Opening My Own Miracle Door
If you have been reading my blog for any amount of time, you know that so much of keeping boundaries around my eating is a spiritual practice. It’s as much about honoring my word, my soul, my heart and my relationships as it is about not eating sugar. The food came first, but the spiritual stuff keeps me from turning back to the food. They feed each other. I do the spiritual work, I don’t need to eat over being a jerk. I don’t eat, I can delve deeper into the spiritual work.
So months ago, I was talking to a friend who does what I do with food. And she was so angry because she had an addict friend/work partner and he would get sober for a few days and miracles would fall in his lap. People offering not just help, but opportunities! Big, gorgeous, sexy opportunities around work and art and life. And she was pissed! My friend has been sober for decades and she wanted miracles!
So, as my husband likes to (only half) joke, I got into my Lucy booth and gave her some really quality advice, if I do say so myself. I told her that she is a person who meticulously turns over rocks. That she is the epitome of leaving no stone unturned. But that she certainly has a “miracle door” just like her friend. And that she should go look for it and start opening it instead of metaphorically crawling around on her hands and knees flipping rocks.
Well a year later, my friend is having all of her dreams come true. She is making more money, working less. The pandemic changed the way she works and she has used it to her very great benefit. She has been performing her music in new ways. Is working on multiple new music projects. And she just got engaged *and* bought her vacation home in a Southern town she loved and lived in as a girl.
And wouldn’t you know it, I got jealous! In my head I kept thinking “How come *she* is getting all of these miracles?!?!”
I love the irony of this story. I love how proud I was of my brilliant advice. And how it never occurred to me to take it for myself. And how in the end I ended up in the same position as my friend.
I have started looking at pictures of doors. Mystical woodland door art and photos of old colorful European doors and Arabesque doors with arches and key-hole shapes and round Hobbit hole doors from blockbuster movies and anything I can picture opening to let myself into a miracle, or to let a miracle out.
I am no stranger to miracles. Getting my eating under control felt like a miracle in a way that very few people can understand. When I was growing up fat, it felt like being fat was the worst thing I could be. I was shamed and humiliated, and I was put on diets, and I was told how simple it was to just stop eating. But it was not simple. In fact, it felt impossible. There was diet food. And I ate diet food until I had lost enough weight to go back to eating the foods I wanted to eat. Which would make me gain all of the weight back, plus more. And I knew that I could not live on diet food forever. And I knew I could not eat the foods I wanted in moderation. It was going to take a miracle for me to stop eating compulsively.
But I got that miracle. I have gotten to keep that miracle for 15 years. And it still feels like a miracle. It is still as wondrous and magical and awe inspiring to me as it has ever been. It has lost none of its shine. In fact, I am more grateful and honored to have found a solution now than I was 15 or 12 or even 5 years ago. My eating boundaries have carried me through so many difficulties and so much worry and sadness.
So I am looking for my miracle doors today. And I am grateful to have a way of life that reminds me that all I have to do on any given day is keep my eating boundaries. And that if I do that, I have a chance at something else. A relationship, or an opportunity, or a blessing. That I got one big miracle and it gave me the chance to find all of the other miracles.
onceafatgirl 