I’ve recently gotten into romance books. Maybe moderns romance books. Not the old school ones with the hot couple on the front in low cut shirts, hair dramatically blowing in the wind. I actually have never read one of those. But after listening to an episode of Code Switch where they were trying to decide whether it was best to read escapist books or not during 2020, I made note of a few romances and thought I would give them a try.

At first I was a little worried about how much I liked them. It’s taken me a while to unlearn the kind of weird expectations I picked up from rom coms and I was worried that my brain was falling into a similar trap.

But what I have realized over the last couple of weeks is that I’ve enjoyed the specific romances I have because they give me an alternative internal dialogue for men.

You see, I’ve picked up a rather weird understanding of how men think. Some of it probably came from the media. But I know some of it came from my mom who flat out told me all during my teen years that boys only want one thing and that they would do anything to get it. When I told her that a boy at camp told me I had nice eyes, she dismissed it immediately. A super fucked up thing that made me wonder if maybe I had ugly eyes since it seemed so obvious to her that he wasn’t being genuine.

Suffice it to say, I learned to distrust men.

But the writing in these books, at least the ones I have been reading, has been a good reminder that men are not always immune to the many anxieties and overthinking that I experience constantly. It’s a good reminder to check my assumptions about what men are thinking. It’s a good reminder that there are at least other possibilities than the ones I was taught.

So yes, well there is also a part of me that loves how prettily these books wrap up. How they inevitably end, after conflict, with the main couple happily together in the end. I think that is at least not the only reason I enjoy these books. And that is something of a relief.

I heard this episode of This American Life when it was first released in 2016. It was one of those things that I read/listened to/saw at the time that I finally began to question the diets I had been on for fifteen years.

This episode is an imperfect piece of media. And every time I listen to it (as I have every year or so since hearing it the first time), I pick something else up from it. Today I realized that the part of Elna’s story that I can relate to is the struggle of what to do with the knowledge of how differently I was treated when I was thin.

My story is not Elna’s story. I was truly thin in the middle of my adulthood, my mid twenties. And then the bubble of diet culture burst and I was diagnosed with an eating disorder and I went into recovery and I got fat again. Fatter than I’ve ever been. And I slowly saw the way things changed.

The area in my life where I struggle with this the most is dating.

I know logically that people of all sizes date and love people of all sizes. I see it in my real life. I see it in my Instagram feed. I know this logically, but every time I try to date I just can’t stop seeing the ways things are different. I went from matching with four out of five people to matching with two out of five. And the numbers, of course, go down from there. The numbers of who will actually respond and then who I may actually meet and then who I may go on a second date with and etcetera.

I also know that I feel differently about myself now than I did when I was thin. Don’t get me wrong, I still didn’t think that I was thin enough when I was thin. I still needed to lose weight as far as thin me was concerned. But I think I also knew that I was conventionally attractive. And I was told it. And I was treated that way.

When Elna, in this episode, talks about suddenly seeing the secret bougie life that thin people live. I am reminded that I got to live that life. And I lost it. I gave it up. Not to say I super had a choice. I mean I guess I could have continued to have an eating disorder, but all science generally predicts that I still wouldn’t have stayed thin in the long run. I understand why Elna chose not to give that life up.

When Elna talks about how she was happy before she was thin. Before she realized what she was missing out on. That’s the part I couldn’t relate to. I was always told explicitly that my life would be easier if I were thinner. What I want to do. What I have been trying to do slowly and over time is to unlearn that. Is to forget the evidence I have gathered in having been thin and now being fat.

Because really, true or not, it doesn’t matter. I am not going to be thin. And I’d rather dismiss the folks who walk around with unquestioned anti-fat bias than lament myself, my fatness, and the thinness I once experienced. I wish I could just believe that I am beautiful and believe that I am worthy of love and that I am attractive and that I will find love. And some days I can believe it. Really and truly. But any time I feel rejected. Every time I meet a potential date in person for the first time. Every time I develop a crush on someone and am not sure if the interest is returned, I wonder what it would have been like if I were still thin. I wonder if these men would react differently to me then. And I know that I would rather be with a man who finds me attractive now than a man would dismisses me now. But when there is no one, this rathering feels like a pointless thought experiment.

I have struggled to put myself out there since getting fat. And so all I have is this self-fulfilling prophecy of evidence that no one is attracted to me when I am fat. And I guess that’s what I need to keep working on. Challenging this belief and gathering the new evidence. We’ll see how this goes. And in the meantime, I continue to be grateful for the slightly increased media representation of fat people. And the awesome fat people I follow on social media. That’s at least the source of some evidence to the contrary. Some healing lessons.

My favorite love story doesn’t even involve love. I had dated Colin for a few months after college. Dating might be a stretch. We were friends, and one drunken night I went for it. He had always been the life of the party, center of attention kinda guy. He was a couple of years older than me, but we were in the same cohort in a rotational program at work. He really caught my eye when my friend suggested I train for the Detroit marathon with her, and he said I could do anything I set my mind to. After that first night, we kept sleeping together. I had never had a boyfriend, and my sexual experience consisted of one night stands peppered throughout college. So I was excited to suddenly have someone I was sleeping with consistently. I was cynical enough to know that didn’t mean anything for romance, but it was still a level of intimacy that was new and exciting for me. 

I still remember that first time we slept together when I was sober. I was so nervous. I had never initiated sex sober before. Would it be awkward? How did it work? 

Colin and I kept things casual for a month or so. We didn’t want to rock the boat within the group of friends we had built, so without discussing it we decided not to tell anyone. This secrecy was pure fun, given it lasted for all of a month until one of his good friends figured things out. Since it was so short it served only to heighten our excitement, stealing glances across the table or touches behind others’ backs. 

When Colin’s friend found out, he felt a new pressure to make what we had into a relationship, rather than the friends with benefits thing we had been doing. Having never been in a relationship, and recently heartbroken over a college friendship gone crush gone awry, I was nothing but thrilled at the prospect of finally having a boyfriend. 

Colin and I were only involved romantically for a few months. All in all, if memory serves, it was a chill and fun few months. But something weird happened over the summer. I don’t know or maybe don’t remember what it was, but something triggered a huge insecure anxious attachment attack for me that ended in a drunken scene of me asking if he ever even cared about me. As I told a friend today, I have a flair for the dramatic. 

Thankfully, Colin and I were had been friends before and more importantly were surrounded by a very small very close knit group of friends. Less thankfully, Colin and I were sharing a cubicle for three months following this dramatic break up. Still, after weeks of my sneaking off to the bathroom at work to cry and his trying to pretend he didn’t notice, our friend web forced us to eventually return to being friends. 

And so we remained for a year or so. Nothing big happened during that year. We all grew a little. Matured a little. We continued to drink as a group pretty regularly. We went to some concerts, cooked meals together. One day, that following summer, Colin and I went to a one day music festival together, just the two of us. 

I have never been an active music listened. Meaning, I have rarely put in the effort to seek out new music or new musical experiences. In Detroit for those years, I went to more concerts than ever before or since. This was my first and only festival and I was not wholly prepared for a whole day of being surrounded by people and enveloped by loud music. Colin was a great friend to go with. He had a good sense of how to get the best out of the experience and was someone I was very comfortable with. I remember turning to each other when a band neither of us had heard of, MisterWives, completed a sound check because their singer was clearly incredible. I remember taking a nap in a patch of sun on a grassy hill waiting for a big name on the main stage of the event. I also remember realizing that this was precisely the comfort I wanted to feel in a romantic relationship. And so began a small fantasy of Colin and I getting back together. 

The timeline feels a little blurry. This was, after all, back in 2014. I know I didn’t act on this fantasy right away. I really enjoyed our friendship, and was worried about how making my feelings known would change things. Eventually, he and two of our other friends were given the offer to go work in Italy for three months. This felt like a golden opportunity. I could tell Colin how I was feeling and give him some time and space to figure out where he sat with things. And, if he were to reject me, I’d have three months to cry and lick my wounds without sharing even a zip code with him let alone a cubicle.

So I wrote Colin a letter. I knew he was getting his hair cut the day he was scheduled to fly out. I planned to drop off the letter then, hoping to place no pressure on him or awkwardness on the situation. I very clearly indicated that he should not review the contents of the letter until he landed in Rome. And that was that. 

We were still working for the same company, but our time zones six hours apart. That meant that we had a couple of hours after I came into work when Colin was still at work in Europe. We chatted regularly during those hours exchanging stories about food (mostly him) or random things he was not privy to with the friends in Detroit (mostly me). But the whole time I never knew where I stood. I didn’t know if he had read the letter. I didn’t know what his thoughts were. I just knew that things seemed to be business as usual as far as our friendship was concerned. And the rest of it changed from week to week. Some weeks I was sure he was being flirty and that we were en route to rekindling our romance. Other weeks I was sure he was avoiding me and remaining my friend out of pity. But looking back, it was mostly fun, until the week before he was supposed to come back. That week, Colin mostly disappeared. We didn’t talk much online at work or offline later. I knew he was doing his last trip around Europe the weekend before the last week and suddenly felt all this anxiety rushing in. I knew he was meeting a friend in Prague or Bucharest and wondered who she was and what was going all with them. All while knowing, it was really none of my business. 

Colin was scheduled to come back on a Friday. A full week after we’d last spoke. We had a bowling night scheduled for the youth of the company I worked with, and I was determined to make the most of the evening spending time with friends and having fun. We drove down as a group, and I was pretty surprised to see Colin in the middle of the back seat when they came to pick me up. I slid in next to him but made an effort to not let our bodies touch. I was hurt by his disappearance and more unsure than ever of where we stood both as friends and as something else. 

Still it was hard to stay sad with that group of people. And easier than I care to admit to avoid the feelings bubbling up with alcohol, friendship, and bowling. And so we drank and bowled and devoured food comped by the company. At some point in the night I was sitting in a booth next to Colin, the alcohol blurring the determination I had earlier to maintain a clear line of demarcation. 

And then our thighs were touching. 

And then he was holding my hand. 

And then he was whispering in my ear that he wanted to give us another shot. 

And then I was kissing him in public, which he was not super into. 

And that was that. After months of mostly fun and bits of anxiety and uncertainty, Colin and I were back together. 

We talked more that second time around. I made sure to express my anxieties to him even though I felt they were silly. He made sure to be supportive. We also experimented more. After four months, Colin realized he still didn’t feel anything aside from platonic feelings towards me. Our break up the second time around was far less dramatic. And it surprised me. I was still hurt. But also more grateful than the first time around. We were both curious enough to give it a try. It definitely sucked that it didn’t work out. And our friendship didn’t recover from that second break up. I think that had more to do with my undiagnosed depression and the feeling that I just didn’t want to be living the life I had created for myself in Detroit any more. 

I love that Colin and I gave ourselves the opportunity to try romance out again. It’s not a thing we’re really shown in our culture. Experimenting with relationships. Trying things out even though they may fail. We tend to think that it’s not worth risking the friendship, forgetting that the friendship is not a guarantee regardless of the decision to pursue or not pursue something romantic or sexual. 

I love this love story. I love the slow build of it. The unknown during that year of friendship between romantic endeavors. The slow build of it all. The risk of putting it all out there in a letter. The transatlantic waiting. 

I love this love story in which Colin and I never exchanged “I love you”s. 

I am fat. I have gotten fatter in this year of pandemic. I struggle with this. I had gotten to the point where I was ok with my body not being thin. I was proud to have gotten to a point where my body was steady, no more big downs and ups. I was not ready for my body to change again. I have been terrified of losing weight for a bit, scared of what it would trigger and mean in terms of relapsing. But it turns out I also wasn’t looking forward to the potential of continuing to gain weight.

This is complicated. I consider myself a fat and body liberationist. I know that all bodies are worthy and deserving of so many things that many bodies–fat, black, brown, indigenous, Asian, disabled, ugly–are not getting. And also, I sometimes still wish I were thinner. Not because I believe thinness is more valuable, but because I live in a society where thinness is more valued.

After more years of being fat and getting fatter. More years of being around newer friends. I am starting to realize that as long as society believes that weight is something that people can control, anti-fat bias isn’t going anywhere. And that sucks. That belief is so deeply embedded in our culture. So many thin people believe that they earn their thinness, don’t realize that they struck gold mine with their genes.

I have some friends, thin and fat, that I know don’t believe this. That know that they do nothing to “maintain” their bodies. But I also have friends that I suspect do believe this. I sometimes wonder what those friends think when they look at me. What they think when I express my anxiety around going to the doctor or dating while fat. Around going to the doctor for anything and everything (from heartburn and foot pain) because I am always met with mandates to lose weight. Around telling a person I know that I wanna go on a date with them because I still have a hard time believing that they, or anyone really, could be attracted to a body like mine. I wonder if they’re thinking “why doesn’t she just lose weight then?” I wonder if they’re thinking “yeah…how could anyone be attracted to you?”

But what I realized this morning, in the early hours that my body decided it needed to be awake for is that while a lot of people see fatness as a sign of laziness and stupidity and lack of self-control, for me, my fat signifies survival and resilience. My body survived 16 years of my starving it. Sixteen goddamn years. And my fat is at least partially a direct result of that. Fat was and is my body’s way of ensuring that I survive another round of starvation. I may still struggle to believe that fat is physically beautiful all the time, but recognizing this truth I have a new appreciation for my body. My fat is here as a reminder that my body worked overtime for sixteen years to keep my alive.

Some people aren’t so lucky. Eating disorders are deadly, moving between number one and number two in the list of deadliest mental health disorders. For those of us that do survive years and sometimes decades of undiagnosed and often prescribed eating disorders and eating disorder behaviors, we are often left with a fat body that is preparing for another round, a body that is fatter than where we started. It’s ironic and often so painful to realize that dieting reliably leads to weight gain in the long term, not weight loss.

I am fat. I have gotten fatter in this year of pandemic. My body survived this year of pandemic. This year of stress and isolation and fear. My fat body survived this year of pandemic and it got fatter in the process. Other people’s bodies reacted differently. None of us is better or worse for how we survived this year. For how we survive our culture. And I am white and moneyed in ways I didn’t earn. There is a plethora of evidence that anti-fatness is directly linked to white supremacy and specifically anti-Black racism. I’ll be reading Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings to learn more about that. If you’re interested, please join me.

There is a part of me, deep down in my core, that believes no one will ever love me.

I do a lot of judging of this part. I get annoyed that she’s so cliché. That she thinks she is so special that no one will love her. That wants to shake her awake and show her everyone in her life that does. That is dumbfounded by her. That wonders if there will ever be enough proof to convince her otherwise.

Today my mom asked me to consider “making my own child outside of marriage,” and that part of me heard “you’re never gonna find love, so if you want a kid, you have to do it on your own.”

It’s beside the point that I don’t want children.

I am thirty, I haven’t been in a relationship in a few years, and haven’t really dated in a couple. Apparently this is the time to start cutting my losses and considering life without a partner.

Don’t start with me. I know if push came to shove my mom would say that’s not what she meant. I really hope to any power out there that that’s true. But that’s not the point of this post. The point is, what to do with the part of me that believes this interpretation.

For a while, I’ve been trying to investigate her. Trying to find out where she came from (oh, I know). That didn’t get us too far. Aside from maybe my realizing that I didn’t have to listen her (that small part of me that is).

Then I was trying to convince her otherwise. I have shown her lots of data, organized in all different ways. It took a lot of work for me to gather. When you believe something, you tend to collect the data that support it and miss the data that doesn’t. She’s not been having it.

I am scared that if this part is always there, this will always be true. This is one of the (countless) reasons that I hate law of attraction stuff (the others are rooted in a lot of systemic isms). Scared that by having any piece of me that thinks no one will ever love me, I will indeed end up alone.

It sucks that I was ever led to believe this. IT REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY SUCKS. And it sucks that I really don’t know what to do to stop believing it. Cheesy as it sounds, I am trying to just accept this part of me. To love her after years of trying to understand her and prove her wrong and shush her.

PS I would love to hear my mother say, “Of course you will find love. No matter what you look like. Plenty of people love you. And plenty more people will. In our family. Outside of it.” I don’t know that I’ll believe her if she were to say it. But I guess it never hurts.

Learning that working out can be a response to my body’s saying “let’s do something” instead of a response to some arbitrary mainstream fitness expert’s (who is by the way likely just using thin privilege to market a product) saying that I need to move in a specific way for a certain amount of time every day in order to have “a bubble butt” or “a tiny waist” or “a flat tummy” has been the most challenging and ongoing lesson in my recovery.

Here are a small number of things that have helped:

1. Taking a break from movement. I intentionally stopped moving my body at all for several months.
2. Trying a variety of ways to move your body. For me it was especially helpful to start with things that hadn’t been marred by my eating disorders such as: hiking, restorative yoga, dance videos, going for walks, kick/boxing.
3. Spending five minutes a day really experiencing your body and doing nothing else. I find this especially interesting to do when I am resting some days and when I am moving other days.
4. Letting go of black and white/all or nothing thinking. It is still hard for me to “miss a day” without deciding that I am done moving my body for good. Thankfully, some of these other steps, especially #3 create space for me to hear my body telling me it wants to move. But I think I often miss it for days before realizing that’s what I’m wanting.

Movement is still complicated for me. There are times I feel so sad about what my body is able to do now versus what it was able to do years ago. (This has nothing to do with my weight, and everything to do with the way our body develops stamina and fitness over time.)

At times, I feel embarrassed that I breathe loudly or can’t talk for a few minutes when I go up a (very long very steep) flight of stairs during a walk with some friends.

Sometimes I feel jealous of my friends who haven’t had to deal with this, who have been able to continue with the running and the hiking and the moving without having to deal with the mental health implications that eating disorders bring into the picture.

These ongoing lessons in movement have not been easy or pretty or linear or smooth (the story of my learning to move my body again that is). But they have been real and empowering and emotional and important.

A few weeks ago in therapy, I was complaining about my anxious attachment to my therapist and she said something that blew my mind…like journaling five pages in 20 minutes right after blew my mind. She said the insecurity of the relationship isn’t on me, it’s on the relationship.

I started learning about attachment styles after my first relationship ended when I was 22 and just starting to see a therapist. I immediately recognized myself as insecure anxious and projected insecure avoidance onto my ex. And on we moved.

When my third and most serious relationship ended, my new therapist and I found ourselves talking about attachment again. It came up in my psych classes. It came up when I worked in residential. It came up every time I started dating someone new and every time they disappeared on me, or didn’t.

In the last few months I think I’ve been experiencing a low-grade anxious attachment attack (this is a term I made up for it, it’s not clinical as far as I’m aware). It came from just being so alone all of the time. The combination of starting a job from home and rainy Portland winter and pandemic. Oh and everyone else also going through their own versions of dealing with coming on a year of pandemic stressors.

And so, when I found myself feeling crazy for not hearing back from a boy, I reverted. I reverted to young me who thought everything was my fault because if it was my fault then maybe I could fix it. If it was my fault then it was in my control. I wished and eventually said in therapy that I could just be more secure in myself and then I wouldn’t go crazy every time someone disappeared no matter if we had been dating for a month or friends for many.

And my therapist said–you are acting this way because your relationship feels insecure, not because you have insecurities.

Of course she said this in like the last five minutes of our session that week because I’d spent the first 50 minutes avoiding anything to do with this because I felt ashamed and embarrassed that it was all happening again.

And so, now I have come to understand attachment an eensy bit differently. And I’m still working on fully wrapping around what this all means but here goes a draft of it:

As someone who didn’t have a secure attachment with a primary care taker growing up, relationships need a bit more to feel secure to me and can fall into insecurity more easily if consistency isn’t present. My response to a relationship’s feeling insecure is anxiety–worrying that I’ve done something wrong, worrying that I’ve said something to push the person away, worrying that they’re never coming back.

And then, in response to that insecurity, I grab at everything. I described it in last week’s session as falling off a cliff and desperately grabbing at anything to try to get a hold of solid ground. Desperately being the key word here. In real life this looks like me trying to control people into staying, into talking, into missing me (lol I can’t control people into that). My therapist told me to sit with the desperation. This all thankfully happened 10 minutes into the session–I was over my own avoidance tactics. It’s easier to sit with the desperation when someone else is there. Even via video chat.

When I am at my best, love really flows freely. It sounds cheesy to say, but I can feel it. I love everything and everyone no matter how there they are for me because people are amazing and flawed and beautiful and so deserving of love. When I am at my worst, I try to suck all the love that I can towards myself. But that’s not love. And so it never does much aside from exhaust me and possibly hurt the people around me. So it never does much good.

I think I knew all of this already. A few years ago. I think I learned all of this and then promptly forgot it when I managed to build secure friendships all around me. Friendships are so much easier than romantic relationships for me. And even secure ones don’t feel secure 365 days a year.

But then this pandemic started. And then it kept going. And suddenly I was alone all the time and that part of me that felt abandoned as a child came up screaming. And I had forgotten what to do with her. With me. It had been so long since she screamed this loudly. Not since that break up. That one where I thought I was gonna marry him. I think he thought that too.

Life is weird. We learn lessons only to promptly forget them when the situation changes. I wonder what other lessons I’ve forgotten and when I will relearn them. I know that each learning is a little different. A little easier. A little more nuanced. I know there is purpose in that. And if not, I know it’s inevitable to learn, and forget, and relearn.

I have learned about attachment stuff three or four or five times now and each time I understand it a little differently. And then I wonder if learning and knowing it will change anything. Who knows really.

By the way, I played cards with her. With me. With the screaming child last week. When my therapist told me to close my eyes and try to hear what she wanted, that’s what came up. I played solitaire on my bed with a teddy bear I’ve had since I was born and a picture of 3-or-4 year old me looking over my game. It felt silly, but I think it’s what she wanted, cause I felt better after.

I think all I want is someone who will sit with me when I’m having an anxious attachment attack. And maybe play cards with me. We wouldn’t need to talk or anything. Just being there would be enough.

Below is an excerpt from a note I wrote to myself in the middle of December, at the end of a very difficult day. I’m not in that space any more now, thankfully. But my guess is I’ll be back. There has been a lot of talk about how challenging this pandemic has been for everyone’s mental health. I work in mental health and see the struggle every day. I wish every day that we had just shut down in the beginning, maybe isolation would have been shorter if we had, maybe the toll wouldn’t be so great. I love finding things I wrote in my past. I love the fierce kindness that I showed myself here.

...And it sucks that it’s happening at an already difficult time. And it sucks that there is SO MUCH going on for everyone but your brain keeps telling you it’s because you suck and there is something very wrong with you. It is hard hard work to be trying to convince your brain that the reality it’s building, while based in facts, is not the only possible  reality. And that it is heavily shaped by years of trauma and gaslighting. And that there are other possible realities that are much kinder—both to yourself and to those around you. And it is not easy to always be reminding yourself that you try to live your life leading with compassion and kindness and understanding. I wish so much that I could take this away for you. That anybody could. But this is your darkness. It is a part of you. Sometimes it takes up more space than other times. And while it is true that others may help you carry the load at times, no one can take this away. This is here to stay in some form or another at least for a bit. Can you embrace it? Can you face this part of yourself and say hey. I see you. I’m here for you no matter what. I’m sorry your emotional needs weren’t met when you were young and that sometimes that makes it really hard for you to be in relation with others. I know how hard and confusing it is to feel like you both really need other people and that you absolutely cannot count on them. I am sorry that you were shown for many years that you will have to walk this path alone. I gently remind you that you have also been shown otherwise. That there have been people over the years who have joined you for portions of the walk. That sometimes you forget to ask. And that sometimes you remember but it is really hard for you to ask because you are scared that they will say no or that they won’t actually show up for you. And that sometimes it is hard because you want them to walk for you, to fix you and things for you, but they cannot do that. They can only support you (sometimes A LOT) in doing that. I know that sometimes you feel that you are a lot (never too much). Sometimes a lot even for yourself. And that scares you because if you are a lot for yourself why would anyone else ever wanna take on that load. But you have to remember how incredible you are. You are a strong and magical being. You overcame so much goddamn shit from the people who raised you. You examine yourself and your life and work often to make sure that you and your life are aligned with your values....

I recently gave up on a situationship I had found myself in. (I gotta tell you I’m pretty ashamed of that being thirty and all, but y’know unprecedented times and such).

And when I was talking to a good friend about it, I realized that among the myriad of feelings I was experiencing, one was anger towards myself. Anger that was covering embarrassment. I was embarrassed that I had expected things to go differently this time.

I was embarrassed that I had felt hopeful.

I felt weak that I had felt hope.

It is intriguing to me this concept. It falls in line with everything else that we are taught is weak that actually takes immense strength. We’re taught that being vulnerable–having feelings, being honest about them–is weak. When it actually takes immense strength to face what we’re feeling and even greater strength to go and tell someone about it.

I think the same is true of hope.

I think those of us that are hopeful are often told that we are naive. We are often made to feel silly for having hopes for a different outcome. When things don’t turn out differently, we feel that we should have known better. That we should have seen it coming.

But what I keep realizing, is how much strength is takes to look back at all the things that didn’t work and still hope that something can go differently. And hoping, to be clear, doesn’t mean closing your eyes, sitting back, and praying. Although, that can certainly be a part of it. Often with hope comes a great deal of work. Work on ourselves, work with others, work trying to change a system, many systems.

So if you recently hoped for something and it didn’t come to be, please, feel all the sadness and disappointment that comes with that loss. And remember, you are strong for having hoped. You are strong for imagining something different for you, for everyone.

Keep hoping.

Last week my therapist said something that caught my attention. I was telling her about how I was judging myself for finding myself in permutations of the same situation over and over again. That I was judging myself for accepting less than I deserve.

She told me if I could remove the criticism from my judgment, there is some good information there.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that.

Keep in mind, my therapist reminds me almost monthly now that judging is not in and of itself a bad thing. That our judging is a way that we get a sense of what we want to move towards and what we want to move away from.

And I see that in my statement, I want to move away from accepting less than I deserve in relationships.

But then, what is criticism?

As the definitions, courtesy of Merriam Webster Dictionary, make clear, these concepts are fairly similar. I think it’s fair to say that the distinction my therapist is trying to make, while important, is kind of arbitrary, in that she could have just as easily said that judgment should have been removed from the criticism.

I guess what I’m trying to say is which word we use for what is less important than the idea that that as humans we have ways of sensing what we want to move away and what we want to move towards. We would do well to question these senses at times, after all, they can be easily steeped in all the isms and phobias that our cultures instill in us. Always, they are full of information which is useful in helping us make decisions, or learning about ourselves, or growing.

Last week a friend shared with me that the distinction she makes is between judging and discerning.

I’m curious…how do you deal with judging, criticizing, discerning? Do any of these leave a bad taste in your mouth? Do any resonate with you?