There is a life force within
It has seen me through
Black-pitched soul’s dark nights
Days so thick with despair
I could barely breathe or move
Sometimes it was so very close
If not for that push inside
To continue on this journey
The pull to end it could have won
But something in me wants to live
The weight of hidden truths
Bent her spirit years ago
Self-contained pressure
Wore down potential and hope
An undetectable scoliosis of the soul
Left a misshapen heart that strains to beat
When I was a girl, I lived for food.
The promise of the after-school snack kept me going through the grueling days of my youth. I’d race home to find sweet and savory relief from the confusion of adolescence.
I’d eat from a box of graham crackers, spreading layers of vanillla chocolate chip canned frosting. Or I’d slice up a Snickers bar the way they did in a commercial on at the time, pretending I was in it. Then maybe some Lay’s potato chips. Maybe a Wonder Bread/Gulden’s Mustard/Kraft cheese and baloney sandwich.
I was on my own, so I could eat like I wanted to. No father home yet to bring tension and self-consciousness to the air.
I’d fill myself, quelling the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that haunted me at any other time of my day. This was all mine. My time free from criticism, pressure or fear.
Over the years, I became desperate around this intimate connection with food. Protective of the rituals. The private pleasure I found in food and the act of eating it.
I knew something was off about how I related to food. I felt ashamed and like there was something wrong with me, while at the same time feeling like it was crucial to my very existence. That trichotomy created a painful struggle inside me of shame and appetite and need.
I became secretive around it, knowing on some level that I was not like other people.
I now understand that somewhere along the way, I learned to equate food with so many things I needed: love, attention, security, connectedness, relief, quiet, peace, pleasure, a sense of having something for myself, a way to feel like I had control of one thing in the world.
I believe that some of this relationship to food was learned, familial. My mother, too, sought refuge in her treats. She loved candy, and when I came home from school, she was usually lying in her bed, reading mystery novels, eating candy from a stash she kept in her bedside table. She, too, at some point in her life, reached for food to solve and resolve being on this planet.
I understood her for this. I feel such compassion for her. For her huge needs and the dysfunctional way she had developed to cope with getting them met.
It has taken many years of unraveling this connection for me to find a new relationship to food. There’s been tremendous loss in it. A loss of my friend, my savior, my companion, my sidekick.
But it has been so freeing, too. I have been learning how to give myself what I had asked for from food all those years: love.
Sounds easy, and obvious, right? But what does that actually look like?
It looks like this: giving myself The Five A’s of Love: Attention, Acceptance, Appreciation, Affection, and Allowing.
(The Five A’s concept is from the wonderful book How To Be An Adult in Relationships – Five Keys to Mindful Loving by psychotherapist, David Richo, PhD.)
Those Five A’s satisfy the snack craving every time. I’m not saying I don’t still crave and even miss that snack eating ritual. I do. That’s a deeply embedded habit. I got pretty hard-wired around it.
But today, I take the snack-seeking girl inside by the hand, and I ask her what she really needs.
Sometimes it is some appreciation for all I have been doing all day.
Sometimes it is affection. Maybe a bath. Some demonstration of loving care.
Maybe it is the need to be allowed to really acknowledge feeling afraid, or spent, or angry.
It took awhile for that part of myself to trust that my needs could be met in new ways. To trust in something other than food.
To trust life. To trust love. To trust loving myself, in life.
It is an every day practice, this mindfulness of love. I pour the energy I used to hold for food into other things. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t gotten my wires crossed, that food wasn’t so complicated for me.
But it is.
And so I accept this truth as if I were diabetic, and I do what I need to do to care for myself.
Mostly, as I said, I feel free.
I no longer carry that shame I felt around it. I am literally lighter in spirit. That feeling is the prize I keep my sights on. It is what makes it all worth it.
I may no longer “have” snacks. But I have me.
Sometimes when I am out in the world, I feel a compulsion to go home immediately.
I literally feel drawn, as if by a magnet, back to the safety of home.
I have lived with this sensation for many years now, since 2001. I blogged about it last year when I wrote about depression.
I am still unraveling what is contained in this dynamic within.
On the one hand, I love life, being alive. I crave connection. I love people. I love humanity.
I am an actress. Human behavior endlessly fascinates me. What makes people take actions. What drives us all to stay alive on this spinning blue ball. That we choose every day to love and aspire to things.
And yet. There are times when I am filled with a mix of emotions and sensations that compel me to get home as soon as I can. Fear, anxiety, panic.
I never thought if it before, but is this a version of a panic attack? I have no idea, no way to guage that. I hear people talk about panic attacks. I know people who suffer from them.
How do you label an internal experience like what I experience? I guess if there are enough people experiencing similar symptoms, someone names it and it becomes a way to discuss, diagnose.
I have brought it to conventional therapy. Past life regression work. Rebirthing. Shamanic healing work.
I’ve learned cognitive behaviors to manage it. All have been helpful in one way or another.
But I still don’t have a concrete understanding of why it happens to me. Is it genetically encoded in my DNA? Did my people learn to survive by keeping close to home?
In a past life, was I some tribal member who died traumatically when being away from the others and my soul just cannot let it go?
I know for some years, I withdrew from being in the flow of life because I did not know how to cope. I had to learn how to be in the world again. I had to mature emotionally, with help. That has been an amazing process.
But that period of time is many years past. I have never felt more healed, more whole, more integrated than I do now. I am in awe of the healing I have done, of where I am today. I have a truly gifted life, filled with love, connection, abundance, and creativity.
And yet. The magnet pull comes upon me still.
I believe my body has more to show me. There are answers coming from within, but on my body’s own time. Not my ego’s.
And so I bear patient, loving witness as it happens, listening for clues even as I experience the pull when it hits me. I have finally stopped adding to the pain of it all by beating myself up for its mere existence. Or trying to bully myself into being able to “just bypass it already.”
When I have that pull to go home, I choose to see it with the eyes of a loving parent. I take my own hand and ask myself if it can wait until I finish my day. I promise to give that part of me full attention when safe at home, later.
And I follow thru on that promise. That is crucial. I need that part to begin to trust me, to trust that I can handle whatever may go down out in the world.
I feel that trust growing inside. It is a deeply important feeling.
And I welcome this.
I am building a new home within. And when completed, I will be there, wherever I go, wherever I am in the world.
Sunnyside up
Not just my favorite egg
A way to be in the world
Not pretending, can’t do that
But steering towards the light
Can’t avoid the dark and grey
But I can keep the sun in mindsight
I long to go under
Lose consciousness, go blank
Slip away into nothingness.
What does that say about me?
A local’s not enough.
I don’t need the area around the wound deadened
I need to be deadened.
I am the wound.
Put me out, put me under
Let me go down into the void.
Maybe I’ll come back
Maybe not
Either way, I’ll have relief at last.
Go ahead, please
Just do it
Put me out of my misery
Commit me, already
I can’t stand it in here
This world is too bright
The constant chatter
The onslaught of doubt
Can’t you tell
I am screaming inside
My head is on fire
I am running down streets
I want to be free
Like Blanche DuBois
Take me to my own Belle Reve
Let me sleep there forever
Here is what I can do today.
I can create:
Joy. By Taking time to find it in my body and then give it to the world in the form of smiles and kind interactions with others.
Peace. By listening and respecting others, staying unattached to needing them to agree with me or see things my way. By refusing to war with my self or anyone else.
Art. By choosing to use my body, voice, mind, emotions, instincts, words, will, expertise and talent to create in whatever ways I can. I can do this regardless of whether I get an audition or booking, or am in a show or film or not. Especially in today’s world, I can create art and share it daily, for my self and others.
Positivity. I can choose to meditate, practice gratitude, use mantras and affirmations and select an intention to guide my day. As many times a day as I need to, I can tap into the ever-abundant source of this that is within me. Every moment contains the choice of love or fear.
Justice. I can stay active politically for the causes I support. I can use my voice, body and energy as needed to take action. I can speak up when I see injustice.
Equality. See above.
Beauty. I can allow my spirit to shine freely from within. I can reflect back to others the beauty I see within them, encouraging theirs to flow freely.
Comedy. I can listen for the clown (my unsocialized 4 year old) within, and work with her impulses instead of tamping them down. I can laugh at myself and at funny things and share that with the world.
Music. I can hum and sing and make up silly songs in the grocery line. I can sing at the top of my lungs for the sheer joy of it. Or I can create art from the music in me.
Excitement. I can go against the grain of the social conditioning that started in junior high school and begin to allow my enthusiasm for life to thrive and be seen. I can choose excitement over “cool” and feel my own aliveness flow into the world. Maybe I will spark enthusiasm in others.
Intimacy. I can choose to be vulnerable with myself and with others, and perhaps help them to become vulnerable as well. Vulnerability may well be key to saving the world.
That’s what I can do today.
I developed a disordered relationship with food practically from birth.
Food and eating have long since been very complicated for me.
Food was never just food. Sustenance. A source of energy.
The act of eating was never just a means to satisfy physical hunger, fuel the machine, fill the tank.
It was security. A best friend. My lover. My mother. My father.
Relief. Comfort. Excitement. Joy. A distraction.
A way to protect my self. A weapon. A protest sign. A lockable door. A “Fuck you, world.”
It gave me a sense of well-being. It gave me something that felt essential to my very ability to exist on this planet.
But above all else, and most importantly, it have me an illusion of control.
And this, above all, was crucial to me.
As a child, my world was out-of-control. Everyone in it seemed out-of-control. Every thing happening seemed out of my control.
Inside of me, good gravy, things certainly felt out of control. Feelings, thoughts. Wants. Needs. All felt huge and to a small person who felt they had no voice and no power, they were simply more than I could comprehend or cope with.
Enter food.
The one area I felt I had any say in was with food. What I ate and how much.
Especially how much. Any hint of the slightest suggestion that I might begin to think about considering becoming open to the idea of portion control still brings up a deep revolution within me. A protest begins without my having to even rally the troops. Big signs flashes in my head: “Fuck you!” “Over my dead body!” “Not while there is still breath in my body!”
You’ve got to be kidding. I’m supposed to let someone else tell me how much I am allowed to eat? What?!
Seriously, I get so defiantly enraged at the concept I literally feel nauseaus.
To a non-disordered person, it may be very hard to comprehend. It may seem or sound absurd.
But trust me when I say that my being able to eat or not eat what, when, and how much of something I wanted was (and sometimes still is) of incredible importance to me.
Almost feels life and death to me to be able to choose and act as I want in this one area of my life. It looks very much like addiction and obsessive-compulsive behavior because it is very much both of those things.
As you can imagine, such a relationship is doomed from the start. It is not healthy. It is instincts gone awry. It is a coping mechanism that brings an initial and momentary satisfaction followed by an ever-deeper, never-to-be-satisfied longing.
Such a relationship with food and eating skews all other relationships. It is a poor substitute for a real solution to the problem. And the problem, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the food or eating. They are merely the symptom.
So the solution, for me, has not and never will be portion control. I do not weigh and measure my food. (That still sends waves of dread through my body.) I do not label foods good or bad, or blame dieting or fad diets for my problem. Fad diets and the “diet” industry are only potential triggers or tools for my own kinked relationship to food and eating.
The problem was not and never will be my willpower.
The problem is how the funky-ass relationship to food and eating developed the first place. What was missing that led to the kink in my connection to regular eating?
There were circumstances. Maybe something ancestral, genetic, sure. But truly, there were circumstances and my response to them. My best solution for coping happened to be really distorted and led to many years of suffering.
Around all of that, I have done a great deal of work. But in terms of healing, it has come down to this: addressing the part of me that developed such a relationship in the first place.
What did that part really need? How can I help that part trust other ways of meeting those needs? (The second question is almost more important and takes a great deal of patience to answer and to implement.)
I began asking these questions, and learned to really listen for and then to the answers.
The needs and wants came first.
The answer I heard most is that part of me wanting something for herself, just for her, that no one and nothing can interfere with. In unlimited amounts.
This seemed key to the whole thing, this need.
This longing for something just for me, that no one else can have, that only I can have, that no one can take away, mess with or hurt.
Woah. Logically, it is clear when I really lay it out like that that food and eating never had a chance at solving that problem. They do not contain the ability to solve it.
But that part of me was working from a different logic that makes total sense to the information it had at the time. Given the limited resources and the level of maturity of that part of me at that time, I can see how the dots were connected to the one thing that was available and that seemed to work.
Problem is, that part is hungry for something that food and eating can never satiate.
But that is where the real work lies. But as in all things, hard work does pay off. Yes, it does suck to have to do anything at all about a problem that I wish had never started in the first place. But that is just reality and once I accepted that, things began to get better.
That is my job now. To give myself that indefinable…something…and to give it in unlimited amounts.
Sometimes it is my own attention. Support. Kindness. Comfort. Bolstering. Appreciation. Soothing. Excitement. Stimulation. Fulfillment. Fullness. Rest. Recovery. Quiet. Peace. Stillness. A sense of being ok. Safe. Whole just as I am.
These I can give myself whenever, however I want in whatever quantities that part demands, cries for, deserves. I get to pour unlimited amounts of these things into myself, and no one and nothing can interfere or mess with that.
But what about the act of eating? What about that part of it all? That part of me wants to consume, wants to be filled, wants to take in and become one with something.
No, I cannot actually physically have the experience of filling myself with something, taking a substance into my body and becoming one with it.
That is the physical aspect of the whole, and there is another series of solutions to address that part. That I can satisfy in other ways. That is a different blog for another day, perhaps.
But the rest of it, I got in spades to give. Unlimited amounts.
It took some experimentation to help that part of me trust that letting go of the old mechanism for the chance that something new would ultimately be better and actually, really work, for real. That is where patience and gentleness and compassion pay off.
But it is all worth it. The meeting of those needs of my self by myself — that, my friends, I am in control of.
At long last, I have the power that I have so craved.
Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: portion
For JC and anyone else who hates the idea of fucking “portions.”
My heart needs a buff
It’s long lost its shine
I tried to be tough
Tried hard not to pine
But enough is enough
I must draw the line
Smooth out what’s rough
Act as if it’s divine
Get rid of old stuff
Start to care for what’s mine
Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: buff
Beyond the Skinny Branches 