I want to be friends with my body

My body and I have never been friends. For as long as I can remember, the point of a mirror and a scale were to find fault and reasons to criticize myself. My medical charts reporting the various failures of my various systems, same thing.

But my recent colonoscopy and labs are clear: my body is healthy. HEALTHY. For the first time in years. Which unfortunately is more complicated for me than I'd like it to be.

With the healing of my gut has come weight gain. This started happening right away, when I stopped expelling all of my food. (Duh.) With the encouragement of my therapist, I have very intentionally not stepped on a scale at home since March of 2022. At the doctor's office when I must be weighed, I turn around on the scale so I don't see the number.

And then yesterday my doctor messed up and I saw that stupid, stupid number on the scale that gives me such a complex. Friends, I am embarrassed to admit that I freaked the FUCK out. I thought I'd made *so* much progress in separating my worth from my weight and perhaps I have, but to see the number there, quite different from what it was at my lowest, was a challenge. I cried. At home I stood naked in the mirror and berated myself.

I'm ashamed that I would do this to me. My body has worked so hard to claw back to health, after years of being sick and weakened. I want to be grateful. I AM grateful. I am working very hard to remember that my lowest scale number was a representation not of some more virtuous self, but a self who got so sad and depressed that for a while she didn't eat, a self who spent so much time running to the bathroom after meals because of a gut that rejected food, a self who was dizzy almost every time she stood up.

I am stronger now. I'm also more substantial, in every sense of the word. I would like to make peace with that. I want to be friends with this vessel I live in, which carries me from place to place, which brings me pleasure and allows me to love and work and create.

I'm not there yet. I think I am currently at "wary detente, with potential for improved relations." Maybe when it comes to my body I'll always pendulum between fear and Fuck It, and back again, always wanting the middle and never quite getting there-- but still, always trying.

And maybe I can make peace with that, too.

On grieving the living

Life challenges seem to be thrown at me in patterns. Themes. Waves. Whatever it is shows up and then it's EVERYWHERE. It's in my clinical work and something I'm reading and in my personal experiences. It is exposure. It is immersion. It's entirely possible that the pattern only exists because of me. The technical term for this is priming effect-- you see a thing and your subconsicous is then ready to notice it again. And yet. I think it's equally probable that something bigger than myself is trying to show me something, repeatedly, so that I learn and grow. My recent thing is grief, but not necessarily death grief. I'm talking the grief you feel when you lose a person who is still alive. It's been everywhere, all around me, every day this week and last and maybe even longer. Many days I've turned my wet eyes up toward the sky and said, "okay, I hear you. I HEAR YOU. What am I supposed to be learning?" Here are my takeaways so far: *Grief is inevitable as I age, as me and those around me grow and change. In this way, pain is an artifact of time. It's okay to hurt. I'm not alone in this experience.

* I can miss a person SO SO much and want more than anything to get back to a way we used to be together. And sometimes that's not possible. Sometimes a person is so different that I may never get to interact again with who they used to be. It's a gutpunch but that doesn't make it less true. I can grieve for the past while moving toward acceptance of my present.

* Conversely, people in my life may miss previous versions of me, old Allisons who will never again return. They might have preferred the me I was at 15 or 20 or 25 or 30 or 35. But I can't build a life around being who others want me to be. I can't be everyone's type. I can grieve those who choose to distance from me without shaming myself for changing.

* I can't save people. It's not my job to "bring them back to who they really are," because that may not be a thing, and even if it were, I'm not that powerful or important. I will grieve those who change in a way that I believe to be destructive without taking responsibility for their wellbeing. Is there probably more here for me to learn? Yeah. That's what life is, I suppose-- an extended opportunity to learn hurt and pivot, learn hurt and pivot, rinse and repeat. So if you're grieving the living-- you're not alone. This is human. And I see you.