I Will Spend the Rest of My Life Learning This One Thing

And it isn't how to floss correctly — though lord knows I'm still working on that.

WOW! But time rolls on without our permission. Didn’t mean not to post for … seven months (!!), but that’s what happened. I have many partially written drafts, and I started writing the post that follows in January, and it’s still speaking to me (even though I stopped speaking to it). So I dusted it off and finished its thoughts.

The struggle it defines is not reserved for the new year, after all. Each of us has our puzzles to solve in our lifetimes, and usually it takes a lifetime to solve them. So here we go:

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January 2023

So new year, yeah? A chance to do a quick assessment: what worked in 2022, what didn’t, an easy backward glance, nothing too serious. I am, after all, recovering, still, from being one of the well-intentioned stalwart enforcers of the “New Year, New You” industrial complex. (Fortunately for me, at Redbook, at least, I got to dial it down a bit to be in the realm of reality, like, you know, maybe rearrange your home office or something, rather than reinvent yourself. Who has the time?)

So for me, 2023 needs to be about getting back to my healthy habits. When I moved into my new home with my new family, a lot of those went right out the window. There was (and still is) a lot of constructive work that needed to be done around family meal time: vegetables, trying new proteins, sitting around the table and eating together. Which means in the last 18 months I ate a lot of fish sticks and steak and breaded chicken sandwiches, with french fries, rice and potatoes. These are foods I simply have never really eaten, even when my son was young and a picky eater. But it felt vitally important to create a unified routine, a shared front of This is How We Eat. (And there were only tears two or three times — not once from me!)

But I can’t blame the dinners alone. What really got me was ALL. THE. SNACKS. I live with 4 very skinny people now, who eat snacks all the time. My partner still weighs what he did in high school despite a diet in which Utz sourdough pretzels and homemade chocolate chip cookies feature prominently. But truly, their eating habits have nothing to do with mine — though I’d love to blame someone other than myself — and I just jumped in and ate snacks right along with them.

The result 18 months later was my dreading a doctor’s appointment where I would have to face the truth. Not just the number on the scale, but the other things that can ride along with too many snacks and too much weight: high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood-pressure, and low marks for self-care.

Fine. I’ve been to this rodeo before. So I made a plan, and the key part of the plan was cutting myself free from How Other People Eat so that I can make all the fish and whole grains and beans and salads and vegetables and international cuisines and vegetable smoothies that I want and they can have fish sticks and yellow rice. (Mmm, yellow rice.) I also decided that it was time to give up alcohol, because I love it too much and don’t know moderation. And also sugar, refined carbs, red meat, cured meats (bye-bye bacon!). And I added a daily “commute” to my workday, throwing on my coat for a 20-minute walk to work (my desk) and a 20-minute walk home (back to my house, where my desk is) as a neat mental spoof to get me up and moving.

BUT this is not what I needed to re-learn. I completely one-hundred percent know how to eat and how to take care of my body. I mean, I was a magazine editor, right? That is what we published Every.Single.Month — partly because it is so hard to do in our busy, very American lives.

So, What Is It I Still Haven’t Truly Learned?

As part of preparing to build the scaffolding that supports a new set of habits, I will sometimes spend a few mornings just writing out my thoughts about it all. What do I fear? What am I looking forward to? What are the specific tactics? Lists and bullet points often feel reassuring, as do tiny squares that will someday soon hold checkmarks. Mini-missions accomplished!

And in the course of those writings, I wrote out a thought that startled me. I believed I had moved past this barrier, but no.

The thought?

I am worthy of love and peace. I do not need to EARN IT.

Wow. Just wow. That is still lurking in there? That I have to earn peace? That I have to work hard to be worthy of love? I had to face, again, that disconnecting from myself — which is how I can gain so much weight, because I’m hiding inside myself in a way I do not even really notice — is how I express being uncertain that I deserve love and peace solely because I exist?

This floored me.

I was in therapy for many, many years. And I stopped therapy because I became clear that I could parent myself: that I could recognize when I was spiraling or engaging in fruitless (and slightly self-destructive, or at least self-frustrating) habits, and slowly pick apart the threads to find the Thing and just deal with that. I could take a walk or meditate or write down negative thoughts or accept my vulnerability and chalk certain feelings in life up to just being the price of living.

By and large, I am more settled and more secure emotionally now than I have ever been. And it feels amazing. I’m proud of the years of work, I’m proud of embracing the messiness and learning to accept all that is part of me as well. (For many years I thought the best strategy was to carve it out and throw it onto a bonfire. I remember so vividly saying to my therapist “I want to kill that little girl who won’t stop hurting.” And my therapist replied, “You have to love her, and accept that she is you.” I sobbed for a good handful of minutes as that really landed and sank in for the first time. I’m sure she’d probably said it a dozen times prior.)

The point is WOW, but do some of us have a time reassembling ourselves into a solid working order, or what?

I think — actually I know — part of the reason I write so openly about psychic pain and how deeply it roots itself in you is to show everyone, including myself, that this pain does not mean we aren’t high-functioning human beings. I desperately want to normalize the reality of how long it takes to unwrap one’s mind from the coping devices we use to survive difficult times.

I remember my older brother saying to me once, “I can’t believe you’re still struggling with them.” — my parents and their failures — “They have been gone a long time.” But, no, Gregg, no!! I nearly shouted. It’s not THIS part of my brain that struggles, I said, tapping my forehead, indicating the part of my brain that lives my daily life and with whom I am in constant conversation. It’s INSIDE, it’s the operating system itself. Somewhere in there I carry the damage but I have hidden it away. And it raises its head and pulls me underwater out of the blue when I have considered that wound long-healed.

And so there it was, raising its head, in the words “I do not need to earn it” that I scribbled down absent-mindedly, coughing up the latent uncertainty that lurks within, when I was contemplating the price of taking care of myself. (Even that phrase, that came out so easily: “the price of taking care of myself.” What price? Why on earth would there be a price? But for me as a child my eyes were always on my parents, always watching for the next crisis, always centered on them; the only way I knew to try to stay safe was to subjugate myself to their needs, while building this marvelous grandiose achiever personality. It was a pretty good trick, but the TRICK had the price.)

Taking care of myself doesn’t have a price.

This I will keep learning for the rest of my life. That I am safe and whole, and always have been. That I can love myself with gentleness and care instead of through restriction and setting impossible goals. That I do not need to do a thing to earn love and peace other than to be connected to myself and to listen to my intuition and to be present for the feedback my mind and body will share with me if I am present enough to receive it.

That is the life I have been living these past years, hard-won to get here. And I may have to keep learning that one thing forever more — but I am no longer afraid of it. I do not need to kill that little voice or that little girl. I need only to love her, lace up her sneakers, and take her outside for a long walk in this wide-open world and breathe.