Author: jenion

You can’t make me…

Have you ever told someone something like, “You’re the reason I’m happy!”?  I said this to a friend a couple of weeks ago, and his reply was, “No, you are happy because you choose to be happy.  That’s what I read in your blogs anyway. I just get to benefit from it!”  At first, I wanted to argue with him that we were talking about two different things — I meant happy in the at-this-very-moment way.  The happiness I talk about in this blog is much less fleeting, and exists at a deeper level than the present moment.  And, to tell the truth, I was a little miffed that he was throwing my blogged words back at me (which was my other reason for wanting to argue).

This conversation, as so often happens, has hung around at the front of my brain, popping up periodically as if to say, “You’ve missed something important here!”  Well, last night, I finally figured out why it wasn’t going away.

My friend Wendy and I have spent many a Tuesday night together, watching “The Biggest Loser”.  We enjoy seeing people take a look at their own self-delusions or defense mechanisms and begin the hard work of changing their relationships with self and others — that’s why we watch the show.  It gives us opportunities for discussion about our own problem thinking, or our own emotionally difficult issues.  This season, we had been unable to watch until last night, week 8 or 9 on the ranch for the contestants.  During the show, Bob (one of the trainers) was working with a contestant, trying to get her to feel some inner motivation to remain on the ranch. After dramatic tears and a plea from Bob, the woman said (I’m paraphrasing), “I promise I will trust you to tell me the right things to do, and I will do them. ”  Both Wendy and I groaned.  We felt that the woman had missed the point — the point being the necessity of an internal locus of control, self-motivation. Not giving both the responsibility and the power to Bob.

As I was driving home after the show, I realized there was a similarity between my own conversation and the one on television.  In both cases, one person was willing to hand over the responsibility and, yes, the power for their success or failure (or, more seriously, their emotional well-being) to another person.  That’s when the AHA! moment came:

When we abdicate responsibility, or hand it over to another, we are saying we aren’t good enough, strong enough, or skilled enough to take care of ourselves, to own our feelings, to be full partners in our relationships.

In my life, I have many kinds of relationships: family, friends, colleagues, mentors, mentees…the list is long and varied.  However, for much of my life, I lacked confidence in my own ability to be enough for others:  interesting enough, funny enough, engaging enough, lovable enough.  This led to many moments of debilitating insecurity in relationships.  I spent endless hours in agony wondering if a minor misstep or unintended slight had killed the friendship.  I was afraid to share my feelings out of fear that they were too much or out of proportion to what the other person felt.  As a result, I tended to hand my emotional life over to others. If I was happy or sad on any given day depended on what I read into the way others interacted with me.

Healthy relationships can’t bear that kind of inequity.  Eventually, they feel lopsided and burdensome.  More importantly, I cannot protect myself from being hurt by abdicating my responsibility for myself, nor do I gain love by offering to be weak and maleable as a token of trust.  All I accomplish by acting out of my insecurities is making myself feel crazy and off-kilter emotionally — and placing an unfair burden of responsibility on someone else.

Which leads back to the whole issue of happiness.  The people in our lives do influence both our day-to-day happiness and our deeper sense of joy.  But we are the rightful owners of our feelings, and of our choices.  When we stay centered, we can recognize how/when our insecurities are urging us to act out of fear, and we can resist that urge.  It won’t “make” other people love us, or love us more.  Instead, it will allow each of us to act with love toward ourselves and others without all the weirdness and drama.  And it makes it possible for me to admit that my friend is right — I’m happy because I choose to be, not because someone else made me feel that way!

Why Am I Still Doing This?

A few weeks ago, I was feeling pretty discouraged that my weight was stuck in the 230-233 range for a very long time.  One of the frustrations was that I would weigh myself daily, but Thursdays – when I take a snapshot of the scale and post it to this blog – were always my heaviest day of the week.  So, being the superstitious person I am, I started taking snapshots any day that the scale showed a lower weight.  In my (admittedly warped) mind, this was proof against Thursday — and my body wouldn’t dare put up a higher weight when I could prove I had weighed less the day before!

This morning, when I stepped on the scale, up slightly from last week, which was up slightly from the week before…well, I was pretty frustrated.  I had a photo from earlier in the week where the reading on the scale was 225.  I thought seriously about posting that photo instead of today’s.

As I sat at my computer, indecision gave way to resolve.  I have to choose the whole truth when it comes to this journey — the good, the bad, the ugly…that has been my internal contract since I started blogging about my weight loss.  Whether anyone ever looks at it or not, I have to tell my story as honestly as I can.  NOT being truthful with myself is, to a great degree, what made this journey necessary in the first place.

So, here are some truths I have to keep telling myself:

  • Losing weight is hard.  Even after all this time, despite ongoing daily commitment and more good choices than bad choices, it remains hard to do.
  • It would be nice to have the pounds drop off “Biggest Loser” style, but for most people who have large amounts to lose, and for me, weight loss is a long journey: a marathon, not a sprint!
  • Be happy about progress, even though it may not show in the way you want it to on the scale.  My body shape has been changing while my weight has not.  I am now uniformly wearing size 16W in pants, and regular XL or Large in tops.  Two nights ago, I bought my first size 14W skirt.  While it is strange to be straddling the “womens” department and the other departments at stores, it is also awesome!
  • Feeling good trumps everything else! This is the secret that is so hard to hold on to when I get discouraged at the scale.  Imagine, if you can, how it felt to weigh 352 pounds…panic attacks, labored breathing, never feeling good about how I looked, never fitting in chairs or public transportation…I can tell you that it rarely felt good.  Now, I pretty much feel great every day, both physically and psychically.

Posting my weight on Thursdays keeps me honest – with myself and with anyone else who looks at my posts.  I want others to know that, while there are plenty of them, it is worth the hard parts.  And I want myself to know that the truth has, truly, set me free. And that, friends, is why I am still doing this.

As it turns out…

…curbing the violent thoughts which run rampant in my head while driving is extremely difficult.  (In case you didn’t read last week’s entry, I have decided that conquering my violent thoughts is the new frontier.)  On Saturday, I grumbled about another driver in the Barnes and Noble parking lot, realizing only after I verbalized my thoughts that I had a passenger — and she had read my blog entry only that morning.  We looked, startled, at one another then burst into laughter.  Embarrassed laughter, on my part.  Humbling moments, such as this, serve to either convince me that a resolution I have made is hopeless or to recommit to it with greater vigor.  Which direction will I go?!

A few years ago, I read several publications, and watched some interesting films (What the Bleep? and The Secret) on the concept of the “Law of Attraction”.  The basic concept, and I am seriously simplifying here, is that we give off energy that attracts like energy to us.  I have experimented with this concept, and while my experiments have been limited, I have found that it works — to a point.  It’s all about focus: I need to focus on what I DO want, not what I DON’T want, to attract.  Behind the wheel, I am always focused on what I don’t want — a slow driver, or a tourist, or someone who doesn’t use turn signals, in front of me.  My friend, Sara, can vouch for the fact that I seem to be a magnet for unsure and infirm drivers.  This is one of the reasons that I am certain that I will have a better experience when driving if I somehow curb my thinking.

But it goes deeper than wanting a more pleasant driving experience.  Many minds more gifted than mine, from theologians like Pierre Theilhard de Chardin to visionaries like the woman who became known simply as Peace Pilgrim, have written about the need to take a close, hard look at what we allow to exist in our hearts and in our heads.  That these thoughts have real consequences in the world.

Many years ago, I was introduced to one writer who has had a profound impact on my understanding, if not my actual behavior. Etty Hillesum wrote extensive diaries and letters about her spiritual transformation during the period leading up to and culminating in her death in Auschwitz.  She had many offers from admirers and friends to go into hiding, however, she chose to work openly to try to relieve some of the suffering of her people — and to share in their suffering herself when the time came.  Before she was sent to the death camp, she gave her diaries to a friend for safe-keeping, with the instruction to publish them if she died.

In her diaries, which were finally published in the 1980s, Etty speaks eloquently to the point of managing your inner dialogue.  “I see no other solution…than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves.  And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned from this war.  That we must look inside ourselves and nowhere else.”  By February, 1942, when Etty wrote this, she had seen enough inhumanity that she could easily have been forgiven for vilifying the Enemy.  But she took another route.  “By our own hatred…our greatest injury is one we inflict upon ourselves…True peace will come only when every individual finds peace within himself; when we have all vanquished and transformed our hatred for our fellow human beings of whatever race–even into love one day.”

You may be thinking it is a far cry from rising to noble heights while living through one of the greatest human atrocities of the modern world to training oneself not to curse at other drivers.  But that’s not really true.  How can I root out and unlearn my own ingrained prejudices if I can’t even curb this petty vitriol?  That is the real question behind my desire to get a grip on my driving problem.  Which takes me back to the question: decide its hopeless or recommit with renewed vigor?  Taking my cue from Etty Hillesum, what other choice is there if I value peace in this world?