Trouble Digesting
About 3 years ago now is was laying outside in the sun with my favorite 100% cotton ethically made sustainable underwear set eating a watermelon and realizing that this too was making me extremely uncomfortable and my stomach was blowing up to the size of a BALLOON or the size of a second trimester mother’s stomach or the size of what I was eating, a watermelon. I was posting my IBS “journey” on social media because like every other 23 year old who had no idea what to do with her life, I was considering being (read with the valley girl voice) “an influencer”. I had been vegan for a few years and had been in a better portion of recovery from bulimia and anorexia for about 9 months but the thing I was really recovering from was self absorption, obsession with body image, and fucking hating the fact that I couldn’t be “That Girl” because I was This Girl. Coming to terms with being who I am and not whoever “That Girl” is, I had started feeling bloated and was getting extreme discomfort from many different foods so I went to the Butt and Gut doctor (as I prefer to call them) and had them take a peek where no man had peeked before and I was totally fine. My Butt and Gut nurse called me and said, “Everything came back normal”, So naturally I felt like a loser.
See when I go to the doctor I pray that they tell me exactly what I am sick with so that I can get on route to fixing it. But when I get the news that, “Oh actually everything is completely normal and working right and the only thing out of place with your butt and gut is that there is currently a camera/tube in it so that we can tell you that everything is normal” I just feel really defeated, like, “okay so how do I fix this if there’s nothing to fix?”. PODCASTS? Yeah I basically listened to every Darren Olien podcast out there and deep dived into the realm of food and preservatives and pesticides and ancestral diets and yeah.
Along that journey of trial and error with my body I learned a lot about who I am when I’m sick. I was mourning my unhealthy coping mechanisms(puking up all my food, or not eating at all). I had this warhead candy season of being sour and questioning my body’s abilities, wondering when the pain would end, but I learned how to find the sweet spots of life in it and cheer my body on. I mean literally, I would sit on the toilet and look down at my distended white flesh and see past it into my gut and say, “I know you're angry, I am too. I know you’re trying to help me and not trying to take me out, and I just want to tell you… LETS F**KING DO THIS THING!!!! (and yes I mean poop). And when that didn't work I spent a lot of time crying on my bed, naked under the covers with the blinds mostly closed, sour once again. But I learned how to listen to my body and filter what I let into it. Ironically, my favorite book says that it isn't what enters a human's mouth that defiles it, it's what comes out of the mouth that does the real damage. Having spent many days hurling into a toilet, I can agree with that, what exits the mouth does real damage. But in all seriousness once I started believing that my life isn't about what I fuel my body with, but rather what I fuel the world around me with, my trouble digesting food went away.
What do I mean by that? I mean that in recovering from self absorption and obsession with body image, I started caring more about what I was putting out to the world, then what the world was giving me.
P.S. where you fill up effects what you’re able to give out
P.S.S. If what you put out into the world is dependent on the way you look, you're filling a Diesel tank with regular unleaded gas… and you're gonna wear your engine out and lose power(I speak from experience).
Don’t get me wrong, I am still a 21st century consumer and I struggle with selflessness everyday, BUT, I asked myself during this time,
“Do I care more about myself than I do about others?”
“Do I walk into a room and demand attention, or do I walk into a room and look for someone to pay attention to?”
And if I walk into a room selflessly, then the way I look when I enter that room doesn’t matter.
Eating disorders and body dysmorphia only have the power to consume my life when I let them become more important than my life’s purpose.
My life’s Purpose: loving God and loving others well.
Oh man do I F**k it up very often. But it’s that I want to return to the truth: I must become less and less and in becoming less, life becomes more full, my stomach becomes full, my heart becomes full, my joy becomes full, and my purpose becomes more clear.
A challenge to my reader:
Pick one of these things to do this week:
Take note of the way you enter a room
Talk to someone you trust about your eating disorder
(I have some great resources if you need them shoot me an email)
Examine where you find your worth and purpose. Are you filling your Diesel tank with regular gas?