I recently came dreadfully close to making a Very Bad Decision. There were a couple of weeks of ruminating and whining and imploring about What should I dooooooooo. Where should I doooo it?
All culminating in my spending an entire day in my pajamas eating chocolate and peanut butter. And also pretzels and ice cream. And a slew of other crap. Phew! Crisis averted. Just in the nick of time.
Of course gorging on sugar is kind of a crisis of its own magnitude, but I’ll tolerate that marathon eating spasm in order to gain a little perspective. I’m okay dealing with some minor nausea and frustration if it will keep me from backing my soul into a corner. That trade is plenty fair in my book.
I thought I was confused about this particular decision, but apparently my essential self was effervescently clear. And one of her favorite strategies for making a point is to highjack my attention by embarking on monumental lust for gooey desserts. Clever, that one.
(However, in order to keep me on my toes, she’s equally committed to manic preoccupation with obsessive attempts at achieving The Perfect Body. You know, to balance things out.)
After centuries of struggle, I’m intimate enough with these delightful quirks to know that whatever thing has her all wound up with cookies and compulsion has about zero to do with body stuff.
I used to be all Why?Why?Why? can’t I just eat like a normal person who is effortlessly slender???
Not a useful question. It just kept me from noticing that insistent tap on my shoulder and buzz in my ear. The one saying Ah ah ah, you are heading in the most incredibly wrong direction, Dearie.
Now it might take experiencing the rare junk food frenzy. But if I get very attentive and willing to go deeper than bittersweet chocolate (um, hypothetically speaking), and if I get curious about those impulses instead of critical, my essential self is happy to feed me clues about the state of my spirit.
And she ends up being right an infuriating percentage of the time.
Does your essential self have a favorite way to make you crazy command your attention?
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Oh how I get this. Donuts and chocolate chip cookies were the first step in how I became independent. If I hadn’t been eating boxes full of donuts and then running them off after work, I might have coasted along in numb displeasure for a long time. Instead I hired someone to help me stop eating cookies and the help-y person said, what do YOU WANT to do? And I was all, what do I WANT to do? No one has ever asked me that before. I thought we were going to talk about my childhood and cookies. Hunh. Four years later, here I am!
Huh. Now I wonder. How does she get my attention? {I am having one of those What should I doooooooooooo days myself.}
Come to think of it, I had a similar experience to Kelly. I hired someone to help me with wellness and she said that I mostly knew all the stuff she had planned to teach in the program so what did I really want to talk about and then in one session she asked what I wanted to do and I told her – and the answer was quite a shock.
That’s how I was as a teenager! I would beat myself up for not being able to control my eating but it took me years of therapy and self-evaluation to realize that my food and body issues had nothing to do with food or my body. I still have the tendency to eat for comfort which is something I need to deal with.
It’s great that you were able to listen to yourself and get to the place you need to be.
Yes!
Man oh man my life with sugar is so unpleasant compared to my life without it. And when I am doing what I want to do, the cravings aren’t really there.
At my old job I was taking a starbucks-giant-fat-and-sugar-frothy-concoction-break (a venti frappucino dripping with whip cream ain’t no “coffee break”) about every two hours. I haven’t wanted one in months, and tasted one recently “for old times sake” and was completely grossed out.
I also notice that when I refuse to take a break, my body finds a way to take it for me. Like terribly inconvenient deadlines when I scream “I need to keep going” it laughs back “Too bad, you are sleeping for a week. Zap! Here’s the flu!”
@Kelly ~ I can totally hear you, what do you MEAN what do I WANT to do? What does that have to do with ANYTHING? (Oh yeah, everything.)
@Elizabeth ~ Your answer about what you wanted to do shocked you? I love that – I totally want to hear that story!
@Jessica ~ Yeah, that’s the thing — it starts out as a way to deal with other stuff, but then turning to it for comfort becomes a habit with a life of its own. Totally understand that.
@Megan ~ Oh I so relate, it’s amazing the things that I’ve “given up” without missing them at all once I started doing something that felt more like me… those coffee breaks, shopping, the list goes on and on!