Happy New Year, everyone!
I started feeling really good about this year as it was coming–even though my eating disorder was acting up for a couple of weeks consecutively. I have felt like my recovery has been stalling, though I feel more spiritually connected than ever before.
On January 1, I did an overhaul cleaning of my entire space, recharged my crystals in the full moon, and set new intentions and goals for the year. The really cool thing is, this year is the year of the dog in the Chinese Lunar calendar, which matches the calendar animal for the year I was born!
I’m not calling it a resolution, but more an intention; to be more spiritual, more clean (as far as my physical space goes), and more present. So far, so good! This will be the year I finish my Master’s degree, continue my journey of loving myself and learning more and more about me and the world around me and developing friendships and relationships full of unconditional love–for the first time in my life.
I randomly selected (from a quote jar) three quotes to remember this year:
“Don’t take your experiences for granted.”
I hung up my body positive vision board, and my “totem” for the year to come. I worked on this the day after Christmas with my friend-mom Stacy, who just let me talk and create for a few hours in her garage space while I played with her dog. I am so lucky and so grateful to have so many people who support me in my healing, and will go to any lengths to give me the room and the flexibility and the encouragement to keep growing.
It is really easy to get caught up in goals and intentions and resolutions when this time of year comes around. Just like it’s really easy to put everything from “buy groceries” to “remember to breathe” on a to-do list and inundate yourself with tasks and mantras until it becomes overwhelming. So I decided to simplify my 2018 by narrowing it down to one word that I want to be ever-mindful of this year:
Freedom.
As a writer and an avid reader and a person who constantly needs knowledge in order to feel connected to herself and the world, I have a million words to choose from that resonate with me and how I’d like to feel. But based on what I know about how much anger still consumed me in 2017 over my last major breakup, about how much food rules and diet culture still take up space in my life, and how much my family’s opinions about food and body weigh me down (no pun intended), I have chosen that I want to be free from anything that isn’t loving, helpful or kind.
What is there to be free from? I thought a lot about this.
Freedom from negativity. At the close of 2017, I think I unfriended about 40 people on Facebook. I decided who I want to take with me on this journey, and that Facebook friendships are not permanent. But the people who I need in my life are the ones who support me, love me, reach out to me, encourage me and hear/see me, with as much care as I support, love, reach out to, encourage and hear/see them. Being seen and heard, I have learned, is not the same as looking at or listening to someone. Paying attention to their feelings, emotions, thoughts, language, and vibrations is all a part of being with them, and this year, I’m taking those high-vibration friendships with me because they make me better.
Freedom to move and eat as I choose. I still get the urge sometimes to exercise out of obligation, but for this year, I am promising myself that there will be! none! of! that! and that no food is off limits. It’s still difficult to shut down my binge brain all the time, but the more I fill myself with meaning the quieter that voice becomes. One thing that helps me to remember is that I am not in a position in which I am going to starve if I go a few hours without a meal, and I don’t have to eat like there is scarcity due to this privilege.
Freedom from shame. I keep developing my theories on shame based on conversations I’ve had with peers and professionals in the past year. I am no longer accepting the invitation from others to buy into the false belief that I’m not okay how I am. The Twelve Steps teach us that we are powerless over the thing we choose to use in order to make our lives seem “manageable,” but this often runs contrary to the belief I have that I was perfect until someone pointed out to me when I was a really small kid (age 7) that I was not. I want to be with that little version of me and tell her, “you are an entire universe.”
Freedom from expectations. There are people in my life who expect me to lose weight, to miraculously wake up not preferring women, to stop going to therapy and stop experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression. There are people who expect me to say ‘yes’ when they need me to, there are expectations I have of myself that involve unrealistic ideas of beauty. There are expectations in my life that involve working a million hours at the expense of my mental health. There are expectations I have about my clothes, my hair, my makeup, my job, those around me; and I really want to live without expectations from others, or of others; because we are all just on a journey to be better, and we can’t do it if we are holding each other hostage with our own biases and privileging our needs.
Freedom from my trauma. Okay. Big one. I promised myself no relationship until I was all the way through or mostly through processing my trauma. I still have a lot of stuff related to body, worthiness, self-esteem. I still engage in automatic, habitual and unintentional negative self-talk. I still have voices inside my head that aren’t mine, about what I should do with my body or who I should be or whether or not I’m good enough. I want to heal my scars.
Freedom from perfectionism. All this talk about freedom also makes me understand that I will never be entirely 110% symptom free. I will never be able to be free from these things perfectly. I will never have a perfect body because there is no such thing. I will never have a perfect day, or a perfect way of articulating things without stumbling. As close as I can get to perfect is making sure that my life is manageable and that shame, trauma, expectation and negativity aren’t driving.
Royally Incomplete 