Doing The Work

There was a great program on NPR about the collective shaming of fat people in and outside the medical world. This coupled with my knowledge of eating disorders and my own personal story is quite something to put together. It’s no wonder most of us are messed up. The messages we take in even though our gut and hearts try so hard to tell us we are good, well, these messages can be impossible to ignore. The bombardment of so many lies infiltrate us whether we realize it or not. 

It seems the world has conspired against us:  we are not destined to love ourselves.

So in an effort to turn this around, what would it look like if I didn’t know any of this? What would it look like if, from day 1, I just knew total acceptance and love from the world and from myself?

This seems more difficult to imagine than life on mars.

What seems more likely to me now is I want to challenge the moment more often as in, “Is what I am feeling based on what on a message I have learned or what I know to be true about me?” Sounds exhausting but with practice, it might become my new norm

And I guess this is what it means by how change works. It starts not with yourself but within.

And to further this, I’d like to add that the idea of living your best life isn’t one free of pain. Life is full of pain and hurt and that, too, is part of all of this. And my way through is to allow myself to be as real about my experiences and share in order to sort it out and in the process, another person might feel less alone.

I have been saying a version of this forever,  I think. When I look back over my journals I see the exact same themes and I ache for what the world did to that young woman.

Thank goddesses of age and wisdom and curiosity and truth telling who inspire me to keep going.

To tune in deeply into myself and to turn away from the lies….that is the real work.

Kate Bowler, one of my favorite podcasters, says life is a chronic condition. To ride the waves it brings does not mean we are easy breezy. It means we accept what it throws at us and allow those feelings in order to move through it.

I don’t know if anything here makes sense. I feel like I am picking my way through an overgrown garden, barely seeing through the foliage and trees and vines. I see a sliver of light and so I inch my way in that direction hoping for bigger pockets of light as I go.





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