journey

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.

Angel Cards

I have a deck of “angel cards” in my office.  Each little card contains one word and a drawing of angels doing something or holding something associated with that word.  The cards sit in a beautiful abalone shell, a gift from my friend Wendy.

Here’s how they are used:  you draw a card and think about what that word is saying to you at the time you select it.  Sometimes, it feels like you’ve drawn a random word that might mean anything.  At other times, it is uncanny how you draw just the necessary word for your current mental or emotional state.  For example, one day I needed to run errands across town with a very limited amount of time between meetings at the office.  I was stopped both going and returning by midday trains, among other time-sucking annoyances.  On the way back, once the lengthy train had finally crossed the road, I was stuck in traffic behind a school bus.  I was feeling harried, impatient.  Road rage was overtaking me just as I spied an alternate route via a side street where I could get out of traffic and go the speed limit.  Unfortunately, the school bus, at the last second, entered the turn lane in front of me.  And it continued on my alternate route, running a leisurely 15 mph.  I couldn’t pass it, and I followed it right into the parking lot at work.

Frustrated, blood pressure elevated to risky levels, I stormed into my office and ranted a high-drama version of my cross-town trip to a coworker, ending with the school bus.  My colleague suggested, kindly, that I take a few deep breaths and draw an angel card.  I took her advice. The word I drew took the wind completely out of my sails — RELEASE.  But the truly unbelievable piece was that the little drawing on the card was of an angel waving goodbye to, you guessed it, a school bus! Direct message sent and received!

I tell this story to illustrate why I pay particular attention to these angel cards.  It isn’t that there is magic in them.  But, as with many things that allow us to touch our less conscious mind (journal writing is another example) we sometimes surprise ourselves by going to the thing we most need to hear or think about at that moment.  And if Providence is also moving to assist – via our guardian angels – then that is a gift worthy of attention.

Over the past several weeks, I have drawn two words out of the abalone shell repeatedly: BIRTH, EXPECTANCY. First, I can assure you these words are not to be taken literally. Even so, they are powerful words.  I’ve learned to listen when powerful words come my way with such insistence.

What is trying to come into being in my life? I don’t know, but I am excited and just a little trepidatious.  Change, that wonderful, terrible “C” word, fills me with anticipation and fear.  I think I am learning to not only accept change, but to embrace it.  The fear is born of the knowledge that change always requires something from us — if only the internal readiness to go where we will end up anyway.  Friday, after several weeks of pondering BIRTH, I drew a card and discovered that two were stuck together — TRANSFORMATION and TRUST.  Alrighty then. I will try to trust myself, my guardian angels, and Providence.  Something big is on the horizon, though I can’t quite make it out yet.

Ch-ch-changes!

Welcome to the newly up-dated Jenion!

With the coming of autumn, I realized that the look and feel of Jenion was based on the self I was when I created the site last November:  a little wintry, a little dark…OK, a LOT dark!  Readers who have been with me since its inception have followed me as I’ve blogged my way through some significant life changes.  And while the Hunger Challenge and weight loss goals I began with have moved out of the foreground a bit, they still inform the experiences I am writing about — namely, how someone in the middle of life’s journey can “change her mind and change the world” (even if it is primarily her interior world that has shifted!)

So the look of the blog has altered, to reflect a brighter, more upbeat sensibility.  I hope it reflects my inner peace and happiness, too.  There is a subscription button for those of you who have lamented that I stopped sending email reminders when the hunger challenge ended.  I have also tagged entries, picking out themes and/or key words.  Click on one of these (in the lower right sidebar) and it will take you to blog posts which discuss that theme.  The recipes tab is more prominent, and I have added a couple of new recipes which I hope you like (including one for a spicy sausage and veggie soup I created myself)!

As I worked on updating the site, and going back to tag previous entries (which, by the way, is time-consuming and not finished!), it occurred to me that I ought to give some kind of status report on my journey.  Originally, I thought this would take the form of updating you all on happenings in several categories.  But as I gave it more thought, I realized I wanted to share two things in particular:  one a personal insight, the other a goal – both derived from the experiences of this past ten months.

First, after a lifetime of living most of my days in either the past or the future, I have learned to live in the present moment.  It is both energizing and freeing to live right here, right now.  You begin to feel your life vibrate at a higher frequency, and each moment takes on a special and important quality.  Living in the future, thinking things will be better at some distant point (someday when I’ve lost weight, or won the lottery, or done xyz) feels like squandering a precious gift.  I no longer see time as an endless resource — I value it, and want to make it count because my time here on earth is finite.  I cannot wait for someday.  Someday has to be today.

Second, my goal is simply to continue this journey.  No rest for the weary!  More important than the specific tasks and small goals I pledge myself to, is the quest to continue growing and developing into the person I am meant to be.  Certainly, I am not there yet.  There are external pieces of my life I have clung to out of fear or lacking self-confidence to let go and move on.  There are also those parts of my internal self that I have refused to set free out of fear — fear of failure or fear of success. It hardly matters which fear prevents your gifts from seeing the light of day.

Thank you for joining me at Jenion for all or part of the past ten months.  I look forward to sharing the next phases of my journey with you — and hope that you will use the comments section to share both your own path and insights.  For those who don’t feel comfortable making public comments, please see the “about” tab to learn how to contact me via email.

Serendipity

 the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for; also : an instance of this

Serendipity is one of my favorite words, and has been since long before the movie starring John Cusack was filmed.  Since the ’70s, in fact, when  I learned it at a meeting of my ecumenical youth group in high school (thanks to Dave, Randy, Bill and Chuck, the college guys who led the group).

There have been many instances of serendipity in my life and I am always happy to share stories of these moments and experiences because their impact has, invariably, been important.  The hunger challenge, completed on Easter Sunday, was one such experience.  The impacts on my life have been documented in this blog, and I won’t bore you with a lengthy recap.  But hang on to that idea of serendipity for a moment, while I make a slight detour.

Yesterday, I met with the staff of Horizons and Meals on Wheels in order to deliver the donation collected from the hunger challenge sponsors.  If you check out the Horizons website http://www.horizonsfamily.org/news_details.asp?News_Id=105 you’ll see an article and photo documenting the event.  I was THRILLED to be delivering $1,756.00 to Meals on Wheels.  Many people have asked what my original goal was for the donation, and I honestly answered that I hoped for $800 and thought if we hit $1000 that would be pretty cool.  The only thing missing from the true pleasure of handing over the funds yesterday was that I was alone when making the delivery — I would have loved for the sponsors to be there, representing the unified effort it took to reach and exceed our goals!

As I left Horizons, I was a little emotional.  The entire hunger challenge experience was so much more life-changing for me than I could have envisioned when I had the original idea to do it.  Easter was a bittersweet day: I wasn’t sure I was ready for that leg of my life journey to come to a close.  But in recent weeks, as the checks came in and so many friends (old and new) celebrated the journey with me, my perspsective began to shift.

And here’s the serendipitous part:  I had a lot of expectations for the 18-week challenge, but personal happiness wasn’t one of them.  I don’t mean that I didn’t expect to feel good at the completion of the challenge.  I mean, I didn’t expect to feel deeply happy and at peace in my heart.  I didn’t realize that I was opening the door to a truce with my past, yet this truce and the healing it has brought have substantially changed my outlook.

As I continue my personal journey, I am more ready than ever to make progress toward becoming the person I want to be, and creating the life I want to live.  And I am able to be deeply grateful for the ongoing effects of the challenge, rather than sad that it has come to a close.  Who knows what the future holds?  I feel certain, though, that further experiences of serendipity lie ahead!

Silver and Gold

This week has been one of reconnecting with the past, and forging relationships in the present.  When you are young, you think your friends will always be your friends, that you will be the same person moving through time on a continuous and straight trajectory.

Then life happens.

Your hopes and dreams change, your livelihood changes, you change.  And the people you count on, spend time with, love, change too.  Sometimes, the people who come into our lives are meant to also leave our lives once their role in our growth has been fulfilled (or our role in theirs).  Others we lose to pride, envy, greed, indifference, unresolved issues.  These are the losses that can weigh on our hearts.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reconnecting with some old friends with whom I parted under such circumstances.  For years, I’ve thought sadly of these people, wishing we were still part of one anothers’ lives.  I’ve felt guilty, because in most of these cases, I was the one who stopped calling or writing.  However, even though I regretted these losses, as I felt less confident in myself due to my weight and to the dips in self-esteem stemming from my inability to get a grip on my life, I lacked the heart to make overtures of reconciliation.

What I am surprised by is the generosity of friends who welcome us back into their lives after years of silence. What I am humbled by is the capacity of the human heart to go on feeling friendship and love over gulfs of time. 

Since November, I have learned so much about friendship from those of you who have supported my journey.  Many people make up the chain of connection that allows me to feel confident stepping beyond my comfort zone, and who help me create the person I am striving to be.

As I bring old friends into my current circle, I feel a sense of wholeness I haven’t felt for a long time.  I am reminded of that lovely song I learned in childhood, at Girl Scout Day Camp, Eagle Point Park, Dubuque, Iowa:

                   Make new friends, but keep the old.  One is silver and the other gold.

Perfect analogy, because friends, both old and new, enrich our lives beyond measure!