onceafatgirl

Practice makes me proud of myself

I watched a video on social media this week about how if you want to truly be an activist a great step to take is to start some slow hobbies. To learn how to continuously work and wait with hope.

Not results.

And I looked at myself, which I do when I am confronted with something that I want or am afraid that I lack, and I realized that that is what having my eating under control has been teaching me, a day at a time, for over 19 years. 

In fact, it was in getting my eating under control that I not only returned to crochet, but for the first time in my life, had the wherewithal, the attention span, the patience, and the cognitive capacity to significantly advance my skills. Then I had the desire to take on yet another craft, knitting. Then embroidery. Weaving. All the while still learning new crochet techniques. New knitting. Trying new things. Designing! Designing crochet dolls. Designing crochet doll clothes. Designing accessories for dolls. 

I can make things that only existed in my head before! Things that were once just yarn and stuffing and my imagination are now art.

But that took time. So much time. So many years of trials and failures and biting off more than I could chew. And sometimes managing to succeed anyway! And sometimes just not. And having to take 2 steps back. And having to take 200 steps back! Years, coming on decades.

Addiction and instant gratification have a lot in common. And there are many ways that they overlap. When I was in the food, actively in my sugar addiction and eating compulsively, the instant gratification of sugar always got me too high to really be able to advance in learning much of anything. And any project that didn’t come out the way I expected was a miserable failure. And anything I did had to be done in a frenzied burst, before I got too high on sugar and sort of ran out of steam.

I did creating but it was always long on idea and short on execution.

When I put boundaries around my eating, first thing I had to learn was to wait at least 4 hours between meals, plus over night for breakfast. That felt like an eternity to me. It was literally painful sometimes. It sometimes felt like I was going to die. That’s not hyperbole. It’s addiction.

So learning to wait to eat was a lesson. Then doing something to pass the time was a lesson. Then rediscovering my love of learning was a lesson.

Keeping my eating under control is a practice. There is no end goal. It’s an ongoing lifetime goal of authentic living. It’s a lifetime commitment to process. And I only have that because I happen to be a sugar addict, who is now in recovery. A happy outcome to a shitty situation.

So many of the best and most fulfilling aspects of my life are a direct result of getting my eating under control and thereby gaining the ability and possibility of choosing delayed gratification. The possibility of practice. Of doing something just because I do it.

Because if I am goal oriented, at 4:30 in the morning, my butt is not going to be as good an incentive to get out of bed. But I am going to get out of bed anyway, because I work out with my husband at 5, so I may as well get that butt. It’s the workout that is the practice. An hour a day, 5 days a week, to practice loving movement and strengthening of my sacred vessel.

My workout, my meditation, my sleep, my skin care, and my eating are all ways that I take care of myself every day. And any results are from consistency and are a bonus. I do them because the practice makes me proud of myself. Period.

It is a blessing for me to have learned the lesson of patience, of growth, of worthwhile things taking time to build, before the pervasiveness of things like Door Dash and Amazon Prime. Because I cannot imagine how much less patience, or how little capacity for change I would have now if I had not put boundaries around my eating 19 years ago. 

It’s worth the reminder for myself that worthwhile things take patience and time. And that the things that I want and want to be a part of, are going to take, not just work, but work, plus time and hope.