"You know what I've noticed about you? I never see you eat."
"Yeah...I get that a lot," I wince and feel exposed like a nerve through a tooth.
I move through the feeling with my whole body. I do not need to feel shame or hide.
I let it absorb into my belly, into the strong place where I carried my babies.
"Is that like, on purpose?" he asks.
"No, not exactly...but it's probably not an accident. I still struggle. I know you've read my blog..."
"Yeah. It's brilliant," he says.
"Thanks...yes it is my longest standing daemon. I have good days and bad days."
This morning I read my books.
The books change. The practice of reading and sitting does not.
Facebook threatens to take this practice from me. I have reclaimed it a hundred times.
This morning I read:
The only tranquility I knew was to anesthetize myself with food, an indulgence for which I paid dearly the rest of the time. Nothing could save me from the mental and emotional anguish and confusion of being fat, feeling guilty and hating myself for lack of control.
~For Today
I have been seeking forgiveness of myself for this. For my compulsive eating and alcoholism.
It is not an intellectual decision. It is a slow and tedious breaking out from chrysalis. To me it has felt long, yet when I consider how long people choose to sleep in their shells, some an entire lifetime, it is not so long. Perhaps they don't choose. Perhaps an outside light never comes to alert them - there is a whole world out here.
This blog started as an amends to myself. The question:
What would happen if I just told the truth about this struggle, about what my head says?
What if I shared it?
In my other book I read:
"...we don't believe love will ever just come to us on its own. We believe instead that we have to do something to make ourselves acceptable. So to push ourselves to try to be good, to whip ourselves into shape, we hire an in-house critic to keep tabs on how we're doing."
In the margin I wrote: I still believe this.
But I believe it far less...and I can see it is not a requirement for my love of others. Perhaps, just as my allowance for others has turned in to an allowance for myself, this could become true as well. I am still afraid of it. I am still breaking out.
