Category: The Voices in My Head

I am a rock. I am an island.

Letting Go of the Steering Wheel

On By MezzoSherriIn Detox Journey, Practicing in the Heart, Self-Acceptance, The Pressure to Fix Myself, The Voices in My Head3 Comments

One of the things that intrigues me about the HCG protocol I’m about to start is the fact that HCG is a hormone created in a woman’s body when she’s pregnant.

(Nota bene: nothing of what I say next is grounded in medical knowledge, nor is it intended to claim medical knowledge or scientific accuracy. I’m dancing with metaphors here.)

I’m having a hard time putting it precisely into words, but there’s a resonance for me both in the imagined process of a mother’s body producing HCG as part of the protection and nurturance being created for the fetus, and also in the image of the fetus being nurtured and cared for during gestation.

I see myself and this detox journey on both sides of this coin. Certainly a big piece of the journey is to learn to care for myself in different — one might even say “more mature” — ways. To be a stronger mother to myself, in a manner of speaking. (I’m bookmarking that side of the coin for another day.)

Another area of practice and growth for me — which is what’s noodling around my brain tonight — is around receiving support and nurturance, and maybe rewiring some of my old patterns around that.

Let me own this up front: I am not so good at receiving help, support, love or affection. I don’t need to do the detailed forensic autopsy on why that’s so. Take a sensitive girl child, raise her in a patriarchal system with an average life’s share of bumps and bruises and into-every-life-a-little-rain-must-fall, add a dash of intelligence and ambition and you might get someone who decides that her version of strength should be of the “I am Lobo. I hunt alone” variety.

I am a rock. I am an island.So, obviously, some of the sessions I have scheduled for this week’s trip have very precisely to do with the doctor’s consult around the HCG prescription, learning how to administer the injections, all that stuff. But the center I’m working with has a whole team assembled to help give me lots of other layers of support. Tips for grocery shopping and cooking, both within the immediate dietary restrictions of the HCG protocol and beyond it. Other sorts of bodywork and energy work. I’m even staying at the Center’s “guest house,” and the house manager (and/or other center staff) will be helping drive me around to my different sessions and appointments.

I know these folks. I absolutely trust them, and I know for certain that they are going to take good care of me.

And yet. My inner control freak is not entirely happy with the idea of letting go of the steering wheel, both literally and figuratively. And the fact that I am so strongly feeling the limitations of my capacity to receive and to accept — even in something as simple as accepting car rides instead of taking care of myself through a rental car — well, that’s as clear a sign as any  as to why it’s a good thing for me to try and  unwind some of these old habits around false independence and isolation.

Time to try letting the care in.

———-

Image credit: http://www.pixton.com/schools/embed/uneyvcdq

The Fine Line Between Practice and Pressure

On By MezzoSherriIn Detox Journey, Self-Acceptance, The Pressure to Fix Myself, The Voices in My Head4 Comments

A couple weeks ago, I saw a sudden flurry of Facebook activity talking about the “40 bags in 40 days” Lenten challenge. Even though I’ve not been aware of the movement till now, I guess it’s been going on for a couple years or so?*

Anyhow, the challenge is concisely summarized over at White House Black Shutters:

A forty day period in the spring (coinciding with the 40 days of Lent) where you focus on cleaning one area per day. In this one area you challenge yourself to declutter, simplify, decrapify, and get rid of things you don’t need. The goal is one bag a day but you can have more or less.

The 2014 challenge officially goes from Wednesday, March 5th to Saturday, April 19th. Sundays are your day off.

Even though this tradition seems to have started among Christian bloggers, the discussions I saw this year included individuals of other faith traditions also taking up the idea as a way to bring inspiration and structure to a spring cleaning/decluttering effort.

I can absolutely see the appeal, and I gave the idea a long think for myself. After all, I’m betting we still have 40 or 50 boxes left to unpack,** and a lot of the unpacking process is about sorting through all the clutter I didn’t get rid of in Philadelphia and determining what’s going straight from a moving box to the Goodwill pile.

But ultimately, I opted out of the 40 bags/40 days challenge for 2014.

I have a well-developed skill of setting high bars for myself. I can take just about any structure that is meant to help in goal-setting and supporting regular practice of a thing — meditation, exercise, decluttering, what-have-you — and I will use it as a club to beat myself with when I inevitably fall short. ‘Cos I’m human, and sooner or later I’m gonna miss a day’s practice. But I’m not yet all that good at forgiving my human foibles, dusting off the day’s “failure,” and getting back into the practice tomorrow.

So it just didn’t sense like I had the internal capacity this year to be kind to myself within a set structure like the “40 bags” challenge. I’ll be curious to see if I’m in a different place when Lent and spring roll around in 2015.

Till then, I’m doing what I am able to do within the boundaries of my limitations. Work weeks are tougher for me to do any unpacking/decluttering, but I’m building better Monday-Friday habits than I had in Philly about simple things like washing the dishes, putting my clothes away (or in the hamper) rather than leaving them on the bathroom floor, and making the bed.*** And then, each weekend day, I try to get at least one more box unpacked.

At some level, these are very much like goals for a daily practice, but there’s just enough softness and looseness around them that I’m better able to let go any sense of “failure” if there’s a weekend where I don’t unpack any boxes, and instead of immobilizing myself in the beat-up, I just get back to it next weekend and keep chipping away.

In my system, there can be something of a razor’s edge between “practice” and “pressure,” but I seem to be managing to keep myself on the right side of that fine, fine line.

* Considering that last year at Lenten time, I was finishing one job, starting another, and doing phase one of the “3 moves, 2 houses and 1 apartment in 6 months” relocation odyssey, I think I can be forgiven for my ignorance of this tradition.

** Small boxes (file box size, for the most part), so it’s slightly less terrifying than it sounds. Slightly.

*** Yes, the fact that these are victories says a lot about the dire straights we lived in back in Philly.

Not Trying To vs. Trying Not To

On By MezzoSherriIn Detox Journey, Don't you want to be thin?, Health at Every Size, Self-Acceptance, The Voices in My HeadLeave a comment

I have an incredible addiction to the idea of fitting in. Of looking normal, not seeming too crazy or “woo-woo” or “out there” — whatever punitive descriptions the cult of rationality use to condemn someone who believes in Spirit, the energetic system, and so on. The idea of being judged negatively carries way more import to me than is healthy, as does my level of upset around the possibility of having people make false assumptions about me and my life choices.

Given those emotional addictions, this next series of posts feels very scary to write.

———-

In my first couple posts back here, I alluded vaguely to some self-care and detox “projects” I had coming up in the near future. The most significant of those is that I’ll be starting a round of the HCG detox program near the end of the week.

Anyone googling “HCG” is not going to find much of anything that’s discussed through the lens of detoxing — it’s all been subsumed under the cultural obsession with weight loss. This source at least calls it a detox program, but pretty much the rest of the text is an ad for HCG as a weight loss tool. And this article in Slate, plus this blog (and the two she links to) are pretty typical of everything else I’ve found online about HCG: something worth doing all because it makes the numbers on the scale go down. Because the numbers on the scale are quite possibly the most important detail for measuring* a woman’s value as a human being.

So it’s feeling a little weird as I’m moving towards this experience. I know my focus and intention are on detoxing a life’s worth of accumulated poisons (dietary, environmental, emotional). I know it to my bones.

Point of fact: I’m flying some few hundreds of miles away from Boston so I can start this journey in partnership with a detox center that is coming from that same place of intention, rather than going to the Boston-area places that are all about offering HCG on a menu with lipo, botox and laser peels… If I was in a weight loss frame of mind, there’s options just around the corner that don’t rack up the frequent flyer miles.

My goal in this is not about losing weight. But my research makes me pretty sure that I will lose some weight in the weeks ahead. And I have a lot of complicated feelings about that.

I worry about being seen as someone betraying the ideals of fat acceptance/fat activism by making this choice.

I worry about the likelihood that members of the “general” fat-shaming public will likely applaud me for losing weight, and the ways that false assumption will tempt me towards violent angry outbursts.

I worry that no matter how frequently or clearly I am able to articulate my intention for the HCG to be about detoxing, I worry that the experience will still be co-opted into weight-loss discourse — because that discourse is just so fucking strong in this culture. (After all, even the most outspoken fat activist really secretly just wants to be thin, right?) Something about this possibility of co-option fills me with the fiery rage of a thousand suns. Like by losing weight, I’ll be letting “them” (the fat-shamers) win — and oh! I don’t want to let them win.

And yet. In a place of deep to my core unflinching honesty, I also need to own that I worry about the possibility that some small part of me is going to be happy about losing weight. ‘Cos no matter how strongly I try to speak and live from an FA perspective, I’ve had the same share of fat-shaming brainwashing that you’d expect any middle age, middle class heterosexual American white woman to have had. And even though my internal fat-shamer doesn’t come out a lot, she’s still in my system, just a little bit. And I don’t want to let her win, either.

———-

A week or two ago, I read a post on Fierce, Freethinking Fatties that has given me a tiny bit of a lifeline for at least some of these complicated feelings. The post looks at the possibility of weight loss occurring as a result of someone adopting HAES (health at any every size) principles, and marks the distinction memorialized in my post title:

There is a difference between not trying to lose weight and trying not to lose weight. One means that your focus is elsewhere. . . . The other means that you are actively attempting to either stay the same weight or gain weight. . . . [M]ost people I come across who are fat and follow a HAES lifestyle fall into the first category. The act of practicing HAES usually means that they are interested in increasing their health. They are not trying to lose weight, because they are using other means to measure their success. . . . You might lose weight. And that’s okay. You aren’t going to have to turn in your Body Acceptance club card if you do. It just means that your body is changing because you’re adopting different habits.

(There’s a lot more good stuff where these words came from. Seriously, if you haven’t already followed the link up above, this one will take you there, too.)

I’m not trying to lose weight. But if I do lose weight as a side effect of choices I make for their detox and energetic benefits, that’s okay. In a complicated “mostly-okay-but-also-kinda-anxious” sort of way. But it’s what I’ve got for now.

* “Measuring.” Like weight. See what I did there? *grin*

———-

Edit: Because “any” and “every” start with different vowels and create different acronyms when used in phrases, and because it is a nice show of respect to get people and organizations’ names correct…

Getting My Nerd On

On By MezzoSherriIn The Voices in My Head, Topics of Study1 Comment

It’s been a long few weeks at work, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that I’m choosing to enjoy a quiet Friday night at home rather than going out. (This decision is aided by the unfortunate fact that Mr. Mezzo is going INTO a long week or two at his job, so he’s still in his office as it nears 8:30 PM.)

Still, I daresay my chosen form of Friday night relaxation helps prove me to be the Grade A nerd that I truly am.

And how am I choosing to relax? By digging into the materials for the Coursera class that started on Tuesday but that I haven’t yet had time to look at. (See note above, re: a long stretch of crap at work.)

Some number of months ago, I became aware of the field of behavioral economics.* It became something I wanted (eventually) to learn more about as a way to deepen my understanding of human decision-making and all the ways it functions emotionally rather than rationally. I even bought a book on the topic (Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely) that has, to date, been gathering dust on the shelf.

But now Prof. Ariely is doing a Coursera course titled “The Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior,” which seems like a great way to dip my toes into this topic. And it’s being led by the same guy whose book I wanted to read and whose research I wanted to learn about. How cool is that?!

So I registered — it’s free after all — and when the class kick-off emails arrived a few days ago, I just bookmarked them for when this difficult work-week was over.

Which it now is.

So I have saved the Week 1 readings into a Dropbox folder, downloaded the Coursera app onto my iPad, and am about to crawl into bed to start reading and watching video lectures.

I haven’t yet decided whether or not I’ll do another castor oil pack while I’m lying down to “do my homework.”**

* A story for another day.

** Do I live the glamorous rock star life or what?

Counting in Glacial Time

On By MezzoSherriIn Meta-Blogging, The Voices in My Head6 Comments

Okay, that was one hell of a hiatus.

I am somewhat comforted to see that the Merriam-Webster definition of the word uses an author’s and a (rock?) band’s five-year hiatus as examples in the usage notes. You see, I only took 4-and-a-half years off,* so I’m ahead of the game, right?

Something like that.

Anyhow, it’d be redonkulous to try and summarize all that time in a post, so here’s just a couple random highlights:

  • Our New England wedding (3 years ago) was (mostly) delightful, with me in all my Spanx-less glory, and our New England road trip honeymoon was sufficiently inspiring that we ended up moving up to the Boston area within the last year
  • In between those two life transitions I started a different blog,** and spent lots of time and energy on work and my TV addiction. (And iPad games.)

Throughout this time, I have also (especially?) been continuing my consciousness study. Something I’ve been looking at during the last six months especially is the sense of wanting to write about what matters to me, but not really knowing what it is that I have to say or to write about.***

And then, as I was thinking over some self-care projects that I have coming up, I remembered this blog and re-read the posts from all those years ago.

Maybe I’ve known what it is I have to write about for a while now. Maybe I just set it aside till I was in a better place to take it on.

* Well, 4 years and 7 months, but who’s counting?

** Which also got mostly abandoned. Evidently, I have been better for the starting of things than the sustaining of them.

*** Doesn’t that sound kind of hilariously familiar? (The more things change…)

Of Lunchtime and Lingering Habits

On By MezzoSherriIn Don't you want to be thin?, Fat is Just an Adjective, The Pressure to Fix Myself, The Voices in My Head17 Comments

This week at work has been on the crazed side, but I’ve been trying to carve out enough time to lunch with colleagues in the cafeteria — just for the sake of some conversation and to get a bit of a break. Yesterday, however, that streak ended and I found myself eating at my desk. My traditional bring-from-home lunch: a Lean Cuisine frozen entree.

Let me say that again: Lean effing Cuisine. Food designed and marketed to help one lose weight.

I’ve been eating these for lunch at work for years. I can’t recall what I did during the grad school/teaching years, but by the time I was in the office environment with lunchrooms and microwaves, my transition from skinny kid to fat adult had commenced and I started buying the frozen entrees as something quick and convenient and that also would help me “get thin again.”

Now, I consciously decided to stop dieting somewhere in 2008, when I chose to embrace the ideals of FA for myself. And yet I’ve been buying diet meals for office lunches for all of those intervening months.

And I didn’t even really notice that weird contradiction until yesterday.

I’m trying to imagine what rationales have been going on in my head for me to simultaneously eschew dieting and to buy diet lunches for myself. Is it another twist on the good fattie/bad fattie pressure I talked about two days ago? My symbolic gesture that yes, I am eating healthy so if I’m fat then it truly is about genetics and not about me eating “too much” or “the wrong things”? Is it that notion of “this fat but no fatter” that was so insightfully discussed* on Shapely Prose recently? My way of trying to “hold the line” so my body stays at this current weight?

Either of those possibilities seem reasonable — and by that I mean “reasonably likely,” not really reasonable.

But I can’t help wondering if there’s something both more innocent and sinister at work here.

On the one side, there’s the innocence of it being an unconscious choice. In a life that can sometimes feel over-full, I find comfort in having some routines. And this choice for bring-from-home lunches is such an easy choice for me to make. (Which definitely says a lot about my class privilege and the fact that I can be so cavalier about the cost factor.) There’s a narrow little shelf in the freezer that perfectly holds 6 Lean Cuisines, and Matt and I know exactly which are my favorite flavors, so we can easily restock that shelf on each trip to the grocery store.

On the sinister side, is the way that this is such an easy choice to make. The miasma of body-shaming in society kind of makes it easier to be on a diet than not to be. Lo-fat, no-fat — and Lean Cuisines — are practically configured to be the default food choice for a woman to make. I think it’s the power of that miasma that helped me not only to continue the Lean Cuisine habit, but to do it so very unconsciously. To not even notice that I was buying diet food. I was just buying my “normal lunch.”

Powerful messages to try and resist. And I’m feeling tonight that I’ve got a long way to go in that.

Especially because when I did the grocery shopping today, I bought 3 more Lean Cuisines to restock the freezer shelf. I just didn’t have the mental energy to figure out how to reinvent my lunch habit, or to reinvent my mornings to make time for more preparation-intensive lunch choices.

At least this time it was a conscious choice. That at least gives me more of an option to choose differently, once I have the energy to do so.

* Too tired to find link; will do so tomorrow.

Addicted to Life

On By MezzoSherriIn Fat is Just an Adjective, Health at Every Size, Self-Acceptance, Spirituality, The Pressure to Fix Myself, The Voices in My Head8 Comments

One of the topics that often circles through FA circles is a healthy skepticism about any dieting lifestyle change rhetoric that too strongly embraces that associates heaviness with addictive eating. Such skepticism is well-founded in part because fatness looks to be a way more complicated and individualized phenomenon than can be captured in a simple “calories in > calories exercised off” equation.

The other Very Good Reason to be skeptical is the cognitive dissonance around classifying a substance that is essential for the maintenance of life as an addiction — as if food is somehow like other addictive substances (like alcohol or drugs) that can be completely excised from life.*

This in large part is noodling around my brain again because of an insightful post over at Kataphatic.** It will be very hard for me not to quote the post in its entirety, but I’ll do what I can to pull out a passage or two that really started my wheels turning.

Katie was writing about the Candidacy Guidebook that lays out the steps on her path towards ordination as a deacon in her church, and specifically about a passage that discusses the need for substance abuse counseling for many individuals “who become dependent on alcohol or other drugs or food.”

Katie’s initial response is charming enough to warrant a healthy quote:

So here I am, reading along, thinking, “yep, I’m with you here, it’s not healthy for ministers to become dependent on alcohol or other drugs or… food?

Wait what? (cocking my head to the side and raising one eyebrow)

Does that really say FOOD?

Are they really saying that as a minister I am supposed to become super human and no longer be dependent on food??” [ . . . ]

Ooohhhh, okay.

So what they really mean is “emotional dependence.” Not just “dependence” period… because suggesting that we could become “dependent” or “addicted to” something that is actually necessary for our survival is just… silly, right? No one in their right mind would suggest otherwise! Right?

haha… hah… *sigh*

Katie goes on to thoughtfully examine notions about emotional dependence on food, suggesting that comfort food could perhaps more readily be classified amongst a whole host of self-soothing behaviors that are okay in moderation but could become problematic if taken too far. She also cautions about some of the dangers she sees that can stem from placing too much of an emphasis on “emotional eating” as something to self-monitor and judge oneself for.

It’s all very wise and heart-centered and I encourage you to read it all. But, in a narcissistic it’s-all-about-me moment, I’m going to riff off of her closing words:

But just because you’re fat, or just because you “emotionally eat” from time to time, doesn’t mean you have a disordered relationship with food! God has purposefully chosen to make this thing we need—food—bring us pleasure, draw us closer in community, and give us emotional comfort in addition to satisfying physical hunger. Let us be thankful for the good gift of food, and its ability to enhance our lives in such a complex and beautiful variety of ways!

I find real comfort here.

I’ve shared earlier about some of the ways it’s a tough summer for me. In addition to these upheavals (good and grief-laden) in my personal life, I’m still in my first 6 months at a new job which is rather demanding, and I’m starting coursework to begin the long road to an MBA. So in the midst of all of this, yes, I have been taking occasional refuge in the macaroni and cheese.

I know intellectually how FA activists work against the symbolic opposition of the “good fattie” (someone with pristine nutritional and exercise habits who remains fat) vs. the “bad fattie” (someone with imperfect eating and exercise habits). But as I’m trying to find my own voice in FA circles, I can feel the weight of internal pressure about how I’m not being a “good example” of Fat Acceptance, and I’m not being any sort of example for the idea of Health at Every Size. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

As I’m trying to find my own voice in FA circles, I can feel the weight of these internal pressures. But I can also tap into a growing sense of internal resource and acceptance that helps me resist such pressure. That helps me understand how turning to comfort food is an entirely natural way to respond to all the pressures and changes going on in my life. (One might even call it a healthy response, as compared to other self-soothing behaviors that got a little bit out of control in my life a decade or two ago.)

Perhaps best of all, as I continue to find my voice in FA circles, is the way that I don’t have to stand alone against the voices of internal pressure. Instead, I can be part of a community from which I can draw wisdom and support. Like I did from Katie’s post.

Blessed be.

* I do not mean to minimize how hard it can be for an addict to cut alcohol or drugs out of one’s life. I merely wish to make an obvious contrast between the theoretical possibility of letting go of a substance like alcohol — which has no inherent physical necessity for human life — versus the notion of giving up food — which is necessary for life.

** Allow me to pause for a brief squee over how terrifically inspired I am to know that there’s a blog out there writing about Fat Liberation Theology. Squeeeee!

The Selfishness of Body Dysmorphia

On By MezzoSherriIn Fat is Just an Adjective, Self-Acceptance, The Voices in My Head7 Comments

So we fly north tomorrow for the family/funereal weekend. My suitcase is mostly packed: I’m sure I have way too many clothes for the length of trip, but there’s a lot of different elements to plan for.

One major element is simply the way I inevitably begin to have an internal freak out whenever I’m about to see my family.

However much of a grownup I am in my day-to-day life, however much progress I’ve made in bringing fat acceptance into my life and growing my sense of self-acceptance, I still revert back to all sorts of self-judging habits when I go back into the family environment in which I spent all those awful awkward school years.

So instead of finishing my packing, instead of journaling, or showering, or doing any other thing that might better prepare me to take care of myself and support my family and honor my father — instead of any of that, I am feeling down on myself because when I am up in New England, I am “going to look like  whale” next to my older sister who got the athletic/skinny genes.

I was speaking to one of my spiritual teachers last night, looking ahead to this trip, and discussing the ways I fear it will be a more sorrowful experience for me than even the original funeral was. (His death was so sudden, I really truly think I was in shock for the funeral and a couple weeks after.) We also talked about this slide into the old “unhappy adolescent” headspace I could feel coming in, and the way that my current 40-year-old fatness has just been completely co-opted into the narrative of nasty self-talk this voice in my head spews out.

Not one to mince words, my teacher encouraged me to fight this voice. “You’ve got so many great things going on, and this is the voice that keeps you from enjoying any of it. This is the voice that shits on your life.”

And I am really angry about this internal pattern of mine tonight. So many things it’s keeping me from. I’ve listed some of those thing above, and I could sit and type and list more things for quite a while. Like the fact that I haven’t seen my niece and nephew since Christmas, and I could treasure another chance to see them, and also open my heart to be ready to support them as they face the first significant loss of their young lives. Like the fact that Matt has been so supportive of me in my grief, and how grateful I am to have him to lean on during the next few days. Like…. Like…..   Like…..

Or, to boil this down to its most essential feature: when I let myself fall into this space of dysmorphia and self-hatred, it keeps me from my life.

The Comparison Trap: When Blogging meets Life

On By MezzoSherriIn Meta-Blogging, Self-Acceptance, Spirituality, The Voices in My Head5 Comments

It’s interesting to me how my patterns of inadequacy and “not enoughness” can seep into so many corners of my life so subtly and so intractably.

Like here.

I started a blog because I wanted place to explore my own thoughts about self-acceptance. And yet I’ve found myself with a case of writer’s block these several days. Call it the Ecclesiastian block, a.k.a. the “nothing new under the sun” syndrome. Everywhere I look, it seems, there’s writers out in the blogosphere who are examining any topic I might, and they’re doing it with wit and thoughtfulness and profundity. In other words, they’re all doing it “better than I could” — at least, that’s what the voice in my head is telling me.

In other other words, I have fallen right into the comparison trap.

Comparison is just about the most effective self-esteem killer I know. After all, if self-esteem is intertwined with self-acceptance, what is the effect on self-acceptance when I look outside myself for the standards of how to be? Basically, it’s me stacking the deck against myself. Instead of honoring what is authentically Sherri, I judge my existence against someone else, which gets me into this loop where I beat up on myself for my inability to be someone else.

The absurdity of that logic should be evident in that last phrase I typed: beat up on myself because I can’t be someone else. Asking, expecting myself to be someone I’m not. And how fucked up is that expectation to put on myself?

After all, like Dave Matthews asked years ago, “Could I have been anyone other than me?”

Nope. And yet I so often fall into that trap of trying to be someone else, expecting to act like someone else, and then being bitterly disappointed and self-blaming when I (inevitably) fail in that project.

The road away from that habit has been a long one, and it’s not been an uninterrupted journey. But more and more I’m able to tap into an awareness of my authentic self, and the faith that I am authentically, uniquely perfect in my existence.

“Could I have been anyone other than me?” No, and that’s a reason to celebrate and to honor. And the beauty of that notion — and the fragility with which I am currently able to hold it — is likely the reason why that particular song always makes me tear up a little bit…

So in addition to Dave, I’m going to try and take a notion from my man Stephen Sondheim:

George: I’ve nothing to say

Dot: You have many things

George: Well, nothing that’s not been said

Dot: Said by you, though, George

“Said by you, though.” Things that have been said, things that are being said elsewhere, things that will be said differently by others — those things are still worth saying by me, if they’re things I want to explore and express. Because there is an essential difference between my voice and another writer’s. When I’ve fallen into the comparison trap, I fixate on that difference as the reason why my thoughts are “worse,” and why I shouldn’t bother saying them in public.

But when I separate myself from the habit of judgement, that same awareness of difference is the road to believing my words deserve their own airing. Not ‘cos they’re “better” than anyone else’s. Just because they are unique and strangely perfect in their own way, their own moment.

So I guess I fell into the black hole real fast, but at least I’ve come out of it pretty quickly.