Self-care

I was listening in yesterday on a teleJAM between Brene Brown and Lissa Rankin where they talked about health and vulnerability. I have already talked about who Brene Brown is, but Lissa Rankin is also pretty cool.  She is a mind-body medicine physician and the author of the book Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself. Anyway, while I was listening in on their call, I starting taking some notes, and I have kind of mulled over them since then and have some thoughts I wanted to share.

There were a couple of things that I enjoyed about their conversation, but the one thing that I keep going back to is the idea of taking care of ourselves. Brene was talking about how there are things that she must do everyday that are not negotiable if she is going to be her best self. I don’t remember everything she said, but I do remember that two things on her list were exercising every day and getting eight hours of sleep every night. For some reason, this just really made me pause. OF COURSE, there are things that we can do that really represent us taking care of ourselves in the best way we know how. However, how often do we really do them?

There are definitely some things that I could do every day that would fall into the realm of self-care. The first is to get at least seven hours of sleep every night. I would love to shoot for eight, but my body actually seems to be okay with seven hours. When I work my twelve-hour shifts, this means that I need to come home from work and be in bed and asleep no later than 10:00PM (I get up at 5:00AM to get ready for the work). But that is totally doable! Even if I want to watch TV for an hour or read after I eat dinner, I can be asleep by 10:00PM. The second for me is also to get some sort of physical activity in every day. I work at a pretty physical job (sometimes, the majority of my twelve hours are spent on my feet), and I have let go of the idea of fitting in gym time when I am working a full day, but on the days that I am not working, I know my body feels better when it moves. It doesn’t have to be a long run or a multi-hour sweat session, but even getting on the treadmill for 30 minutes and spending some time in motion can be enough.

Some others things have to do with my environment. I have a LOT of stuff (I joke that I have a hoarder mentality, although I PROMISE that there are not dead cats under any of my belongings), and I am not someone who keeps her apartment spotless. In fact, because my bookshelves have so much stuff on them, I don’t dust nearly as often as I probably should. But I definitely am sitting here right now surrounded by clutter, and it definitely stresses me out a little bit. My dining room table is my catch-all, and right now it has on it mail, craft supplies, my lunch bag, a couple of books…you get the idea. Piles of stuff that are waiting for their own actual place to “live.” The dining room table is not where they should live. I also can see into my bedroom and see a couple of pairs of pants on top of my cedar chest, multiple pairs of shoes on the ground, and a stack of clothing that is waiting to be put away. My carpet catches a lot of black dog fur and white cat fur, and I definitely procrastinate on vacuuming. But it would probably take twenty minutes to straighten up all these areas, and I know that my environment would feel more peaceful if I did. This would be an act of self-care because it would bring some calm to my life.

And another thing I should do is learn to say no. I love my job, and I work hard at it, and I often pick up extra hours when I am needed or switch my time from day to night shift, and I love being able to do that. I love that my coworkers know that they can count on me to be as flexible as I am able to be in order to best suit the needs of our NICU. And that is not the kind of “saying no” I am talking about at all. However, there are definitely times when I overextend myself, both personally and professionally. There are times when I plan three nights out in a week after working 48 hours in that week, and I find myself wishing more than anything for a night at home on my own. There are times when the opportunity to join another committee at work comes up, and my instinct is to volunteer, until someone points out that maybe I already do enough. I am getting better at this, but there is still room to grow here. My friends and I just lead such busy and different lives that I never want to be the one who isn’t available to hang out or spend time together. And I believe so fully and strongly in the work we do in our NICU that I want to throw myself into that work and give every last bit of what I have to offer to help make our unit the best it can be. However, sometimes I need to have that same kind of regard for myself and know when to rest and when to take the time to recharge. I am working on it.

One thing I talk to my therapist about is how I have a negative self-talk loop that plays in my head when things are really stressful for me (and much of the last year and a half has been really stressful for me). Often, when emotions get to be too much, I give in to numbing behaviors (food, Candy Crush Saga, channel surfing, trying to find the end of the internet) in order not to have to feel the emotions. It is in those moments that I don’t believe that I am worth the courtesy of these self-care pursuits. After all, when you enter that shame spiral, the message you are giving yourself is, “I am not enough. I don’t deserve better. I am a screw-up. I should not expect to feel any better than I do right now.” However, showing yourself a LITTLE kindness can go a long way toward shutting up that inner mean girl. Getting the sleep you need, getting out and moving, eating fresh foods that taste good and are good for you (YAY for CSA season!), and doing things that truly help you recharge can stop that shame spiral and that negative self-talk loop in its tracks. Caring for myself can take the power away from my compulsive eating and can give me permission to allow people to see me, all of me, the good parts and the bad. I see glimmers of this happening from time to time, although there is still plenty of room for growth as well.

But for today…I slept seven hours last night. I am going to the gym. I enjoyed a healthy and satisfying breakfast. And I have some clutter to clean up so that I can restore some calm to my physical environment. I need to set some non-negotiables, and today seems like the best possible time to start.

 

Sitting on the bleachers vs. being in the arena

I was perusing the “Brene Brown” topic on Tumblr tonight and came across an interview she did in the fall of 2012 as part of the Good Life Project entitled “Vulnerability Is Not Weak.” It was about 50 minutes long, so I sat back and watched it on my laptop, sometimes paying close attention and sometimes letting my mind wander (and sometimes doing Sudoku). There was something she said, however, that made me grab a pencil and scrap of paper (an envelope, actually) so I could write it down. What she said was this: “It’s so easy to make a life and a career out of sitting in the bleachers and making fun of people and putting them down.”

Brene Brown often cites these words (pictured above) from Theodore Roosevelt in her talks: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

It’s really hard to let yourself be seen 100% by those around you. To do that, you have to present both your happy face and the one that tells the world that you are a little sad or a little lost or a little angry. Feeling a little guilt. Feeling a little shame. Feeling a lot of shame. You have to be vulnerable enough not to hide yourself in snark (I am SO GOOD at bringing the snark.) or deflection with humor or calling attention to the deficiencies in others so as to take attention away from those in you. It’s really easy to stay in the bleachers, making fun of people (always tongue in cheek, although every tongue in cheek comment does have some truth at its base), instead of going into the arena and daring greatly.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. I want to “get it.” But no matter how much I want to do this, I still stumble quite a bit when I try to be vulnerable, when I try to let people see me and be seen by me. I have some people with whom I can do this, but even when I am in the moment with them, there comes a point where it gets too hard, and that’s when I go into snark mode or turn what was my story into an anecdote. My therapist usually has to continuously redirect me back to the feelings when our conversations get too hard for me. When she asks what I am feeling, and my reply is, “I don’t know,” she has to lead me through it and drag it out of me, and it’s so hard just to let myself be seen.

However, a lifetime in the bleachers is not what I want to have. And it is only by learning to dare greatly that I can expect anything more than that. I don’t know yet what the answer to this issue is for me. I know that the events of the past several years of my life have been part of what brings me here today to this “crisis of faith,” where I find myself starting over, unsure of myself, unsure of my place in this world, and thirsting for more than the life half-lived that I had set myself up for. But creating new habits is really difficult, and really putting yourself out there sometimes seems impossible. I guess I will continue to show up as often as I can bring myself to, holding on to the glimmer of hope that I see when I look at the work I am doing, trusting that there is something out there that is better than what the past several years have been.

Over

Today, I received in the mail my final divorce decree. Unbeknownst to me until today, I have officially been divorced since Tuesday, which is when the judge issued the decree. We had a bit of a hiccup in the process last month, when the first filing was denied due to some confusion when reading a calendar on the part of the attorney, but it was refiled, and now I am no longer married. I sort of wish I had known that when I went in to see my therapist on Wednesday, as our conversation might have gone a little differently. As it is, she and I will have plenty to talk about (which is always the case, actually) when I see her again.

I don’t know if there is a way you are supposed to feel when something like this happens. I expected to feel a lot of relief, but the reality is that nothing has really changed, except for that I am not still married to someone apart from whom I have been living for almost the entire last year. I am feeling more sadness than I expected to feel because I really thought that the final divorce decree would be nothing more than a piece of paper to me, and it feels like a little more than that. This is the last step, though, in my official starting over process. Everything from here on out is just an opportunity for growth. I just have to grab on to that brass ring.

Let it be. Let it go.

I continue to write daily (sometimes more than once) on 750 Words, which means that this blog is not getting a lot of action. I just have a lot of stuff to say that I don’t want a lot of people to read, so it’s great to have an opportunity to get that stuff out of my head and into words, instead of letting it fester up there and continue to lend itself to the hum of anxiety that sometimes accompanies my days. However, I still like to check in here on occasion, in the event that anyone is reading (I know a couple of you still are!) and in case anything I have to say might be helpful to someone who is reading it.

Anyway, I met with my lovely and talented therapist today, and the title of this blog post represents two pieces of advice that she gave to me that she said she would like to tattoo on each of my wrists. The first is, “Let it be.” I think this one speaks to mindfulness…being present in the moment and letting the moment be. Sometimes, when I am talking with her, she says she can see me leave the moment and go elsewhere (usually back inside my head because she has struck a nerve or gotten too close to the truth), and instead she would like me to let it be. The second is, “Let it go.” I spend a lot of time in a place of self-deprecation. I am constantly beating myself up for something that occurred one minute, one hour, one day, one week, one month, one year, or one lifetime ago. I can conjure up feelings of shame concerning any of a variety of things that have happened in the past that should really just remain in the past. But it’s so hard to leave them there when they are knocking on the door to my mind, just waiting for me to let them in and let them allow me to feel badly about myself. So let it go. What happened in the past does not matter as much as what is happening right now.

I read this quote, I think on Tumblr, attributed to Lao Tzu: “If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.” I have thought on this quote pretty often (and may have even mentioned it here before) because I think it speaks perfectly to my state of mind. I am often living in the past or future instead of in the present. As a result, I am not usually feeling what I would describe as peace. 

So I will try to let it be. And I will try to let it go. 

Thoughts

I haven’t been blogging here lately because of the privacy issue I talked about in a previous post. A lot of my writing has been very “brain dump” oriented and sort of repetitive in nature, and for that I have been relying on 750 Words to give me a private, unfiltered place to store my thoughts. I like 750 Words because it isn’t going to be read by anyone else, so I don’t have to worry as much about grammar and syntax (although my Type A self does have trouble veering too far off the grammarian grid), and I also can say the same things every day for five days without having to worry that I am boring an audience. I don’t like it because there is NO opportunity for feedback, but perhaps that is what I need right now. Maybe I don’t need to be “performing” for my (albeit small) audience. Maybe I need to be writing just for me.

However, there is still this blog, and there is still some worth in sometimes getting some feedback from the general public. And there are still topics that I do feel comfortable throwing out there for the world to see. I am currently in deep introspective post-therapy mode, so I have a lot of thoughts rattling around my head, mostly regarding food, so I thought I would share.

I had my regular bi-weekly therapy session today, and I went in there agenda-less. I used to arrive in my therapist’s office with a rough idea of some things we could talk about, which probably was not the best plan ever. After all, part of the worth of spending time with a professional is letting her help you guide the conversation in a way that will be beneficial to you. When I showed up with my journals and my collages and my books that I was reading, I was kind of artificially dictating where our conversation would go. In hindsight, I recognize this. At the time, I was so OH-MY-GOD-WHAT-ARE-WE-GOING-TO-TALK-ABOUT? that I didn’t really see what was going on. She mentioned to me about a month ago that she thought some of this was going on, so last time, I went in with nothing with me, and we had one of the best, most honest conversations that we had yet had. Today, I went with the same plan, and it was another good (exhausting) time.

Today, we talked about my behavior patterns with my disordered eating. And I have touched on this here, but I was given an opportunity today to really sit with my thoughts and talk them through and share them, and it was interesting what came out. Let’s talk about the anatomy of a binge. When I sit down to eat, I choose food initially based on what I think will taste good. However, in veering toward mindlessness in my eating (whether I am starting to eat when I am STARVING or eating while reading or in front of the TV or in the car or any other place that means that I am thinking about something other than the food I am eating), the first several bites taste good, and then I head into mindlessness. As I continue eating, I often tell myself that I “deserve” to eat this food. After all, I work hard, I had a stressful day, I worked out, it’s a holiday, it’s my birthday, someone was mean to me, I am tired, and the food is going to make me feel better. As I continue to eat, I hit the place where I tell myself I don’t deserve to stop eating. All I am worth is this opportunity to feel bad about myself. I deserve only to punish myself with food.

There are some things I can do to try to prevent this behavior even from starting. One thing that my therapist suggested was not letting myself get to the point that I am ravenous. Part of calorie-counting for me has always been eating big meals but less frequently. I was more interested in using a lot of calories at one time so I could still feel like I was treating myself. But she does have a point when she says that not allowing myself to get to the point of being starved will allow me to enter each eating experience from a more controlled place. I am not sure how this will work in the NICU, as there isn’t a ton of opportunity to take frequent breaks, but I could certainly have some go-to foods that were super portable that could be there for me to eat every couple of hours. Maybe more frequent, lower volume meals can keep me in a more mindful place. Another thing I can do, which I have been dipping into over the past week, is making sure that I am not otherwise occupied while eating. Living alone, it is SO tempting to sit in front of the TV and zone out while eating my dinner. But I do have a dining room table. I could sit down at it and focus on my food while eating it. I tried that a couple of times over the past week, and it was useful because I paid attention to what I was eating, how it tasted, and how it made me feel. I still inhaled my food like there was a time limit, and I still was a card-carrying member of the clean plate club, but it did feel less mindless than dinner with the gang on Seinfeld usually feels.

As she said (in a very tongue-in-cheek way), my therapist has not ever led me wrong. She has been with me through some really difficult days, and she has consistently supported me while giving me solid advice. AND she laughs at my jokes, which is important to me! So this is the next step in my journey. I never saw the small, frequent meals plan as a necessity for me. However, the large, infrequent meals plan hasn’t worked for me so far, so maybe it’s time for a new approach. Small, infrequent meals while not distracted or engaged in mindless behavior. I can add that to my “I will try anything” approach to kick ED to the curb.

An advertiser’s dream…

I have said on more than one occasion that I am an advertiser’s dream. I am always looking for the greatest new thing to try in a variety of areas of my life. Someone mentions a new lipgloss? Off to Target I go. I read that a steam cleaner will make cleaning my floors a breeze? I am off to buy one (I actually bought a hand-me-down from a friend in that instance.). New flavor of chips? Let me try it. When BB creams came on the scene last year? I tried every option I could find in the drug store (before ultimately sticking with Garnier, which was the first brand I tried). And now I am trying REALLY HARD not to spend time even investigating these new CC creams I keep hearing about. Instead, I am going to try just to stick with what works.

Anyway, this is something that can also be applied to my weight loss attempts. I have tried a lot of different diets. And none of them worked in the long term for me because they didn’t address the root of why I was eating. So now I am trying to address the root of why I eat, and it is a lot harder and a lot longer of a road than I ever would have expected it to be. It’s not a checklist of things I can do to make things “better.” It’s not a book that I can read that tells me how to “fix” things. Instead, it’s a lot of inside-my-head work, and it’s not at all linear, which means for me it is not at all easy. I like things tied up in a tidy little package. I like cause and effect. I like facts. I am not usually very comfortable in the feeling place.

The internet can, for me, be a dangerous place. If you Google “emotional eating,” you find a lot of great information, but you also find a variety of “programs” advertised that promise to help you make peace with your food or help you learn to listen to your feelings or teach you how to honor your physical hunger and use it to plan your eating. And the advertiser’s dream in me wants to sign up for every single one of them because what I am really looking for is someone who can give me a list of things that I can do that will have as an end result a healthy relationship between me and my food.

However, there is a little, surprisingly rational, voice inside me that tells me that the only way to address the root of why I eat the way I do is to wade through the shame and fear that bring me to a point where I feel like I have to numb myself (By the way, I also numb myself with other things…the internet, mindless TV watching, and online shopping are some other things that come to mind). The good news is that I have a wonderful therapist who can help me do just that. The bad news is that to do that, I have to take an enormous mental leap. But I feel like everyday, I am getting closer to taking that leap.

“Replacement” Foods

I was perusing Pinterest this morning, and I noticed how many pins I saw on there that were promising to be great substitutes for _____________. You probably know what I am talking about. Make your own soft serve ice cream from frozen bananas! Tastes just like the real thing! Make gummy bears out of bananas! A healthy fruit snack for toddlers! (I feel like we are putting a lot of pressure on bananas, BTW.) Cauliflower “popcorn!” Just as good as real popcorn! Spicy Buffalo cauliflower! Who needs chicken wings? (Looks like we are putting a lot of pressure on cauliflower, as well.) More than 100 alternative pancake recipes, many without any type of flour in them at all…to take the place of the real thing.

For people who have messed up relationships with food, such recipes are kind of like the Holy Grail. If I freeze a banana, whip it up in my food processor, and add a little cocoa powder to it, I will never miss ice cream again. If I make some Buffalo cauliflower, I can fool my mouth into thinking that we are having wing night at home. Clearly, this is the answer to my problem. I will never overeat again!

This, of course, is not true. Despite spending a major chunk of the last twenty years dieting, I remain, well, kind of a major chunk. (badum-ching) And I have tried a ton of foods that were supposed to taste as good as the real thing. Sugar free candies. Baked potato chips. Diet soda (to be fair to diet soda, I do enjoy it, but I like regular soda more). Crackers made out of lentils. Meat substitutes. Gluten free breads. Kale chips (NOT A FAN!!!). Mashed caulfilower. Every artificial sweetener that I have been able to find in the aisles of my local Wegmans.

I would like there to be more honesty surrounding these pins. Something like this: If you take a banana and whip it up in your food processor and add some cocoa, you get a frozen dessert that tastes pretty good, in and of itself. It’s not ice cream, but it’s a nice treat on a hot day. Or this: If you cook up these protein pancakes, they are not going to taste like the flapjacks you can get at IHOP. However, they will keep you going throughout the morning, and you can add different spices to change their flavor a bit.

We all seem to be looking for all the enjoyment without any of the guilt. However, that just leads to a life where you think you can’t eat ice cream! It allows you to see occasional treats as “bad” and perpetuates the idea that those of us who eat something that is “bad” for us are deserving of punishment. And it continues the disordered eating patterns that I can see winding through my days. Instead of giving in to the promise of JUST LIKE THE REAL THING, however, I am going to focus on having the real thing, when I want it, just until I am content, so that I am not left dissatisfied by my attempt to fool myself into thinking I just ate ice cream or a cookie or a gummy bear.

Help Yourself

A couple of months ago, I mentioned to my therapist that I thought I might be reading too many self-help books. This was right after I had finished reading the complete works of Geneen Roth, and I had moved on to a book called Big Fat Lies Women Tell Themselves. I was pretty engaged in spending time in deep-introspective-post-therapy-mode, and I was spending a lot of time in my head. I wanted her reply to be one of the two following things:

1. “There is no such thing as too many self-help books.”
2. “Of course you are. You need to stop.”

Her reply, of course was neither of those, and instead she asked, “Why do you think that?” I was stumped. I have always kind of been a fan of books that can be found on the self-help shelf of the bookstore. I had a long SARK phase, and I was always a big fan of the book 14,000 Things to Be Happy About. But I was worried that either I was getting a little obsessive with the topic or that I was taking therapy a little too seriously (This is faulty logic, of course. Therapy is serious.). Since her reply was ambivalent, I decided to pull back and do more reading for fun.

However, throughout the past month or so, I have been getting back into that section of the bookstore and spending time among these types of topics. The first book I read from those shelves was Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted, which is a memoir of her battle with anorexia and bulimia, another recommendation from my therapist. I have neither anorexia nor bulimia, but I do have some significant disordered eating patterns, and the book was a powerful read. The author is coming to speak in May at my nursing school, following an alumnae reception, and I am planning to go see her speak. Her honesty in Wasted was at times painful to read, but the book left a real impression on me. Although I could not identify with the behaviors she was engaged in during her battle, I could certainly identify with some of the feelings behind those behaviors.

The second book was by an author I mentioned recently, Brené Brown. I read this week her book The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You Are Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. This is kind of a scary book for me. It talks a lot about living an authentic, wholehearted life, which sounds like a great life to lead. However, when I imagine incorporating her guideposts into my life, I run up against a case of the “I can’t”s. I can’t let people see 100% of who I truly am. I can’t give up on my desire to fit in with the crowd. I can’t imagine letting down my guard that much. But it’s more fodder for my time in my therapist’s comfy chair!

In preparation for Marya Hornbacher’s event, I picked up today Madness: A Bipolar Life, and I also grabbed my next Brené Brown book, I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough.” Ah, yes, “I am enough.” In this society, a lot of us go around feeling like we are not enough. Not skinny enough. Not successful enough. Not wealthy enough. Not giving enough. Not rested enough. I am probably most excited about this second book because I am only partway through the introduction, and I am already having some moments of “ah-ha.” In my usual style of fully immersing myself in whatever I currently find interesting, I am also reading up on Brené’s blog and watching the episodes she was in on OWN’s Super Soul Sundays. As an aside, this is the same trait that had me reading all seven Harry Potter books in two weeks’ time and made me an expert on Lizzie Borden sometime during my middle school career.

Here’s the thing about blogging about this stuff. I struggle about getting too personal and getting too excited and saying something that someone reading this doesn’t want to hear. It could be a friend or a family member or a former family member or a coworker or an imaginary internet friend or a stranger. It’s really hard to honor your own journey while being respectful of the people in your life, I think. I don’t ever want someone to think that I am pointing fingers and blaming anyone for what led me to a place where I have some work on myself to do. I think our past experiences combine with what makes us who we are, and that turns into our story, and sometimes something comes along that derails us a little bit and gives us an opportunity to either collapse in on ourselves or to grow. Initially, when my marriage began unraveling, I really started to collapse in on myself. I have a couple of amazing friends and a whole group of caring coworkers (We are nurses, after all. Caring is what we do.) who were not willing to let me do that. And now I find myself with this opportunity to grow. And I want to share it…I just don’t know how much of it I am willing to.

 

Mindlessness and the Goldfish cracker

I was having a conversation today with one of the moms whose baby is currently in our NICU, and I mentioned something to her about how there are those foods that I know that I don’t like but still find myself eating. I am not sure, looking back, how this came up at all in our topic of conversation because I am pretty sure that we were talking about something totally unrelated, but this is something I think about from time to time, so I thought maybe it would be a good blog topic. So here they are…foods I don’t particularly care for that I continue to eat anyway.

I should preface this with the same story I told her, which was about some of my nursing school days. On Wednesday evenings, we had lecture for about 17 hours (really, I think it was for four hours…but it seemed like a lot longer since I often was coming right from a full day of work to be there). And on my way there, I loved to stop at the grocery store to pick up some staples to help me get through the lecture with my brainpower relatively intact. There was some variety to the foods I chose, but they were almost always crunchy things that came in large enough bags that they would last for the entire lecture. The one that sticks out the most when I think back to those days is Goldfish crackers (specifically the Pizza and Parmesan flavors).

I ate a LOT of Goldfish crackers. I was in nursing school for two years, year-round, and I sat through a lot of lectures (Side note: I also gained 35 pounds in nursing school. Not a mystery how that happened.). So my Wednesday would go like this: Go to work. Spend the day working as a nurses’ aide (easily one of the hardest jobs there is). Finish work and drive to the grocery store. Buy Goldfish crackers and Cherry Coke. Drive to school. Settle in next to my nursing school BFF, Paula, with my book and notebook open, several pens on the table in front of me, and my snacks arranged around me. Steadily eat an entire bag of Goldfish crackers as I listened to my professor. Develop horrible heartburn. Pop a Pepcid on my way home.

Goldfish crackers are one of those foods that I don’t really care for very much, but I eat them anyway. I still occasionally grab a bag when I am grocery shopping. I can’t eat them slowly and savor them. The bag is opened, it must be finished, and I munch and munch until they are no more. Once the bag is empty, I usually remember that I don’t really like them. But in the moment? It’s mindlessness at its worst.

Some of the other foods that are on this list are any cracker that has an excessive amount of powdered flavorings on it (such as any Cheez-it other than the original flavor, any of those flavored Ritz chips, the new flavors of brown rice Triscuits…you get the idea), Pretzel M&Ms (and most pretzels, actually), Lays Stackers, most flavors of Pringles, most flavors of Combos, most crackers, almost all non-homemade cookies (so that would include things like Keebler cookies and Chips Ahoy!, as well as grocery store bakery cookies), the home fries in the cafeteria at work, and the list could go on and on. In the last month alone, I have eaten all of these items at least once. And every time, I ate my entire serving and then reminded myself that I didn’t like them in the first place.

This is some great ammunition for my inner mean girl. First of all, the act of eating an entire bag of Goldfish crackers in one sitting lends itself really well to some negative self-talk. Second of all, added on top of the fact that I ate the entire bag is the fact that I don’t really like the damned things in the first place. And when I am feeling at my worst about something like this that I have done, what is my response? If your guess was to open up another bag of Goldfish crackers, you would at least be getting close to the spirit of the truth.

Mindfulness would probably go a long way toward removing these unloved foods from my life. If I came at a bag of Goldfish crackers from a place of mindfulness, I would not open the bag because I would remember that I don’t like them enough for them to be worth it. And maybe I would eat something else instead.

Shame. And Brené Brown.

Yesterday, I had an appointment with my therapist after working night shift and not sleeping since the day before. I joked with one of my coworkers before I left work that this could go one of two ways…either I would fall asleep in the comfy chair in her office and say just about nothing or all filters would be off and I would ramble on for 50ish minutes about whatever crossed my mind. Neither of those things happened. Instead, we had a good conversation that joined a string of good conversations we have had in the past year or so. I am still processing most of what we talked about (I do a lot of post-therapy processing and even have named the days after my appointments my Deep Introspective Post-Therapy Days), and I don’t usually bring that process to such a public forum as my blog (even if my readership is relatively low, Google means that anyone could find at any time), but at the very end of our session, she mentioned to me the name of someone whose work she thought I should look into. And that person is Brené Brown. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work. For the past ten years, she has been studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. She is the author of three books, and she also spoke twice at TED events, after which her speeches went “viral” on the internet and were viewed by millions (Her website is www.brenebrown.com, and there you can find information on her books, links to both talks, and her blog). My therapist suggested I watch what she had to say about shame, and I did so this morning. And I look forward to seeing her other speech and reading her books and listening to what she has to say.

When you have disordered eating patterns, shame is often at the forefront of your thoughts. After having a bad day and eating a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, the internal dialogue you find yourself with is never, “Wow, I just did a really good job of taking care of myself after a really hard day.” Instead, your thoughts are consumed with thoughts like this: “I am so stupid. I can’t believe I ate that ice cream. I am so worthless. I should just keep eating. I am never going to be thin. I am never going to be happy. I am never going to feel any better than I do right now, and I don’t deserve to anyway.” And the part of you that leads you to the ice cream freezer in the first place is born of shame. Many people, both women and men, have it in their mind that they are not worthy of good things and that there is something wrong with them which means that they have to live a very small life. I have spent some time on Tumblr this past year, basically looking for and reblogging inspirational messages to keep me going as I struggle to find my new normal and learn to embrace the opportunity that I have been given to change what my story is going to be. And Tumblr is full of blogs written by people (mostly teenage and young adult girls, I believe, at least among those blogs that I am following) who are in the throes of eating disorders and self-harm and suicidal ideation, and they are trying to remind themselves and their followers that it is okay not to be okay and that they are more than the number on a scale and that suicide is not the answer and that they are enough, just as they are, right in this moment.

Disordered eating is a kind of armor. It keeps your shame on the inside. It does not allow you to be vulnerable. When need or feelings threaten to bubble up to the surface, you react by pushing them back down with whatever behavior it is you engage in. For me, that is eating. For someone else, that might be restricting. For someone else, that might be cutting or bingeing and purging or extreme exercise or any of a bunch of other behaviors that don’t get to the root of the problem but lead us to think that we are “dealing with it.” It would be so nice to be able to do more than just deal with it. I don’t have any answers, but I do have some books I am looking forward to reading and more work that I am looking forward to doing in that comfy chair in my therapist’s office. I have to keep thinking that there will be a day when ice cream will not equal a binge to me, and I really will feel like more than just the number I see on the scale.