(Short Life Update) Tis The Season Of Manufactured Discontent – How To Navigate This Season Bonus Holiday Episode

"You are NOT enough."

"You don't have enough."

"You haven't done or accomplished enough."

"How will you make sure you become your highest and best self in 2024? What are you going to do to fix, change and improve all the things that are WRONG with you right now?"

"How will you manifest that perfect future where all of your flaws have been erased and you are finally that ideal version of self you've been trying to become?"

"Are you lonely? Do you feel unsatisfied? Struggling to find your place? Are you plagued with self doubt? Self sabotage? Bad habits? Bad parts? A broken brain?"

"Good."

"We have a program, course, and consumer good for that."

At this time of year more than ever, pretty much everywhere we turn, we're going to be activated into a state of manufactured discontent.

Stress about who we are, what we are, what we've done, what we haven't done, where we are in life and this is by design.

Today, I want us to take a HUGE step back, so that we can critically look at all the toxic messages that are likely to overwhelm us at this time of year.

All the messages that fill us with shame, guilt and a sense of incompleteness that drive us into the next round of self improvement.

All of the false hope that tells us if we just try hard enough, push hard enough and invest in the right things, that we can transform ourselves into the ideal versions of self we KNOW we 'should' be.

All of the noise, all of the chaos and all of the voices that take us out of our center and keep our gaze locked on a way of life that can only lead to more pain, struggle and shame.

Today we're going to unpack how to move through these holiday times without losing our self love. Without falling for the messages of society that tell us how deeply unworthy we are. Without getting caught up in the idea that the only hope we have is to fix, change or otherwise get rid of parts of ourselves.

Today we're going to look at WHY everything gets turned up so much this time of year, and how we can walk away from these next few weeks more solid in our self love and less discombobulated by all the negativity.

We don't have to get trapped in self hate this time of year. We don't have to get overwhelmed and we don't have to get locked in the cycle of never ending self improvement.

**I also want to clarify! That by saying that I am doing better in comparison to lots of others who have similar issues to me does NOT mean I am saying that those others are less than, making bad/worse choices than me/I'm better than them' on any level. We are all at different places and I have had opportunities that have helped me that I know many others don't have. I was only trying to express that I very much could, and likely SHOULD be worse than I am.**

<3

**Also a Special Note about someone asking if this is tied to my history with ED and how I see this fitting into the larger narrative of manufactured discontent**

What I would say is, yes I for SURE had an eating disorder - growing up chronically ill and in a household where I was perpetually gas-lit about this, blamed, told it was all in my head and basically ignored or made to feel like I was a burden, I developed feelings of hate towards my body because it really felt like it was my body that was keeping me from being loved.

Then when my hormones went totally wonky in my early teens and THIS is when my caregivers started to 'care' and pay attention to me (in really toxic ways) this of course added fuel to the fire. But then when I started to take the reigns of my health and change my diet and look into alternate healing - there was a part of me doing it to be thin, and a part of me that just DESPERATELY wanted to feel better - the constant stomach aches were debilitating, but at the same time they had been my entire life experience so I didn't even really have a concept at the time that what I was feeling wasn't normal.

Then for many years yes, I hyper restricted and over-exercised - and ironically I was the HEAVIEST during this time I have ever been in my life - for many years. I essentially tried to lose weight for about a decade and was almost entirely unsuccessful.

That's when I had that first self love breakthrough - that I had to let go of trying to change or control my shape, that I had to accept whatever weight my body wanted to be at because I clearly didn't have control. That's when I made EVERYTHING about how I FELT instead of how I LOOKED and really started to do all the long, hard mental work of healing my relationship with my body, no longer seeing it as an enemy, no longer scape-goating all my pain onto it - and that's when I had to do a LOT of emotional/trauma healing.

My eating disorder was *partly* due to body hate and shame yes, but it was also due to the many, many symptoms of pain that I had every single time I ate, how sick I was and just trying to feel better - so it wasn't so straight forward as just healing my relationship with my body and then being 'normal' after that. I was deeply, deeply sick, and so healing my relationship with my body left me in a place of being able to SEE how sick I was, for the first time, and being able to realize that I hadn't caused my own illness, and likely wouldn't have developed an eating disorder had I not been so sick.

From there, I really haven't changed how much I am eating, and have reduced exercise dramatically over the years - and my weight has fluctuated due to having figured out a LOT of my health issues that I NEVER would have even realized were there had I stayed in my eating disorder where it was all about just trying to control my weight. Letting go of trying to control how I look made it possible for me to actually see what was going on with me.

I would attribute healing from my eating disorder TO figuring out my chronic illnesses. Then from there, from that time where I was at that 'perfect weight' to now - I actually eat basically the same amount and work out even LESS then then, but I have changed WHAT I am eating so much to match my actual conditions, and this has meant a LOT of the swelling and inflammation I was carrying around that looked like weight has left. If you just compare my face from then to now you can see how much the swelling has come down.

Learning to not make it about my weight helped me to actually see what was going on with me. It helped me to understand that I was having symptoms. It helped me see that so much of what I was experiencing wasn't normal. Getting past all that shame and guilt for my size meant I could connect with my body, how it actually FELT, what felt good and bad - and that has brought SO MUCH healing. Again even just figuring out I had MCAS a few years ago and not changing the amount of food I am eating but changing WHAT I am eating lead to weight loss because it just brought SO MUCH inflammation down. I think people also don't realize that the weight you're at isn't just about calories in and calories out - because again there were times when I was significantly heavier than I am now, eating WAY less and working out WAY more - because it was all so against what my biology needed.

Learning to love my body and stop shaming her was the REASON I figured all of this out! Otherwise I would have just been stuck in trying to control my weight and that totally obfuscated everything else.

This last bought of weight loss happened purely because I was on a new medication that was mediating some of my symptoms, but causing weight loss that I tried to mitigate with changing my activity levels and food intake - but it wasn't enough to off-set, so my doctor and I have decided it's better to manage the symptoms in other ways and come off the meds - which means I should just naturally re-gain what I lost.

Long story short, yes, I totally had an eating disorder AND a big part of that eating disorder CAME FROM being SO SICK and not having any other way to try to feel better. Also from a lot of mental and emotional abuse. It came from never being believed, from being shamed and guilted, from being sick and not knowing it - there were so many reasons and it was very messy and complex.

In the healing of that, led me to seeing what was ACTUALLY going on with me, learning how to work with that, and again seeing that in real reality, I don't actually have control over my weight. Due to all the conditions going on with me, it's a constant game of trying to heal, figuring out what makes things worse and better, and the weight is just something that happens or doesn't at this point. It took me a long time to even become AWARE of a lot of my symptoms, because it many of them were so normal to my experience, I had no idea they were even symptoms. I used to eat foods I was very much allergic to and had no comparison - so cutting them out and feeling so different - it was a huge discovery. This is part of the complication of not having a healthy 'before' to compare to - to even see what I was sick with took a long time!

It's very complicated, but long story short, I know I don't have control over my weight and trying to manage my health is complex - but I am constantly figuring things out, making progress, feeling better, trying things, some things work, some things don't - and that's the complex web of a chronic illness. You have to just keep trying and finding what works and living for mobility and feeling because how you look is essentially out of your control for the most part.

This brings me to my larger point about manufactured discontent and how much judgement and shame are still a huge part of our culture. I have literally been body shamed at every size I've ever been. I've been told I'm horrible, evil, a lier and all sorts of hurtful things purely because we still live in such an ableist society that projects onto all of us that we have perfect control and if we are suffering or don't look normal, that this means we must be doing it to ourselves and that this is a reason we are then allowed to judge, shame and write people off. It took me years to realize that I had been sick my whole life and that I didn't do this to myself because of this narrative. I believed I was to blame for everything and even gas lit myself that dieting did this to me - when in reality I started dieting BECAUSE I was so sick in the first place.

Our culture keeps us in this perpetual state of shame and feeling not enough - and this idea that we all have total control over our health (or any aspect of life for that matter) and can just choose to be perfect if we want, and that we are failures or frauds in some way if we don't have that, that we are to blame and that it's ok to assume people are just making bad choices or are delusional in some way, when we know nothing about them - it's part of the division that keeps us fighting against ourselves and one another instead of seeing the larger system and how it needs to change.

This is a massive tool of the system to keep us radically disempowered with us believing we are acting in empowerment.

The reality again is I have no control over my weight. I never have. And it took years of work to accept that and move to a place where I knew I would be judged and shamed and I had to learn to love myself enough to keep putting myself out there despite that, and to keep pursuing healing even as that's meant lots of weight fluctuations over the years.

This self love path of moving through all the shame and living for feeling has saved my life - and it's why I do this work. I want us to get to a place of compassion for ourselves, so we can then have compassion for others. Everyone is doing their best. Everyone is worthy of love and kindness not judgement and rejection. None of us have perfect control. That's the main thing. We have to get past this false idea that we are shameful and guilty and always to blame for what we do, so we can see true root causes and heal.

None of us have it all figured out - including me - but the longer I walk this path the more I learn, the more tools I get and the better life becomes. It's just a progressive journey that's both beautiful and messy and again we all deserve compassion for the fact that we are all here trying. I would never choose to be this weight, and the truth is I have never been able to choose my weight - and I know that MOST PEOPLE can't choose theirs either. That's why the diet-industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. If it were actually possible for all of us to just choose our weight, we would all be at that weight and size and the industry would cease to exist. This narrative is again, deeply toxic and harmful and perpetuates so much manufactured discontent, navel gazing, shaming and division. I hope to be a part of changing that.

That's why I do this work.

We all need compassion and understanding that we have choices yes, and also, circumstances that are out of our control, and we need to live for how things ARE not how they LOOK. We need to start assuming the best in one another.

I acknowledge that not all comments about my weight are coming from malice and some are from genuine concern and I appreciate that. And I also feel again that a lot of them come from assuming they know more about me than I know about myself - which is again a big part of our conditioning - if we see someone who seems to be doing something other than what we are doing, we assume they are ignorant instead of assuming WE are ignorant. Because we are trained to be so closed off and ashamed of our stories, we see the complexity of our own lives, but project simplicity onto everyone else. It's a big web. But compassion can and will help us change this - and that's the whole point of this channel <3

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