Can I Be Fat and Happy?

Thursday, May 23rd, 2013

fat and happyMy relationship with my body is complicated.

I’ve spent most of my life hating it. I’ve hated the outside of it for being too big and too round, and I’ve hated the inside of it for being too damn fragile. I’ve hated that it needs to be pampered to function well, and I’m envious of people who seem to run through life with little thought to how their bodies look or feel.

In 2010 I completed a 12-week “Body for Life” program, and I was happy with my results.

In 2011 I lived in an RV and ate my way around the country.

In 2012 I decided I was sick of not being able to keep up with family on bike rides, and I declared it the year of better health. Then I decided that I was sick of thinking so damn much about my body and I was just done. I was done thinking about it, fighting with it, sacrificing for it, and obsessing over it. I was checking out of the game completely.

It’s now 2013, and I am perhaps the fattest and most out of shape I have ever been.

And I want very much for that not to matter.

I love who I am. I love my courage, my good intentions, my curiosity, my creativity. I love my curly hair and my ginormous smile.

I want that to be enough.

But I do not love being afraid of my body. I don’t love knowing that there are things I can’t do, bike rides I can’t take, and things I cannot wear. I don’t like knowing all the things I’m too afraid to try because I know my body will fail.

I feel like I’m not supposed to say I want to lose weight. I’m supposed to accept and love myself exactly how I am.

But then again, I think about all the changes I make on the inside without guilt. I make them because I love and accept who I am. I practice gratitude. I work to be more patient. I strive to apologize more often and argue less. And none of that is a sign of self loathing.

I hate that this is so complicated.

I hate that the way my body looks and functions has become so inextricably linked to things like self worth and self esteem that I feel like I’m cheating on happiness by admitting that I’m unhappy with my weight.

And I hate the idea of hopping on the rollercoaster again. Part of me is afraid because I have succeeded and then quit so many times before. I’m not afraid of failure as much as I’m afraid of succeeding and quitting again. I’m afraid of being a joke. I’m afraid that Jared will appreciate my success, and I’ll know then that he’s disappointed in me right now.

But mostly I’m afraid of admitting that there’s something about me that I don’t like right now. I feel like I’m breaking the code, the one that says happiness comes from acceptance and self love.

I do love me.

I just don’t love how much I weight right now.

South Dakota: What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know

Tuesday, May 21st, 2013

Last week, Emma and I went to South Dakota as guests of the tourism board, and I found out just how much I’d neglected my own backyard for the first 27 years of my life.

Despite having grown up in Iowa, which borders South Dakota, I’d never visited. I also had no interest in changing that, and had even leveraged against taking a detour to see Mount Rushmore during our Great American Road Trip. I was pretty sure I knew what South Dakota had to offer.

Namely, this:

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(which I could see plenty of in Iowa)

And this:

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(which, meh, so there’s some dried up lands or something.)

I was wholly unaware of this:

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As it turns out, the Badlands are perhaps the most poorly named landmark in all the world. The WTFLands would be more apt, because that’s exactly the reaction one has when one suddenly sees a moonscape explode onto the prairie.

IMG_8773The Badlands 7

This is the sort of place that fuels conspiracy theories about UFOs and aliens making Earth landings. It makes no sense, and its ridiculousness is as beautiful as it is bewildering.

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And I grew up just eight hours away.

I also, as it turns out, grew up about 10 hours from the Black Hills National Forest, a sprawling collection of hills and pines. It is here where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play.

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(The buffalo also nurse.)

As Emma and I were shuttled around the state, we constantly wished for more time. More time to pan for gold, more time to hike among the spires, more time to walk through the woods and whisper to the wildlife.

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But now that extra time will require another plane trip, another vacation that is saved and planned for. Now we live another day away, and it’s driving me nuts to know what I didn’t take advantage of then.

And isn’t that how it goes? We all have treasures in our own backyards, places other people board planes to visit, and so often we take them for granted. It’s so easy to ignore the simple pleasures.

How far are you from South Dakota? Do you visit the national and state parks within driving distance of you?

Emma and I were guests of the South Dakota tourism board. They paid for our flights, lodging, attraction admittance, and food. If you’re planning a trip to South Dakota in the future, I highly recommend getting in touch with them for help planning your itinerary.

You can see more of my photos of South Dakota here.

How Combing Your Hair is Like Working Through Old Hurts

Thursday, May 16th, 2013

This analogy will make the most sense to you if you have long, thick and/or curly hair that gets tangled. If you have short, thin and/or straight hair that never gets tangled, you might want to read this post instead.

I was sick last week, and so I spent three days in bed. During those three days, I didn’t wash or comb my hair, but instead rubbed my curly head back and forth on my pillow a lot. I got out of bed on the fourth day and was excited to finally feel well enough to shower – until I touched my hair.

The term rat’s nest does not do justice to what had developed on the back of my head. It was more like a dreadlock, a matted ball where thousands of hairs had felted into a single, unbreakable entity.

I knew this was going to hurt.

I washed my hair in the shower, and then scooped a glob of coconut oil out of the glass jar. I flipped my head upside down and massaged the oil into the knot before finally starting to attack it with a pick.

Except I didn’t attack it. You can’t attack a mass of hair like that without tearing chunks out of your scalp and breaking into tears. Well, maybe you can, but I can’t. I have a soft head and a low threshold for pain.

So what I really did was gingerly try to comb my hair. I tried to go right at the heart of the mess, but when the pain got to be too much, I instinctively moved the pick further from the center – out to where the pain was bearable.

I continued like this for some time: slowly working my way through the smaller knots, retreating to the pain-free sections, and then trying to see how much closer I could get to the real problem. Eventually there were no small knots to untangle, and somehow it seemed the big knot was gone as well.

This, I thought to myself, is exactly what it’s like to work through emotional pain.

(Really. These are the kinds of thoughts I have when I’m standing with my head between my knees in my bathroom. This is how my brain works.)

Sometimes we try to be brave, or we try to just get it over with, and we go at the heart of the issue. Maybe we hire a therapist or buy a whole stack of books about our problem, because we think we’ll just deal with it already.

But the really hard stuff usually scares us off at first. We back away, because we have to. We take a step away from the most painful parts. Instead, if we’re able to, we sit with the little pains for as long as we can. And then we say, “OK, that’s far enough for today, let’s talk about something else.”

And we keep going like that for a while: slowly working our way through the smaller pains, retreating to the pain-free topics, and then going back later to see how much closer we can get to the real problem. And then, if we’re lucky, we look back and see that we’ve untangled a whole lot of small knots.

untangledOur pain tolerance seems to have improved.

The big knot seems more like a small knot, now.

If we’re lucky.

Or maybe that’s just me. That’s how I’ve worked through the big pain. That’s why it took me years to talk about things like being raped, or having an abusive stepfather, or my little brother being arrested.

I think this is probably normal. Instinctive, even.

I think going back to try again is how you eventually break up the biggest hurts.

And I think all of us have our limits for how much pain and fear we can handle at once.

But I think, too, that complete healing is possible. Eventually.

4 Reasons Happiness Takes Guts

Tuesday, May 14th, 2013

the guts to be happy“When I die, I hope they say: she had the guts to be happy.”

That’s my twitter bio. I wrote it on a whim one random day, but it is a pretty accurate paraphrasing of my much longer mission statement. And most of all, it spells out one of the things I’ve found to be most true and least discussed about happiness: it takes guts.

Courage. Bravery. Whatever you call it, I believe that the kind of happiness that both stirs and roots your soul requires doing tough stuff. Here’s why:

Happiness calls for vulnerability.

Happiness is all about connection, and connections are deeper when we let someone see and love all of us. But doing that demands vulnerability. It demands showing our weak spots. There’s simply no way around it: you can’t be accepted completely if you don’t reveal yourself completely. And that can be scary as hell.

Happiness asks for acceptance.

Buddhists, zen masters, and playwrights remind us that the way to be happy despite dark days is to learn to accept them. Life is not perfect, and happiness isn’t about pretending otherwise. But acceptance lets us at least keep breathing through it, lets us acknowledge what is instead of constantly fighting against what we wish it was. The hard part of acceptance is having to sit still in the dark, to let the pain come and wash over you if it needs to. Acceptance sounds like a serene and peaceful state, but it is a courageous act in practice.

Happiness comes from knowing yourself.

Knowing yourself is awesome. Getting to know yourself can be much less awesome – especially if you’re afraid of what you might learn. Just like showing all of yourself to someone can be scary, revealing who you are to yourself can be just as frightening. Plus, you have to dig up all the fears and insecurities, all the things your brain actively works to keep hidden. But doing that brave work lets you see and accept all of you. It’s worth it.

Happiness demands change.

There’s no avoiding it. Our brains crave change and life insists on giving it to us. We cannot be happy without it, and yet we are also hardwired to fear it. Facing that change, embracing it and finding the joy in it, that requires a whole heap of guts.

Remember this when happiness feels hard.

Remember this when you’re faced with something that scares you. Remember that the doorway to happiness is shrouded in fear, and that all you need is the guts to walk through it.

And remember that you are brave.

I’m not just saying that. I believe that because you are here. You are looking, reading, thinking about how to be happier tomorrow than you are today, or happier tonight than you were this morning. Not everyone does that. Not everyone has the courage to go looking. But you do. So I mean it when I say this to you:

I know that you have the courage to be happier.

And it’s a good thing, because you’re going to need it.

Actually, You Do NOT Have to Love Yourself to Be Loved By Others

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

Conventional wisdom – or at least wisdom from most of the Facebook graphics I see – says that you have to love yourself before anyone else can love you. As a proponent of self love, self esteem, self have-faith-in-yourself and all that other selfish stuff¸ I’m inclined to agree with that motto. But in practice, I have to admit that being loved helped me learn how to love myself.

I had a brief twitter chat about this recently with motivational speaker and author Tiphani Montgomery (further proof that Twitter is bizarro amazing).

love yourself tweet

When I saw Tiphani’s initial tweet, I thought back to a time when I hated myself. Not only did I not like who I was, but I was convinced that no one else would, should, or could love me. I was certain that my actions had made me unlovable.

I’d like to tell you that I clawed my way out of that dark hole of shame by realizing that I had an internal value that couldn’t be tainted by temporary actions. But that’s not at all what happened.

Four women loved me when I couldn’t love myself.

These four women, women who are more like sisters than girlfriends, knew all of my mistakes, and they loved me still. They didn’t love me in spite of myself; they loved all of me. They showed me compassion and empathy, and they wrapped their arms around me when I was convinced that no one should.

I was lucky, because these four women were – are – some of the most honorable, wonderful, admirable people I know. They are people I want to be more like, so it meant a lot to me to have them love me. It suggested to me that I was worth it.

It helped me believe my husband when he also said he still loved me.

And that helped me believe other friends, other noble women and men, when they told me they loved me.

Being Loved Is Just the First Step

I watched Muriel’s Wedding this weekend for the first time. It’s the story of a woman who isn’t loved very much by anyone and who doesn’t love herself much either. And then, of course, she reinvents herself.

At one point, Muriel is sitting in the dark with a new friend, and she’s talking about how hard it is to be nothing. Her new friend says, “You’re not nothing Muriel! You’re amazing!” And she says it with such conviction that you just know this is going to be a turning point in the movie.

I immediately whipped out my iPhone and made a note of this quote, thinking it would be perfect to include in a post about how friends can love us until we love ourselves.

And then, Muriel doesn’t really change on the inside. She gets a haircut, loses some weight, and moves away from her horribly abusive family. But she is still very broken on the inside and very desperate for validation from the outside world.

This is totally ruining my post, I thought.

But the movie, ironically, was more accurate than the post I’d planned or the pithy mantras we hand out to each other on the Internet.

My friends loved me, and that provided me with social proof that I was worthy of love and forgiveness. But I also spent a crap ton of time in therapy, and that was the work only I could do to figure out what I was worth.

The reality is that you can be loved even if you don’t love yourself.

Being loved can be like training wheels for loving yourself.

But what the Facebook graphics should really say is that the love of others isn’t a substitute for loving yourself. Loving yourself is another step forward, one that you have to take alone, when you’re ready.

However, I will always, always be grateful for the people who loved me before I loved myself. They showed me it was possible.