Good enough

An interesting side effect of stopping restrictions, over-exercising and generally escaping the diet prison mentality is the fact that your mind is open to a whole lot more things.  Many of these things are positive, but sometimes what happens is your other insecurities pop up!

This is not exactly a pleasant experience, but it is a place from which personal growth can flourish.  I, like every other person in the world, am haunted by feelings of inadequacy.  Of course in an area that I get the most artistic and personal satisfaction, but yet I never feel like I can measure up to those I admire.  I imagine it is because I want to be "GOOD" at my personal passion of photography.

My issue is my perceptions of others.  I perceive that they have the way of thinking that is technical and mechanical and computer literate and they have extreme attention to detail and unlimited patience, knowledge, money and time- in other words: the ability to be a way better photographer than I am.  Lol.  I am exaggerating, but seriously, this is the path that I lead myself on when I look at the work of the people I admire the most.  It never occurs to my hyper-critical mind that perhaps they go through the same processes and struggles that I do.  Or the fact they all focus on one or two types of photography and don't do the same things I do.  And seriously how nice they are and how helpful they always seem to be if you ask for advice.

I doubt that these people would agree with my perceptions of them, and indeed I hamper my growth sometimes by getting distracted by all the stuff I like to do in addition to photography.  The saying goes- a jack of all trades, master of none.

As an art teacher, I definitely am a jackie of all trades- I can draw, paint, do clay, print making, etc, and I can hold the hand (figuratively) of my students as I go, helping them feel successful and teaching them about life and relationships and work ethic and creativity and perseverance.  They think I can do everything.  And if I can't, I can figure out how to fix it.

When I get out into the adult world, things are a little less full of admiration.  And I occasionally take this fact as rejection of any skills I actually do have....  oy.

Ok, so this isn't really all about photography, it is about the things I reflected on when this came up in my most recent coaching session.  I need to step back and think about things more realistically, less full of the feelings of inadequacy and insecurity.  I went through these feeling about my art teaching a few years ago, and I have worked through that fairly satisfactorily.  

The good thing about not being in Diet Prison is that you have so many other things that you can do with your life other than plan, execute and regret the things that you eat.  Fun activities that you can participate in besides figuring out how to burn the most calories in the most efficient way.  Ways to keep yourself occupied that does not involve research on the latest food fads, exercise trends, and fitness apps and apparatus.

But we have, lying in wait, the real issues that bother us.  These issues are ready to pop up when we are not paying attention.  They make us doubt ourselves and our go to response is to turn inward and blame ourselves for things we never learned or interests that never served us.  We are face to face with a job we still hate, a relationship that is toxic for our mental health, or being overwhelmed with people taking advantage of our unwillingness to disappoint someone and therefore we end up doing things that we smile and say we are fine with, but underneath we are seething and resentful.  The true issues that are still there and bubble into our consciousness.

It seems that these thing like to happen when you are innocently washing dishes, driving your car or when someone makes comments to you that alarm you.  You don't have the distraction of hating your body, but that might still be the go to reaction.  I find I have STILL times when I get unhappy with the way I freaking look in reaction to a great amount of stress in some aspect of my personal life.  We must deal with the underlying things that really, REALLY are there and causing us pain.  (Photography isn't a real painful topic, but it is important enough to me, and deeply personal, that it makes a good example)

SO, self care:   self coaching..... paid coaching....  meditation.... deep breathing..... journaling.....
this is my arsenal of tools that help me get ahold of myself.  So I can get back to feeling light and easy again.  So I can take another step down the path of true healing.  If you are in this place, know that it is normal.  Know that you can do this, you can face your life without the shield of dieting.  You can deal with your problems past and present and not blame your body for them.  You don't have to restrict your food and make yourself smaller to please those around you.   You, like me- we are more than good enough to take up our space.

The last couple of weeks...

I have had a very busy and sort of stressful couple of weeks here, I am presently on a break from school- as short one, but still- and I just listened to our latest podcasts.  There seems to be some issues with ITunes and the podcast library, which is disturbing.  Hopefully I will be able to link this up soon.

It is interesting how little things pop out at you when you are least expecting it- this happened to me just recently, and I am so happy to say I had the tools to deal with it.

In short, I had an exchange with a person who talked in great detail on how they restrict and what foods they do and don't eat and then went on to do some minor size shaming as well.  I just don't hear that very often anymore.  I also did not manage to get "into it" because it was just not worth it and wasn't the time or place.

Immediately before this event, I had some big body acceptance moments- as in, I was feeling bad about parts of me and it manifested itself while I was putting on an outfit....  which made me really edgy and cranky. The next day while getting ready in the morning I suddenly understood what was going on.  I don't want to make it seem like my entire interaction with this person was horrible, I love this friend so much, but that aspect of her makes my eye twitch.

I found I was able to step back from the whole situation and look at my reactions with curiosity and interest.  I was able to redirect my brain and feelings- I had a real hard time the next day, but I was able to synthesize the whole thing and come to a satisfactory conclusion....

People are truly afraid of fat.  They are afraid to have it, to experience it and to look at it.  They make judgements that are not at all based on true authentic science, as related to health and I think they are just afraid to see it. I might be way off base, but maybe not so much.

It is a pervasive idea that being heavy is unhealthy, as previously discussed in my Bob v. Oprah post. So, lets turn inward and look at this. Is there any person in the world who MATTERS that will love you less because of weight?  As Anne-Sophie said, she never looked at her mother and thought I would love my mother more if she lost x number of pounds.  It just doesn't matter.  My grandchildren won't enjoy being with me less or more based on weight.  It's a battle some days.

Yeah, that's all I have today.  :)

Daffodils and waterbottles- self care and balance

Self-care and balance was the subject of the last podcast that we (Leila had to miss this one- *sadness*) recorded and it is something that I have been thinking about ever since.  I was fortunate to have a little time to listen to us while I actually went for a walk- outside!  and in the SUN today and I wanted to develop the ideas I was trying to say in this episode.

Balance in life is "possible" but what exactly is that?  What does this- in the present day's popular vernacular- even look like? I think the answer to that is an individual's idea of balance.  For me- being an optimist that I am- balance means that I am happy, that the irritations of the day leave me immediately after the situation has resolved itself, that I am happy to talk to people when I see them and I am happy to be alone when I get home as well.  I think happy is at my center of balance.

What could this look like to other people?  Could your balance mean literally that the bad times during the day are balanced by things going sort of ok- that your generally pessimistic outlook on life is balanced by a few things that don't suck?  I know people like that.  Are you an introvert and your balance in life is being largely left alone because you work in a somewhat solitary job, and you have a small family and limited social life, but enjoy being out and about in a limited fashion?  Perhaps you are fairly extroverted and you are on the phone with your friends frequently, and have a public workplace, then need to spend time with others in the evening and chit chat on text until you go to bed? What does balance mean to you?  I am not criticizing these ways of looking at life, merely thinking of people I know and trying to see from their point of view and imagining what could be a balanced life.  I, of course, only barely touched the surface of this, but the amazing differences in people would lead to different definitions of what balance is.

In our case, we were discussing the balance between real life and healing and I have to imagine that everyone processes this differently as well. I have to imagine not everyone can do this, but,  I personally went cold turkey when I began my healing and escaping from diet prison.  I quit weighing, dieting, and embracing diet culture really quickly, in literally a day.  I decided to stop and I did.  This does mean that I floundered around for quite a while, because after more than a couple decades of thinking that following diets and shrinking myself was the only way to self fulfillment, it took a lot of time and a lot of self care and body image work to change the way I saw myself.  There was not a lot of balance during the first few years of healing, there was a lot more feeling free, though.  It was outstanding to just eat what I wanted.  It took a lot longer to come to terms with the exercise component but I did.  It is so nice to really not care what I have for any given meal.  I don't care what my macros look like, don't think about if I have had more than 2 pieces of bread in a day, feel no concerns when I pick up a second cookie if it will feel good in my tummy.

Freedom gave me the space in my mind to work on my body image and my self worth.  I said in the podcast that I still have feelings that I am not doing enough, that I don't deserve to take rest time, or have down days.  (The self worth work goes on, but it is much easier to identify that there is something that needs to be turned and examined.)  So there surely was not a lot of balance during my early recovery period, there was just a lot of time given to my inner work.  I did a lot of guided meditations, I journaled, I had group and private coaching.  The meditations included visualizations and breathing work. I was religious in working on these things, doing the assignments and writing prompts from the group coaching, listening to the "tapes", finding new things to read and people to follow on social feeds.  And then I found I didn't have the NEED to listen to my morning meditation.  Didn't HAVE to journal for pages and pages every day....  that is when the balance began to happen.

I was trying to convey in the podcast that I think the balance of healing and real life happen in ebbs and flow.  We have cycles of nature, cycles of energy, and I think cycles of balance and imbalance.  I think the balance in our life happen when we can handle the things that are bringing us to our knees or making us not sleep at night or rest like a giant ball in your chest that take up all the space you usually have for patience, and breath, and love, and compassion.  When we know what authentic self-care tools we have to use and where we can go when we are in crisis.  The balance comes in knowing that we can find our way out of this and it does not involve trying to control life and people and situations and love by making ourself LOOK different or a certain way or a eat a different way because if I lose weight everything will be right again, because it is sort of magical because all the people on tv and the internet say our life will be perfect if we shrink and take up less space and become less than what we are.  whew.  No- that won't work at all, dieting won't work at all.

Self-care tools at their finest frequently don't cost anything.  They don't involve having someone do something fancy or luxurious for you.  While having the pedicure or massage or buying the shoes or the daffodils or taking that bath in the good bubbles might be momentarily amazing, these are the lesser self care practices.  These don't bring to your mind the things that affected your outlook on life from your childhood, or the friends that betrayed your, or the trauma you suffered, nor really do they help you see them from where you are living now, from your present point of view.  They don't let you really decide that the mean girl in your mind is really not speaking the truth.  The lesser self care practices don't cause the sublimation of healing happen in your mind and change your go to responses to stress.

Writing in  journal/notebook/scrap paper, meditation in whatever form works for you, movement that is healing and not punishing, breathing purposefully and rhythmically are things that are authentic forms of self care.  Moments that you find during your day- only 30 seconds or a minute- to truly give yourself positive reinforcement in some way are incredibly effective.  In my case, the water bottle filling, when I breathe slowly to relax myself is far superior to the beautiful little bouquet of daffodils I bought myself last week.  The flowers were lovely and I adore them, but they didn't quite do the trick to rescue me from my acute distress.  Coaching, visualization, time to actually relax and giving myself permission to be put aside things that just didn't need doing are what got me out of my funk.  I never could write out a sentence that said the last two weeks I have felt like a total disaster, a failure, a shipwreck and I can't sleep or relax  because.......  I kind of don't really know.  I do know that facing all the issues that were adding up and making myself stop several times a day to hold my hand on my heart and breathe into it was the thing that broke the cycle and has me back in balance.  Every time I face the demons and can bring myself back to balance without being on a diet or blaming my body for the situation brings me another day of peace.  

Take the time to find your own authentic self care and think about what balance means to you.  We are more than worth it.