Finding Peace in the Journey: Freelance Friday

I was on a retreat last week with a lot of women who care about the same thing I do: finding peace in the journey to health.

This week, most specifically this morning, I woke up and rolled over to grab a drink of water. When I cracked an eye to grab the cup, my eyes fell on the one chip I managed not to eat in the stack I grabbed after work on my way to bed. And see, yeah, you’re probably reminded of that old gem about eating crackers in bed, but this was chips, thus a whole different thing, so LAY OFF ME.

Balance. Finding peace in the journey. Loving yourself and getting through the trauma of the now. Numbing hurt. These are struggles that every one of us goes through, every day. And whether you numb your hurt with food or with alcohol or with far-too-aggressive behavior in your slow-pitch softball league (I see you), the basic truth is that everybody hurts. Sometimes. (I linked that to Jon Stewart’s parody. You’re welcome.)

But it’s really hard to see outside of your own bubble because we’re human. Even though everybody hurts, it’s really easy to see it differently. To see it as everybody might hurt randomly, sure, but it looks like everybody has it together. This person got promoted, PLUS she has abs now. This person got a new house, and EVERY room looks like it has its own filter. How often do we think that this person got promoted and it’s KILLING her and she is running almost literally so she has abs now because she went from zero to 60 THOUSAND on her step count and she doesn’t even have time right now to LOOK AT HER OWN ABS?

We pretty much never do. Have time to look at our own abs, I mean. Whose neck even works like that?

So while it feels like everyone has their shit, but that shit is more or less together, and they probably NEVER make a sandwich with two heels of bread that are so thin they kind of folded in on themselves in the bag somehow, they’re thinking the same thing about someone else.

What I learned at this retreat was something that I already knew. Find what you need, and if you can’t find it, create it.

What I needed – still need – is a group of people who can find their voices and own their struggles with food. Who can do this both together and separately. I wanted to find someone else who could speak to eating whole bags of cookies or an entire pie or cake, and then, if necessary, running to the store to replace it before anyone else was awake or back home. Who could say that sometimes, eating was so mindless that it didn’t SEEM to be connected consciously to thought, much less numbing, even though that’s exactly what it was.

So, I’m creating it. In spite of the fact that it’s another Zoom in the world of shitty endless Zooms, it’s still gonna be great. We’ll make it that way. We’ll talk about the hidden parts. The struggles. The triumphs. And we’ll just, like, genuinely cheer for each other. We want good things to come to one another, you know? It just makes sense. It’s something so simple, and so obvious. I hope you have something in that in your life, or at least have someone or something to talk to – even better if they listen.

We can chart our path to health, but we can also chart our stumbles along the way. We can talk workouts, or talk meal planning. We can talk derailments, or we can talk recipes.

Man, this is gonna be great. You in? We’d truly love to have you. (We is me. I’m we. I’d love to have you.)

But regardless of how it’s done (crazy if that’s not with me, but I get it), we should all be finding peace in the journey. Because we (we is you) truly, truly deserve it.