When Starving is Actually a Good Thing
I remember when I was working about eighty hours a week and still trying to give my best to my three littles at home. I was expecting to give 110% to each party. As if we could ever give more than 100% to one thing, yet I was trying to give more than that to two. I am sure that you have experienced this in some area of your life. Two competing needs or wants going head to head for your energy and time. Often we will simply default to obligation over quality and be consumed by overwhelming burnout.
And that’s exactly what happened. I not only burned out, I became incredibly ill. The illness in retrospect was actually a blessing. A big giant loud halt to the over-scheduled life I had been pretty successful at living. I realized it was physically (and spiritually, emotionally, and mentally) impossible to put 100% into two things at the same time.
During this time I was also trying to take better care of myself, but old self-sabotage habits completely demolished my meager self-care attempts. Yet again, I was trying to put 100% into competing aspects of my life. I was so used to serving self-hate as punishment from childhood (and adulthood) abuse, that I couldn’t quite figure out how to serve self-love because everything I tried felt like it wasn’t working. And it wasn’t.
You can’t have two masters as the quote goes. You have to choose where your energy and time will go. Throughout life, it will shift based on many things, but for the most part, we can choose where we place our hearts and effort. If you put your energy into self-hate, there isn’t much left for self-love. When things are scarce it’s hard to survive, and it will eventually starve off, so you must choose love to flourish and thrive.
I know this isn’t easy, especially after years of terrible habits that may have accumulated from the damage of other peoples’ hurts. So start small. Aim to do just one more loving thing for yourself than hateful. Tip the scale ounce by ounce until self-love becomes your new way of life.
For me, it will be a long road of continually learning this lesson in life, but I have come very far and couldn’t imagine ever going back to how I used to treat myself (worse than an enemy). The words I would tell myself, the punishing behaviors of rigorous demands I would place on myself to prove my worth, and the underlying belief that I was defective and worthless.
Yet by being brave enough to try one small thing at a time, I was able to offset a momentum that was contagious. It felt so weird and abnormal at first, but I was learning a completely new way of living after years of what I knew as “normal”. I couldn’t feed two masters any longer, so I chose to starve self-hate and nourish self-love. Doesn’t it always come back to love?
So…
Spend time writing down what you do that harms you and what you do that helps you. Put it in a two-column list, Venn diagram, or mind map. These would include things you know only hurt you or that definitely help you.
Can you identify the feelings you are trying to generate by adding helpful things into your life? Can you identify the emotional or situational triggers that cause you to do harmful things? (Note: they are usually complementary yin/yang type of pulls on each other)
Now that you have this blueprint, do simple audits with things that come your way...will this help you or will it harm you? All you have to do is choose a “help” one more time than you choose a “harm” and you will begin to tip your scale.
