Have you ever seen a beehive, the kind with glass sides that lets you look in on hundreds of shimmying bodies milling about, each one pressing against another until they become one vibrating mass?
Yesterday our family visited a new-to-us church. “Is it going to be s-c-a-r-y?” Graydon asked, his desire to spell out words increasing with each new word he learns. “Not really,” I replied. “All churches are made up of people, and people are just people, so that’s not so scary.”
In 2011 I began writing about intuitive eating. I wrote to process and to heal after living with disordered eating for nearly ten years. In many ways, intuitive eating saved me from myself. Most importantly, intuitive eating taught me to listen to myself and to acknowledge a quiet voice that whispered, “You are enough.” I wrote these essays for myself, but knowing how deeply rooted issues of weight are with feelings of identity and belonging, I decided to publish them here in hopes of helping others navigate the road back to oneself.
She opened the paint deck and was flooded with a surge of possibility. Like a gust of air on a spring day, pouring over the colors made Eliza feel like she was coming out of a fog. And wasn’t she?
Old age was in many ways a blessing. Long gone were the days of desperately trying to balance work and kids and a husband. Grocery shopping and cooking meal after meal. She ate when she felt hungry and stopped when she was full. She didn’t have to feign interest in making dinner when there was no one home to eat it but her.
I just read a fascinating article on the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, found via The Frugal Girl. The author, Steph of Simplistic Steph, argues that despite the loudly touted benefits of the FIRE lifestyle, not everyone can retire young…and that’s okay.
I have a theory about writing.
There are days when I wish for adventure, for far away places and people I’ve yet to meet, times when I long to be anywhere but here and now: a different person in a different body in a different town. But then there are times I crave the comfort of what’s known to me, when I can embrace who I am in the now.
All day long as the hearings were going on, I kept whispering to myself:
I believe you.
You’ve got this.
Keep going.
Be strong.
Don’t stop now.
I had another doozy of a day today. Work felt so overwhelming that by lunch time I was ready to cry. But then slowly, things…