative to that. We had recently built a space for teaching yoga that was being woefully underused that fit my needs exactly.
I wish there was a happy ending. That the students came by the cartload and blossomed, and that my colleagues rushed to my side to begin meditating as they saw the infinite benefits of the practice.
Instead, my colleagues politely declined citing their own classroom needs or lunchtime responsibilities, and other than a few students who took me up on my offer a few times and then returned to their regular lunch, I found myself alone… again.
Strangely enough, or perhaps not, what seemed like defeat bore fruit. My solitary lunch became my moments to reach for my own compassion and to try to find the humanity that at times seemed so lost in both those suffering from and those trying to aid people in addiction.
I began to see that not my words, but my life had to be the message. If I truly believed in what I was doing, the way that I comported myself would be far more profound than discussing the effects that meditation had for me.
So I began to talk openly about my practice without reserve whenever it was appropriate. When a student would come to me for advice I would invite them to sit with me while we talked.
I began to try to remain still during my staff meeting instead of squirming and joking with the people next to me. I learned how to try to give my single-pointed attention to those who were with me more often. I began to talk less and listen more to my colleagues.
I began to try to see the middle way in the frequently passionate meetings we would have after school, finding compromises instead of pushing for my point of view. Especially as those meetings took on an increasing layer of gravity and an almost frantic quality as our students began to fall victim to the opiate epidemic. One death after another, sometimes within weeks of each other. Beautiful young lives ended.
I learned about holding grief and sharing pain. I learned about being present in the moment because the blatant reality that the next day was no longer guaranteed was ever present.
I left that job after ten years, with a heavy heart, amidst what felt like an interminable sea of personal troubles that had prompted my decision to leave a community I had quite literally grown up in.
When I reached my new employer the next school year I set up my desk. I put my singing bowl out and hung up my banner with a quote from HH the Dalai Lama. My new students started to ask me about them. I told them quite openly about what they were for and about my meditation practice.
I asked a few of my colleagues if they would let me do a short meditation before they started their class, and for the first few months of the school year I took five or seven minutes to try to teach some of the most basic elements of meditation: relaxation, finding the breath, body position.
Once again, most of the students weren’t particularly interested, and my colleagues quickly reclaimed their “time on learning” for more important things. But I persisted.
My openness brought other colleagues from other grades to me, and we began to have a small community of teachers who not only all had a practice, but all shared the hidden shame and frustration of knowing the impact of meditation but not knowing how to implement it, or how to even discuss it with our students. We found each other.
We began to talk about how to bring this into the classroom and into the school community. I began to offer a short twenty-five-minute class on meditation during a recess on Friday.
I expected maybe three or four students. Those who seemed receptive to our conversations over the course of the year and who would frequently request that I return to leading meditation before class. Instead, I got eight. And to my surprise it was not the students I expected. I had made my own poor judgments. Most of the students at my door that first day were not even on my radar. Over the next few months they became some of my best students.
I left that first class with a deep gratitude. The students were hungry for this. For a time and a place that was unscheduled, safe, and without threat, where they could simply be.
I saw what I had always believed, that these practices were powerful, useful, and practical for anyone who was willing to try, even a little.
I’ll never forget the first time I had a meeting that ran into that time, and one of my sixth graders stomped up to me and demanded to know where I had been and informed me that I owed them a meditation!
This small class turned into a bigger and longer class. I got an official class period once a week and told the specialist coordinator not to cap the number thinking, once again, that I wouldn’t need to. On the first day there were seventeen that came. By the end there were nineteen. I had planned for eight.
I learned about a different kind of at-risk student: High drive for success, high socioeconomic status, high expectations. The achiever. The over-scheduled. The listless and bored. It was incredible to me how infrequently these children got to be children.
The first time one of them relaxed enough to fall asleep during a class I felt like I had achieved something important. They were safe, they were calm, they were able to relax and for a few minutes experience the solace of not being asked to do anything. To be allowed to just be.
What is the point of all this? For me, it was the realization that if I wanted to make an impact on my students, my community, my world, it required the courage of truth. It required me to be exactly who I was.
I have no illusions that my students came to me to learn meditation. The novelty of the experience wears off fairly quickly. They came to me to learn meditation because they saw how I lived.
I own who I am. Waking up doesn’t make you less human. It makes you intensely human. Emotions bloom like flowers and then fade and die. I enjoy the flower. I let the flower go. I live openly and it draws the openness out of others.
I don’t know if meditation will have a place in my students’ lives in the future. I do know that my life has gently jostled theirs in that they now know, consciously or otherwise, that there is someone in the world who cultivates peace and serene silence.
One of my favorite students commented that he had never seen me upset for more than a few minutes. He was a deeply anxious child with tendencies toward obsessive-compulsive disorder and ADHD.
Without my saying anything he remarked, “That’s because you meditate right?” “Every day.” I replied. He smiled. I smiled. We were present, together for a moment.
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No One Deserves to Be Abused
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” ~Kahlil Gibran
You’re stupid. You’re a loser. You’re worthless. You will never amount to anything. You’re not worthy of love. These are things I’ve told myself throughout my life.
The experiences I had throughout my childhood led me to believe I was deeply unlovable. I thought that because I had been abused and ignored, there was something seriously wrong with me.
That’s what abuse and neglect does. It seeps inside you down to the deepest level. It changes you in every way.
You begin to feel as if you don’t matter. You blame yourself, thinking maybe you did something bad enough to deserve it.
You push people away. You build walls because it’s easier than letting people in and letting them get to know you.
You sabotage anything that could turn out to be good because you believe you don’t deserve to have good things.
You may look for any little thing in a relationship that would make you feel justified in running for the hills because when someone shows you love, it terrifies you.
Even after the abuse ends your brain finds a way to continue abusing you.
I grew up with emotionally stunted parents. The only emotion my father knew was anger, and when he expressed it, it terrified me. My mother was a very distant woman who kept to herself and ignored what was happening around her. This left me feeling trapped, with no one to talk to.
I shut down emotionally just like my mother. The only way to escape my environment was to close in on myself and keep everything inside.
For a long time I believed my childhood trauma was my fault. I told myself no one could ever love me because my parents didn’t, so how could anyone else? I told myself I was worth less than dirt and proceeded to treat myself as such.
It’s easy to think that once you leave those people behind life will be better and bright. No more pain. No more heartbreak.
I thought that leaving the place I was born, the place that had brought me so much pain and sadness and anger and self-hate, would solve all my problems. I thought the words (stupid worthless piece of garbage!) that repeated over and over in my mind daily would dissolve. I thought if I could just get enough distance between myself and my parents, it would all magically fix itself and I’d become a completely different person.
I was wrong.
Leaving didn’t solve anything other than putting over 2,000 miles between me and them. I didn’t magically change.
Those thoughts were still there. They became stronger over time, but at first they weren’t as bad. A few years later I was blindsided with feelings of self-loathing. Every time I made a mistake it was because I was stupid, and you better believe I never missed an opportunity to berate myself for those mistakes.
I believed the dirt on the ground was worth more than me. There was always this voice in my head whispering “worthless, worthless, worthless,” and I believed it.
I really struggled. I felt lost and alone. I hated my parents. I held on to so much anger over what had happened that I was blinded by it. If I could keep that anger and pain alive, I could use it to punish my parents. Or so I thought. I was only hurting myself.
A few months ago I started counseling. I’ve learned a few things about myself and life in general. I hope that if you are struggling or have experienced trauma, these things will help you too.
1. Abuse is never, ever okay.
There is nothing a child could ever do to deserve abuse. If you are an abuse survivor of any kind, it was not your fault. You didn’t deserve to be hurt in that way.
2. You don’t have to believe every negative thing you think about yourself.
When we’re born, we don’t have all those self-loathing thoughts floating around in our heads. They are ingrained in us by others, and if we live with them long enough, we start to believe they’re true.
When you start to tell yourself that you are worthless or ugly or stupid, think about that thought and where it really comes from. You’ll most likely find that it stems from an external source. If we examine these thoughts we’ll see that perhaps they aren’t how we truly feel about ourselves. We can change them.
3. Abuse doesn’t make you any less worthy of love.
I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Just because someone else can’t see your worth that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
4. It’s okay to ask for help.
There are many trauma-informed mental health providers out there. They can be helpful in giving us tools to live better lives. They also set us on the path of being able to see that we do matter and we do deserve good things.
5. It’s okay to let go of people who’ve hurt you, whether that is a parent, sibling, aunt, or uncle.
We live in a world that acts as if familial relationships are forever, no matter how poorly we may be treated. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren’t. It’s okay to put yourself first. It’s okay to either set strict boundaries or let go completely. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
6. It’s never too late to take care of your inner child.
Many survivors feel as though they missed out on a “normal” childhood. Your inner child is the part of you that feels wounded and unworthy. That little child reaches out for you, begging you to listen and be there.
Ask that part of you what it needs, and do that. It could be something creative like coloring or finger-painting. It could be dancing or playing a favorite game. Or they might want validation for their feelings. Don’t criticize your inner child’s thoughts. Let them know they are loved. Let them know you will be there from now on.
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Healing isn’t easy. If you’ve lived your life believing you don’t matter, it can be very difficult to even want to set out on the path to healing. Give yourself a chance. Don’t give up on yourself, on who you could become. It will take some deep digging, but it’s worth it. You are worth it.
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Being Busy Made Me Feel Important, But Now I Feel at Peace
“You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes a day, unless you are too busy, then you should sit for an hour.” ~Ancient Zen proverb
I used to think that life was about powering through things. I’d grab a latte, write my to-do list, and proudly cram as many things as possible into my day.
At work, there was staff, payroll, invoices, customers, marketing, and the occasional cleaning of an office bathroom. At home, there was parenting, dinner, cleaning, homework, bedtime, laundry, and plans for the next day. When my eyes could no longer remain open, I’d fall into a restless night’s sleep accompanied by a busy mind and grinding teeth.
I figured I had no choice. I had two kids, a husband, a landscape business, a school that wanted parent participation, a co-housing community with obligations, and an overachiever complex.
There was plenty on my plate just being a mother of two with a family business. But what made matters worse was me going above and beyond. I was president of the school foundation, head chef for community meals, point person for committees, and in my free time, (when was that exactly?) an aspiring athlete training for triathlons. I wanted to be the woman who could do it all, and do it well.
Being busy made me feel important. The more I juggled, the more praise and attention I got from others, fueling my sense of purpose. It fed my ego and gave me the adrenaline to keep going.
Without being busy I thought my life would look insignificant. I might disappear like a beige house in a sea of endless tract homes, bland and provincial. So I filled every second of every day with a sense of purpose and a mission that never left room for rest. When no one needed me, I scrambled for something or someone to engage with. I’d repaint a bedroom or rework our website to keep from being unproductive.
My busy-ness became an addiction. Another project complete, another shot of adrenaline. I felt good and sh*t was getting done!
But similar to a person with anorexia who starves herself to the point of hospitalization, I was so focused on getting results that I didn’t realize the toll it was taking on me.
I told my concerned parents I was fine, and that it all needed to happen. I rationalized that I had to do it all for the sake of my family. But underneath it, I was wearing out. My back hurt, my jaw ached, and according to my Ayurvedic practitioner, I’d worn down my adrenal glands, which would eventually lead to other health problems.
When my mother died, my father took up Vipassana meditation at a Buddhist retreat center in Northern California. For Christmas, he paid for me to attend a three-day silent meditation retreat. I was touched by his gift, but nervous.
The thought of sitting still for three days scared me. How would I exercise? What if I had to go to the bathroom during a meditation? What if I couldn’t do it?
The first two days were the hardest. I did everything in my power to summon my patience, but sometimes I let my mind wander on purpose, counted the minutes until the bell rang, and allowed myself to take walks instead of “walking meditations.” I did what any person new to meditation might do: I bent the instructions to fit what I thought were my needs.
But by the third day, something profound happened. I surrendered to the moment, and the stillness felt good. A calm washed over me like the warmth of a bath. What once felt tense relaxed, and I experienced a deep sense of peace. In the absence of doing, I felt like I was coming home.
That New Year’s Eve I made a resolution to meditate every day for one year. Though I knew it was one more thing to add to my to-do list, it felt important. There would be no schedule, no method, no particular length of time, and no particular place. It was just me, sitting in observation of my breath, every day. It needed to be on my terms and without judgment or pressure, or it wouldn’t work.
I noticed my life began to calm down that year. My back pain eased a bit and I craved more quiet. I was quick to notice my feelings and follow my intuition, and my urgency about things getting done was beginning to diminish. By the end of the year, I had only missed six days of meditating. What was once a good idea had become a part of my daily routine.
It’s been over six years since that retreat, and the results of my almost-daily meditation practice have been noticeable, but my proclivity toward being over-productive remains.
Like a recovering alcoholic, I have to talk myself out of falling back into its socially acceptable, compelling grip. My smartphone taunts me like a flask I carry in my purse, begging me to engage with more causes, more conversations, and more people. It never goes away; I just have to keep on top of it.
But unlike alcoholism, being addicted to busy-ness is not a disease; it can be a simple choice. I know that if I choose to indulge myself by packing my schedule, kicking back too much coffee, and going full throttle, I will feel depleted after the race. I know that if I choose to over commit myself, I’m actually looking for praise.
So, instead of getting down on myself, I now close my eyes and focus on my breath. Though I feel impatient and annoyed at first, eventually the familiar warm water soothes my active mind and I am reminded that there is no need to panic, no need to rush. I just need to be still and present, the place where my feelings of insecurity are replaced with feelings of deep connection and gratitude.
It is there that I can relax and just be.
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How to Fight Well in Your Relationship
“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.” ~Rumi
I had one of those really intense arguments with my partner recently, and it made me realize the importance of knowing how to fight well in a relationship.
That might sound like an oxymoron, but there isn’t a relationship I know of where the couple doesn’t fall out at one point or another. Fights can make or break a relationship. That’s why it’s important you know how to fight well—because the success of any relationship isn’t based on how well you manage the good times but on how well you can deal with the bad.
Basically, it’s about how well you can learn to fight.
Learning to fight well is important because it can help bring up lots of hidden stuff that’s been lying dormant for years; it enables you to be really honest with each other, which helps you develop deeper levels of trust; and studies have shown that learning to fight well can even improve the intimacy in your relationship.
But back to our fight.
It all started when I was out at friend’s house and lost track of the time. My partner and I had agreed to spend some quality time together that evening, and when I noticed the time, my heart sank. I knew she would be upset as I made the difficult call home, and yep, I was right. She was livid. We then descended into a really uncomfortable argument of blame and counter blame, with a bit of defensiveness thrown in for good measure.
Criticism and defensiveness are two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as highlighted by renowned relationship experts Drs. John and Julie Gottman. They noticed these two traits are highly correlated to relationships that lead to breakup and divorce.
Whenever my partner and I would have our worst arguments these two traits would always be present, and this time was no different.
That’s why becoming more aware of how you fight can help you avoid relationship Armageddon and instead increase the trust, safety, and love in your relationship. To help with this here are seven key steps to follow when you feel as if you’re descending into another one of those earth shattering fights:
1. Upgrade your language.
Some arguments can help grow the relationship and develop greater levels of trust and intimacy between both parties. Other arguments are the opposite; they create a hierarchy and a power struggle, which diminishes respect, trust, and love.
If we rewind to the start of our arguments we can predict to some extent their “success” by the language that started them and whether it was “hard” or “soft.”
Hard language starts with generic hyperbole like “You always…” or “Why do you never…” or “I knew that you would…” Soft language uses “I” statements and focuses on the actions that took place, how they made us feel, and what we want to happen.
My partner’s language that day was very “hard.” She criticized me and I immediately became defensive as the original story in my head started to change in response to her accusations. The firm agreement I knew we’d made became a tentative expectation in my mind. My lateness was no longer my responsibility but my friend’s, who had been delayed preparing food. Bit by bit I retold the story of what had happened and made myself into a victim of my circumstances instead of the owner that I really was.
The language used at the start of our exchange influenced my response and how the subsequent argument progressed.
The Gottman Institute reported that they can predict with 94% accuracy how a discussion will end based on the language used to start it. The softer and kinder our words, the less defensive we become, meaning we are more open to taking responsibility and creating connection instead of disconnection.
A key principle to help with this is to use language to complain but don’t blame.
2. Create space.
Luckily, I had a one-hour drive home to work out what had happened and to get some perspective following our argument. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was a crucial period because I used it to work through what had happened, and there’s no way we could have achieved such a good outcome without the time this gave us.
I’ve learned that it’s wise to agree in advance to call a “timeout” or “press pause” before arguments begin. In the past I’ve attempted to call a timeout to create the space to calm down, but this has only made matters worse.
My partner and I now have an agreement that if either of us needs to call a timeout in an argument the other will respect the request. It can be infuriating at the time, but arguing when you are in a low mood or heightened sense of emotion is never going to assist your dialogue. Therefore, it’s important to create space as much as you can.
3. Safely express your emotions.
On that drive home the first thing I did was shout and scream about what had happened. My inner child had a field day as I moaned and complained to my imaginary passengers about what she’d said and how wrong she was. It was fantastic, and a very cathartic way to clear the negative energy and emotions I was holding on to around the conversation.
When we had the initial phone call I went into a stress response as my body became flooded with cortisol, and my heart rate went through the roof. Expressing my emotions and doing lots of deep breathing on the way home helped me flush the cortisol out of my body and return it to its original state. Without doing this I would have taken those negative emotions and feelings into the resumption of the fight on my return home.
The intense emotions we have during a fight form a negative filter through which we see the relationship. There’s not much our partners can say that we won’t interpret the wrong way when we come from this place. That’s why it’s so important to clear the filter and express your emotions as best you can.
It’s important to make sure that you find somewhere safe to do this, however. Doing it next to your partner won’t go down well, so get out of the house and find somewhere to express your emotions as cleanly and safely as possible so you don’t take it into your next fight,
4. What if…?
Once I’d let go of the emotions I started to calm down, and it was only then that I realized I could let go of the story I’d been telling myself. It was at this point I decided to tell myself a new story that started with “What if…”
“What if she had a point?”
“What if I wasn’t being honest with myself?”
“What if I wasn’t taking responsibility for something?”
This provided a new lens through which to see the situation. With my strong emotions now expressed it was like a fog had been lifted, and I could see the situation from a new vantage point. This new perspective allowed me to completely shift my thinking on what had happened and relinquish my grip on the version of events I had concocted to help deal with my partner’s “hard” response.
5. Take responsibility.
From that simple question I realized that there was plenty I could take responsibility for, that I was ignoring based on my initial triggered response. I was shocked because once I found one thing, I found another, and another. By the end, I could take responsibility for almost all of what happened.
It would have been easier to take responsibility for either nothing (be stubborn) or everything (be a people-pleaser). But the more honest I was with myself, the more I could distinguish between what was mine and what was not.
For example, we had made a clear agreement about what time I would get back. I knew the food was going to be late, so I could have explained to my friends and left without eating. I knew I didn’t have a watch, so I could have checked on the time from somewhere else.
Previously I’d been telling myself the story that I needed in order to ensure I wasn’t in the wrong and to protect the scared little boy inside myself that was upset at being made to feel bad.
This also helped me to realize what I was not prepared to take responsibility for. I was being accused of some things that weren’t right. In fights we easily turn critiques about our actions into criticisms of our character. So, for example, in this scenario I was late home because I didn’t prioritize my partner. This is a critique (and is true); however, a criticism would be that this action makes me a selfish person (not true).
Taking ownership for what was mine helped me release responsibility for what was not. This helped me to feel much stronger and clearer in owning my part in the situation and how I communicated it to my partner, as a result.
6. Respect your partner’s process.
When I arrived home I was excited to share what I’d learned with my partner and imagined us having a great conversation about it. That didn’t happen because she was still really annoyed with me. I came through the door with this great insight and awareness about the argument and how and why I’d behaved as I had. However, I was met with stonewalling.
I’d used the journey home to vent and express my feelings, so the emotions in me had subsided. However, my partner had been sat at home the whole time stewing and making matters bigger and badder in her head, so we were in very different places. She still needed to express those emotions and get them out of her system before she was able to communicate with me in a productive way, and I needed to create space for her to do that.
That was really tough because I realized I was in one place (emotionally and physically expressed, and now ready to take responsibility for what was mine), whereas she was somewhere else (still emotional and not ready for a rational conversation).
7. Create the “container.”
Fights often get out of control when you are both full of emotion and expressing it from a place of fear. The most important thing missing in most fights is a safe space within which to share and be heard
When my partner and I fight we often fight for space to be heard as much as we argue about whatever the fight appeared to be about. Most fights are secret battles for power in the relationship and not really about whatever started them.
To fight well requires one of you to have enough presence, away from your emotions, to create a safe space (or the “container”) within which to have the conversation.
Once my partner’s emotions had calmed I asked if she was okay to have a conversation about what had happened because I wanted to share with her some things I wanted to take responsibility for. She agreed, and we were then able to have that conversation where I took responsibility for what was mine and we discussed what was not for me to take.
I found that leading and taking responsibility for what was mine made her more trusting in me, which added to the safety we’d developed in creating the “container.” This made her much more understanding and able to take responsibility for what was hers.
It really helped me when she said the simple words “I was wrong to say you were selfish.” I felt validated, which helped further develop the trust we had for each other.
She would never have been able to admit that if we’d not created the sufficient safety for us both to be honest with each other.
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This certainly wasn’t an easy conversation, but it would never have been possible if we hadn’t taken steps to create some space to express our emotions, take responsibility for what was ours, and then create a safe environment within which to discuss it.
I learned that it’s not what we fight about but how we fight that’s most important.
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Why Some Things Trigger You Emotionally and Others Don’t
“If you’re hysterical, it’s historical.” ~Anonymous
I had been having problems with my email. I dreaded calling technical support, since my experience in the past involved sitting for a long time on hold and listening to someone reading from a script instead of thinking creatively about my problem. However, since I could not fix the problem myself and I felt I had no other options, I called my Internet service provider’s technical support line.
True to form, after thirty minutes on the phone we had barely moved past the point where I had repeated my name and account number to four different people. Then, after another hour on the phone while attempting to solve my problem, the technical support representative actually lost some of my emails.
I’m not going to sugarcoat this. I went ballistic.
Like most people, I’ve spent many hours of my life on the phone with technical support representatives, attempting to fix something that is very important to my life and my livelihood—my computer, my Internet connection, my phone, etc. When they can’t fix the problem, I become completely hateful toward them. For some reason, it’s this one area that just turns me into the ugliest version of myself.
I’m not proud, but I have said some of the most vile things to these people on the phone because I want them to feel as bad as they are making me feel with their robotic repetition of “I’m so sorry for the inconvenience” or their insistence that their software isn’t the source of the problem; it must be my hardware.
I used to hide the fact that I went ballistic. It felt like an ugly secret that I would occasionally lose it with someone on the phone. I think it’s healthy to be embarrassed about completely losing your cool, but it’s also healthy to learn from the situation so you don’t lose your cool so easily the next time.
I have always assumed that my level of anger during these situations is much greater than the general population’s, although recent recordings of profanity-laced customer service calls around the Internet is making me question this.
When I mentioned to a friend that I was fighting with Comcast, she quickly replied, “That’s enraging.” Even my therapist described her own experiences with technical support calls as “crazymaking.” Hey, it’s from a therapist. That makes it official.
I still knew that my particular reaction was overblown. How do I know this? I look to the people around me as a gauge. I pick those people who have a generally positive outlook on life, who are stable, content and able to meet life’s challenges with resilience. I observe their example. I don’t look to those people who have a generally negative outlook on life. Grumpalumps are not a good gauge for what is normal behavior.
I wondered aloud to a friend one day about my overblown reaction to these situations. She knows me well and offered this piece of wise advice. She said, “When you’re hysterical, it’s historical.”
Growing up, I had a pervasive sense that I was surrounded by incompetent people who could not help me when I clearly needed it. I sensed this because it was true. Trust me. That sense of frustration was something that sat, ever so close to the surface, ready to be triggered, well into my adulthood.
Enter the incompetent technical support representative who knows less about my iPhone than I do. In that situation I am, in fact, surrounded by people who cannot help my when I clearly need it.
Trigger. I flash back to feeling like that frustrated little kid who felt that my clear requests for help went unheeded. I wound up figuring everything out by myself, since the people around me were unable to recognize the needs of others and to be of help. That made me furious—and exhausted. It’s that part of me who freaks out at the technical support representative.
We are all carrying around that kind of old, outdated baggage in our present-day lives. This is why what triggers one person is absolutely no big deal to another.
I found it such a relief to connect the dots between my specific type of childhood angst and my extreme reaction to an ordinary technical support nightmare. Making that connection immediately diffused my emotions around it. I was still frustrated—may I remind you it was a technical support call—but I wasn’t “ballistic-frustrated.”
Why does something attached to childhood carry so much force? Remember that children have very little control over their lives. They have limited ability to have experiences that test the worldview presented to them. They have little ability to communicate their needs. They have little power to resist the authority around them. Problems seem so big when children are so small.
Not anymore! As adults, we have power, resources, experience, and a much broader perspective than we ever did as children. We’ve learned a thing or two.
I’ve been around long enough to know that even if there isn’t an immediately obvious solution, I’ll probably figure it out, or find someone else who can. I’m no longer helpless, powerless, or incapable. The kid in me forgets that sometimes and throws a tantrum.
Think about a situation that makes you crazy. What part of you is reacting to the situation? Is it the five-year-old in you that felt ignored and taken for granted? Is it the angry teenager who felt oppressed and smothered? Is it the scared ten-year-old who feels insecure and incapable?
Am I ultimately saying that our negative emotions around those things that trigger us all are unjustified? Not at all. I’m saying our reactions to them can be overblown.
When we are triggered emotionally it’s a signal that something from our past is surfacing. Once I was able to disconnect my past from my present, my emotions diffused and I was no longer able to be triggered. I had a clear enough head to be able to handle the problem with out all of the angst.
I eventually found someone to help me with my e-mail. He was, in fact, a rare find. Now I’m thinking about getting rid of cable and moving to Internet-based television. I’ll tackle that when I feel I’m in the right state of mind and have some extra time on my hands. In the meantime, maybe I’ll create a national network of Technical Support Support Groups.
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Why I’m at Peace with My Weight Gain
“Resistance keeps you stuck. Surrender immediately opens you to the greater intelligence that is vaster than the human mind, and it can then express itself through you. So through surrender often you find circumstances changing.” ~Eckhart Tolle
I took a deep breath, feeling the recent change in my belly. I pinched at my belly rolls. They were familiar, I’d had them before, but recently I had gone through a period of over a year where I was in a smaller body. Now I was gaining weight again.
I refuse to step on the scale, so I don’t actually know how much weight I’ve gained. I can just feel it in the extra belly rolls and the snugness in some of my clothes. In my mind, I have two choices: to wage war on my body or to surrender to the weight gain.
Surrender is the ability to let go of the crushing weight of societal and personal expectations. It’s waving the white flag, signifying I’m giving up all the diet culture methods I’ve tried so hard to make work. I’m acknowledging that they actually never worked in the first place. This option isn’t always so easy, though.
For some context, I’m a body positive and fat positive activist. I advocate for acceptance and health at every size. I tell others they’re worthwhile just as they are. Though when it comes time to put them into practice within myself, it’s very challenging.
I still have days where I suck in my stomach, hoping to appear skinnier to the world and to myself. I try to shrink to become small enough. I feel as though my worth lies in the number on the scale (even though I’m a stranger to it now).
I lie to myself and say that I’m never going to find a partner if I keep gaining weight. I beat myself up about the food I’ve consumed and I compare myself to other people.
My body positive journey is far from perfect; I struggle with all of these things. One big reason is internalized weight stigma or fatphobia. It infests my mind and can take over if I’m not careful.
I mean, look at the world: We fear and despise fat. People are bullied and discriminated against because of being in larger bodies. Fatphobia is very real. It’s ingrained subconsciously; our society trains us to be this way.
The Body is not an Apology outlines some ways in which fatphobia rears its ugly head. In jobs, fat employees tend to be paid less for the same work. In dating, they often deal with people who fetishize them rather than seeing them as humans. In fashion, there are rarely sizes available beyond a size 16. In medicine, doctors see them as weak-willed and lazy.
This is not surrender in our society. This is bullying and prejudice. No wonder it’s hard for people to accept their changing bodies—there are so many consequences for being fat.
The irony of fat-shaming in the name of health is that it actually causes adverse health effects. According to a survey done by Esquire magazine, two-thirds of people report they’d rather be dead than fat. Can you imagine the damage this amount of stress does to one’s system?
No wonder we’re terrified of gaining weight. We let those messages infiltrate our minds, and they drive us to pinch at our belly rolls as if we’re the worst people ever.
On the other hand, being thin means being accepted, flying under the radar, even being complimented. It means that life is easier because you’re not oppressed in this way. Still, fatphobia manages to creep into all of our minds.
When you’re scared to death of what other people are going to think of you, you’re carrying your own sense of internalized fatphobia. This phenomenon even impacts those who are in smaller bodies because of the negative feelings they have about themselves and the world.
It makes sense, then, that my first reaction to my body admittedly isn’t always unconditional love. Rather, the old messages in my mind were saying, “You’re not good enough. You’re disgusting. No one will ever love you. You’re a failure.” They were loud and unrelenting. I was familiar with these messages.
For many years I waged war with myself. I was stuck in cycles of binging and restricting that wreaked havoc on my body. I thought I was being “healthy,” but really I was very sick.
I was obsessing over every little thing I consumed, making sure to track seventy-two calories of butter to my MyFitnessPal app and being hysterical when I gave into a Twix bar. Weight control owned me. I was constantly thinking about food.
Binging and restricting create terrible health risks—getting physically sick from too much or not enough food and brittle hair, not to mention the emotional consequences that occur like stress, obsession, and the absence of joy.
I loathed my very existence, and I definitely was fighting a war against my body and myself. I thought that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. It was utterly exhausting.
I started to think that there had to be another way to relate to my body.
When I was twenty-two, I discovered the body positivity movement. I began with a program called Bawdy Love, which was all about being a revolution to loudly declare that every body is worthy and no body is shameful.
I began to follow body positive influencers online like Megan Jayne Crabbe, Tess Holiday, Roz the Diva, Jes Baker, and hashtags like #allbodiesaregoodbodies. Fat women filled my feed. They were beautiful and unapologetic. They taught me that fat isn’t bad and that people in larger bodies aren’t lazy, unhealthy, or unlovable.
Now, I must say, I’m in a smaller body. I have privileges that many people do not. My level of weight gain so far is still keeping me in a body that’s relatively accepted by society. I don’t know what it’s like to face discrimination based on my size.
I do, however, know what it’s like to hate your body and think that you’re broken. I know what it’s like to do the opposite of surrender. When I’m living this way I do things like workout until I’m ill, take my favorite foods out of my diet, and berate my body in front of other people. This is what waging war looks like.
Instead of doing this, I chose to surrender to weight gain. I make this choice every single day. I try to let go of my expectations and preconceived notions. I’m throwing my hands up in the air.
This isn’t a happily-ever-after story where everything is perfect. Rather, body acceptance takes rigorous work as well simply just letting myself be.
I’m continuing to enjoy my food free from disordered eating. This means no restricting; every single food is available at any time. You won’t hear me talking poorly about my body or about anyone else’s. I refuse to diet and I refuse to indulge others in their diets.
To counteract the voices that tell me I’m not good enough, refute them with “You’re worthy and lovable just as you are. Weight is just a number. You’re okay.”
Eventually, I started to believe these thoughts are true. Part of me thinks that maybe, just maybe, my existence on this planet isn’t for nothing. In letting go of the self-pity, a beautiful sense of self begins to bloom.
Surrendering is harder than you may believe. Internalized weight bias runs deep.
I think at times I come off as someone who’s super-confident in myself and in my relationship with my body, but it takes a whole lot of work to get to the point of surrender. The point of being free from the grips of diet culture.
I still poke at my belly, but mostly it’s with curiosity. If I feel disgust, I quickly try to turn my thoughts around to have compassion and confidence. I notice when my thighs are pressed against a bench. I smile, feeling thankful that my legs move me around.
I don’t step on the scale because I know that it can’t tell me anything about my worth. The numbers are irrelevant. I open my arms to weight gain, though sometimes taking a deep breath first. Accepting it means healing from a disordered relationship with my body and food.
Weight gain is an indicator that I’m living with joy in my life. I’m enjoying meals out with friends, snacking on treats at work, and taking seconds. I’m eating when I’m hungry, what a revelation.
I’m taking deep care of myself, and that may not look like other people’s definitions of self-care. That’s okay.
Fatphobia may say that I’m being stupid, but I choose surrender today. For me, that means throwing out lifelong conceptions that I’m not good enough. It means no longer running in circles chasing my tail, trying to lose weight. It’s opening up to the idea that there’s another way to go about this. It’s peace and joy.
