Judgement Day

I had an epiphany while I was in Holland over the first half of the summer.

Well, it wasn’t so much a light bulb moment as it was this slow simmer of a bubbling up to the surface thing…like…I realize how so much of my struggle to bring my weight down is just part of my onward and forward struggle to keep reaching for goalposts that I insist need shifting on a regular basis.

When would be enough?

Or will there never be an ending point?

I have been a little confused about what the hell I am even doing!

I realize how much of a struggle it is for so many people, how much of a struggle it was for me, to lose weight.

I also realize now that I have lost the weight I wanted to lose, suddenly I magically have another 10lbs I need to get out of the way, what the hell will I do then? Become crazy about another 2lbs?

I dunno man.

Part of me wants to believe maybe I am unhappy with myself? But part of me knows, I am not, but I feel if I rest on my laurels I will be way to comfy and I will just eat my way back to where I started.

And what I realized is that there is nothing wrong with me taking time to just be pleased with where I am, for where I came from, for what it has taken me to get here and for how much I actually DID put effort into. Its like I have trivialized a lot of the effort I put in to everything from being a mother to going to the gym to cooking a meal to managing to remember to shave my fucking legs!

There is something in the way we are all brought up that we, as women, seem to be ok with putting ourselves down, and in turn it makes it hard to be happy for ourselves, happy IN ourselves…and that in turn gets twisted and turned outwards to where we find it hard to be happy for others, happy in the success they achieve, and happy to help them achieve even more success.

You have no idea the number of times someone has chosen to hold information back from me for whatever reason but that could only be so I don’t succeed in some way or the other.

What do you do, right?

We are all judging each other, we may say we don’t, but we do, and like guilty kids caught with our hands in the cookie jar, we slap ourselves on the wrist for judging…and then we go back to judging ourselves without seeing how wrong that is too. I have been guilty of judging mothers long before I ever had kids…and then I had one, and realized I had no way to ever judge other mothers…and then I had two and I was like, fuck this shit, let them do whatever the fuck they want! And after three, it was like, eat McDonalds while sitting on the potty and watching cartoon network, I could care less! That said…I still have a judgement bone to pick with anti-vaccine mums…but I have yet to befriend one by mistake! Lol. So I am safe. I got my share of theist friends…no complaints there, and I get a wide berth for my atheist views too, so its all good. But, yeah, back to the train of thought.

I read this article about how all women have a “tribe” and I was like…yeah, sure, I read the whole fucking article and its all la-di-dah-di, shit we all technically know, but its not some cookie cutter solution.

We are all, very, very, very different from each other.

There is no “that other friend who is different but same”…no, no. I think the only bit of truth in that article was that your tribe has to consist of women who you can be your own true self to.

This.

Your own true self.

Not someone you wish you were, not someone bigger than you, not someone so fucking eager to please that you are willing to bend over backwards to fit that pigeon hole someone has reserved just for you.

Also, sometimes being around someone may make you feel terrible about yourself. It may not be entirely their fault, but it happens anyway, my advise, fuck making that effort to make that person a part of your tribe, just don’t make life hard on yourself.

I think, for myself, I know I have a good little tribe. We might not always catch up with each other, some of my tribe I only get to see once a year or once every few years…but I believe, I truly do, that when I see them, I am me. I am me with all my weaknesses, strengths, laughter and tears dragging behind me in a battered piece of luggage thats big as a bus…but I am me.

I get to be the real me and I sure as hell hope that what I am seeing in them, from the feeling of comfort that I see resonating, that they too get to be their real selves.

I have also been reading a lot of articles about how with us “women” by saying we are unhappy in our bodies, its like insulting to others who may feel there is nothing wrong with you, but then you make them feel shit about themselves.

Its like a mindfuck. I know when I was a kid my mother was always on one diet or another, she was never happy with her body, and because she hated her body so much, and lets just say my father didn’t help with shitty comments about my Mum’s weight…or, really, even our weight, my sisters and mine. Dad, love that man, saw nothing wrong with yelling “hey Fatty” as we ran for that out of reach shot when we played badminton together. Or “Come on fats!” as he’d drag us on a jog with him.

Yep. We have each seen our share of starvation diets, fad diets, bulemia and binge eating. I doubt its that much different for scores of women out there.

And becoming a mother, seeing my own body wrecked the way I saw my tiny mothers body wrecked…it made me deathly scared to get old and struggle with prediabetes or cholesterol problems or worse.

I know my friend Keya is always saying that I am not my mother or I am not my sister or whatever…my own grandmother died very young, heart attack. I think I have spent the last several years making a concerted effort to learn more about nutrition and to really put into practice much of what I have learned or experimented with.

But now I find that the work I have left to do, its really on refining how and what and how much I eat…but also, more than anything, really learning to take a long hard look at how far I have come and to just be grateful for a bit.

I think, such a big part of me is always expecting to see the rug pulled out from under me, on every front…there is always this…anxiety that I will fall flat on my face. With my work, with my diet, with my exercise, with my kids, with my husband with my friends…

And I have to just know its all going to be fine.

I keep saying this, like “you are enough” but its like a mantra that I never remember when its really relevant.

So I gotto start practicing what I am preaching more. I gotto walk the walk and talk the talk or was it talk the talk and walk the walk?

Whatever!

I will just stick to being me, the real me, and if that means that I overshare how much weight I gain or lose, or if I overshare about the exercise I did or didn’t do, or if I overshare about feeling insecure or over confident…the members of my tribe will know, its just me being me and that is the only me I can be. I am not being me just to make someone else feel less them, I hope, if anything, that someone else will also be able to be more themselves by seeing how it can be easy and if someone so frantic and all over the place like me could seem to keep their shit together, even for a moment, then its totally possible, sky being the limit.

I think, for a while there I tried to be all things for everyone. I tried to bring together too many things, too many activities, too many people, too many interests…

And I realize now that a lot of my efforts, although welcome as they were for others, were really me trying to keep my ADD mind busy. And really, even for the people I befriended, not everyone was comfortable around me or vice versa. So I get that a tribe is meant to be small. Its not a village, its not even as big as a coven, although I sure as hell wish I could form a coven where we brew spicy teas and try to white magick away the shit that happens in the world! *hehehe, thats my 19 year old self speaking up!*

I find myself calling people, visiting them, but they may never call me or visit me. Then I question, should I bother calling or visiting? They never seem to initiate any of these calls or visits.

My father is that kind of guy, he makes a lot of effort for others, but he also gets a lot of joy from the social interaction.

So I guess I am just trying to assess if I am like my father…or if because my father, I am like me and whether that me is the real me and if not, should I withdraw and stick to a smaller circle of trust and just be content in that being my tribe?

Who knows.

I think part of me is really on a quest to reclaim the me I was before I started giving out so much of me that I have kind of lost many of the things that made me ME.

I came across a FB profile of someone, you know, someone I don’t know but who got my curiosity going, and so like some stalker in the night I went through all their photos that were publicly visible and I was just in awe. The person, a woman, who does a lot of charity work and is an artist, she was so full of light. Every photo of her had her beaming back at my screen, she had lovely hippy jewellery, flowing hair and blouses, gorgeous nails and perfectly done light make up…and although she must have been 50 or so, she looked like she never gave up her style of dressing that she had when she was at university! Instead of it being a weird thing, I found myself thinking, damn, this woman knows herself. She owns it!

And I am not saying I want to be her, but I want to have that light too. I want to feel that feeling I see in her eyes.

She’s a total stranger to me…I will probably never meet her…but there is a certain something you see in a person who is almost larger than life itself…and I feel like that is where I see myself going once I can learn to make peace with my life.

Having that fucked up few weeks of worrying I may have cancer, and that too in my fucking liver, it really made me withdraw and take pause. And while in Holland, a lot of the conversations I had with my friend Jacek, they too made me realize, what the fuck is important in life?

When you have no money, you worry, when you have money, you worry, when you have no job, you worry about getting a job, when you have a job you worry about losing your job. You worry about your family, you worry about dying, you worry about your kids education, you worry about everything that you forget that today is a day you are living.

I realize that every day could be my last.

I may have been given the all clear for cancer this moment, but I still have to go back for an MRI in 4 months. And no doubt, same as before, the anxiety will build. So I am going to do everything I can, diet, exercise, and for the umpteenth time, I am going to try to fucking meditate and find some of that inner peace people keep telling me about, so that when I get my results then I will either see that the various lesions have been wiped clean from my liver or if there is bad news, at least I am mentally prepared for it and can take it in stride!

I genuinely want to work on this whole “eat your way to health” philosophy.

We will only find out at the next MRI.

Of course, I have to avoid the alcohol to the best of my ability.

I am doing a damn good job of it so far. Of course, the one time I do get to drink I plow through a whole bottle of wine, or more! But it happened twice last month…and so technically…I could make some serious effort to avoid the booze altogether. I don’t drink on a daily basis, I don’t drink to be social (like the one or two)…I tend to drink to get drunk, but the fucked up thing is I find nowadays, maybe its my fear in my liver, I really don’t feel that great the next day, like its toxic as fuck.

I gotto just smoke weed or something.

Apparently cannabis is a cure for cancer!

But I don’t have cancer yet, so I should just try to drink more water and avoid the booze until the next MRI results so I can see if the combination of a predominantly plant based diet and no booze, can shrink the liver cysts and get rid of the liver lesions that (if they grow) could one day be classed as tumors!

So there is really, a lot on my mind, and maybe a bit more to this whole vegan challenge than me just being bored. Maybe I am deep down trying to do something more healthy. I dunno.

I also have my knee surgery coming up…so part of me is anxious about that…needing help, having my mother here, much as I am looking forward to it, I still get anxious. And well…just being stuck without a gym, at home, possibly with crazy, bored access to food!

Argh…gonna stop worrying about it before it kills me! Lol.