I spent this past weekend with my M’s family near Chicago. As I mentioned earlier, M’s grandfather passed away on Thursday morning so the whole family went up to his grandmother’s house for the weekend.
I used to be a BLACK-WHITE thinker. There were no other shades, no other points of view. Just RIGHT or WRONG. Something was a GOOD IDEA or a BAD IDEA. You were either GOOD in my book, or BAD.
Lately I’ve been thinking about being present. Not in a zen, yoga, slowing down kind of way. But in the way that the present counts for something. I got to thinking yesterday about the way we prioritize a future, not yet attained version of ourselves over the here-and-now-and-imperfect self we actually are. I found myself feeling surprisingly hopeful yesterday. I thought about how giving up dieting has returned me to myself, my present self.
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.
I am hungry for connection. Starved, sometimes. I work in a quiet office where many keep to themselves. There are a lot of “how are yous” and “how’s it goings” and everyone is genuinely kind. But some days, I want to shout just to make. some. noise.
One of the things I love about reading blogs and listening to podcasts, is that I’m often presented with ideas that are different than mine.
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.
In the last two weeks I’ve read three books that completely challenged me. I sped through every chapter and was even late to work because I couldn’t put one down. What stunned me about these books was not so much their creative subject matter, but the way each book’s voice created a rich, multi-layered, and thoughtfully described world for its characters to inhabit.
This is Thomas. I’ve written about Thomas before. But nothing quite adequately captures his presence in my life. On our very first date, Mike told me all about his family. I could hear the dedication in his voice—not an unhealthy co-dependency—rather the knowledge that to him, family is the most important thing, and that he would be there for them to the end. And we were.