Two years ago I made a new year’s resolution to become a vegan. I’ll admit my decision had nothing to do with animal welfare. It was driven by entirely unrelated reasons. (That said, I do very much believe in animal welfare, and have since learned a lot about the heinous conditions we subject animals to… – rant suspended)
Firstly, I had spent the better part of the preceding decade fighting with my weight. I tried everything; no sugar, no bread, no eating after 6 pm, calorie counting, obsessive exercise. It got to an unhealthy place a couple times too.
But nothing I tried stuck.
After managing to go months without eating sugar, I relapsed.
After abstaining from ‘whatever’, I eventually broke and binged.
I resented feeling restricted and try as I might I couldn’t stick to limits. I yoyo’ed emotionally, as did my weight and my blood sugar.
I asked my GP for help. After monitoring my glucose levels twice a day for a month (something that required enduring needle pricks), and a couple fasting glucose tests, he told me I was pre-diabetic. There were meds I could take that would level things off.
“What if I change my lifestyle?” I asked.
“Well, you can try…” he answered, clearly not optimistic. I however had found the motivation needed to get off the diabetes fast track with all the finger poking. I was ready to figure myself out.
I told him I was too young to start with pharmaceuticals and that I didn’t accept it as the solution. I left the prescription on his desk. I was going to drastically change my lifestyle, whatever it took.
Back to trying everything. Back to relapsing, back to falling off the wagon, back to restrictions, back to hunger.
Months passed and I was beginning to wonder if I was wrong about the meds.
But before I surrendered, I committed to understanding more about why this was happening. It wasn’t just that I was eating for the sake of eating; I was in a relationship with food, an unhealthy relationship.
Food was tied up in so many of my life events, past and present:
The food rationing when I was a child, food delivered by trucks in the refugee camp where we lived for a time, food chosen in the grocery store but left behind at the checkout because there wasn’t enough money to pay for it. Empty cupboards in my independent living apartment when I was a ward of CFS, trying to survive off a monthly budget of $187 (electric heat, phone, bus tickets to school, clothes, little was left for food). The one meal a day voucher my high school cafeteria gave me.
I had spent a lot of time being hungry, and even when my life stabilized and I had the means to overfill my fridge and my pantry, I was haunted by hunger.
Learning this about myself, I embarked on an intense period of study. I surrounded myself with books, everything from self-help to ‘The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous’. It wasn’t long before I realized I was dealing with an addiction.
The root of my compulsion was fear. In an effort to not face my emotions, I ate them. Happiness was marked by tasty abundance; unhappiness was devoured. I ate to not feel afraid, I ate to forget, I ate to prove I was safe, I ate to…. [insert whatever you like, I ate for that reason too].
I ate and I kept an unforgiving pace at work and home, all efforts to outrun my wounds. I over booked myself, gave the best of me in the service of others, and stayed busy so as not to risk face my underlying pain. I ate unconsciously and without limit. When I could not eat anymore, I fed others. I showed love with food. Food was reward and punishment.
I was exhausted from feeling this way, from living this way.
Secondly, as I continued to learn about my late mother, I began to understand the patterns I was following. My mother had a very unhealthy relationship with food too. She spent her life, the portion I was a witness to, dieting. She didn’t like her body. In a letter to her best friend, my mother revealed a bit about her struggle, a mirror to my own. “…but I have no time for myself. Again, my blood sugar has spiked, I’m not taking meds yet, but I am dieting, and so I am constantly hungry.”
Constantly hungry, that is how I remember my mother.
Her words caused an ache in the pit of my stomach. She too was using food to mask deeper pain. Putting her life up against my own, and into the light, the parallels were impossible to ignore.
My sisters, naturally, were impacted by all of this too. Thus they were part of the dysfunction. One spent most of her teenage years being anorexic, the other was always dieting. We watched, we repeated. What my mother did when I was a child, became what I did as a mother with my own kids. I waited until they were done eating, leaving their unfinished plates on the table, then I ate their leftovers, on top of my own meal, so nothing would go to waste. I was ashamed of myself for how much I ate, so I restricted, until the hunger was too much to bear. Then I binged. On and on it went. How absurd was I in thinking that nothing went to waste? It did go to waste; it went into the waste bin of my body.
Going vegan was a decision made in desperation, my last ditch effort to reset my relationship with food.
Veganism required me to pay attention to what I was consuming, it required me to prepare food for myself (I was stunned to discover all of the animal products that are put into what would otherwise appear, or quite frankly should be, animal product free). Being the only vegan in my home meant I could not and would not eat after the children. Being vegan eliminated most pre-packaged foods. It wasn’t as easy to impulse eat either; I quickly got tired of apples and wasn’t yet well versed in other snack options.
Success.
Veganism slowed me down, it opened my eyes, and it demanded that I look after myself. What a departure from how I had been living, from how I was taught to live? And what a gift.
It’s been over two years and I’m going strong. (I admit to a couple moments where I slipped, but I’ve also learned not to allow a slip to undo everything accomplished.)
So arrived New Year’s Eve 2020; I love New Year’s by the way. I do. It’s a reset button, if you want it to be. It’s a line in the sand, a moment after which I get to start over. It’s a coping mechanism too, I know this about myself; it’s how I compartmentalize. From one day to the next, I get to box up a part of my life and put it on a shelf. I get to redefine myself. Yes, in theory, one can do this any day, I agree with that wisdom as well. I’m just saying that for me, New Year’s holds a special place in my life’s rhythm.
So what did I begin over two months ago?
Starting January first I resolved to meet the rising sun, every day, for as long as I could manage. Today, I saw the 66th sunrise of 2021. No single day has been the same, no single day has been without the gifts of hope and a renewed commitment to me.
Perhaps, you might ask, why do I share my journey from food to sunrise? How are they related?
They are to me.
You see, each of these acts represents an incremental step taken in what’s been a very long journey towards taking up space in my own life, towards feeling worthy of care, worthy of time, towards feeling safe in silence and solitude, towards facing the past without it having the power to steal the present.
I know this might sound absurd to you, except I don’t think it does, at least not to the people who also live and breathe their family, their work, their community, trying to change the world, all while healing from layers of trauma and rising each day against the weight of the past.
I was built to believe that anything and everything which serves others precedes all that serves me. I have had to deconstruct this lesson, break this pattern, and step off the path laid before me. In order to choose a different life, I’ve had to become the architect of my own.
Sunrise has meant all of that for me; the deconstruction, the breaking, the stepping off, the freedom to choose and the will to reaffirm that choice day after day.
Of course, there have been mornings I’ve had to move heaven and earth to walk out of my front door and keep the promise I made to myself. At times, seeing sunrise has meant getting up very early, several hours before it broke the horizon, to fit in my reading / learning time, to prepare breakfast, and quietly pack the kids’ lunches. To take 40 minutes out of the earliest hours of the day hasn’t been easy; I’ve held my ground even as life threatened to thwart my efforts.
The things in life that are truly worth doing are rarely easy.
My sunrises like my veganism have been my ‘small acts of civil disobedience’. I laugh as I write this, the words pulled from my pocket sized book “Civil Disobedience and Other Essays” by Henry David Thoreau. I know these aren’t acts of civil disobedience, not in the purest meaning of the words, but they kind of are. They are acts that honour the rights of the person, in my case, the woman, in contrast to the needs and wants of her family and community. That’s not to say that those two are mutually exclusive, they needn’t be, but if we’re very honest with ourselves, even today, still, they often are.
I’m going to end by sharing a quick exchange of words I had with my eight year old daughter. As I walked home yesterday I happen upon a beautiful coyote. We stood for a couple minutes looking at each other, no doubt, a mutual threat assessment. Then he relaxed and glanced away. I did the same, smiling, feeling deeply grateful for the moment. When I got home, I showed my daughter the picture I took of it, to which she said, “wow, mama, you’re so lucky…”
“Hmm”, I thought about her words.
Lucky?
My life has certainly been the auspicious meeting of luck and sheer determination.
Happy International Women’s Day my friends; here’s to loving ourselves (bodies, minds, and spirits) and remembering we are all worthy of a front row seat in our own lives.
