What's Your Story?

There is so much value to be gotten from hearing other people's stories. I suppose now that I am in a world where there is little time (no time) for telling stories, I miss that sort of connection that you get from knowing people by how they live their lives, not merely by the work they put in. I suppose I am guilty of confusing one for the other, withdrawing from living out my own story because I have been plagued with all these insecurities. What value do I have to give here? I have nothing more to prove. Right now, I am at a crossroads, in a way. I have decided to try to let go of things that are beyond my control. To admit my pace and work with it. To give myself the opportunity to be great at something that I love for a change.

Now that I have surreptitiously given myself the gift of more time, I have begun to read this book called Kitchen Table Wisdom, a book that I have tried to read a long time ago, but ended up shelving because I couldn't relate to it. After aging a few years, I find reading through it that I can finally delight in it and appreciate the wisdom that it contains. I'm sharing a few verses in the hope that they will inspire you to seek out wisdom, and not merely knowledge through other people's stories, again.

She said "Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering. Despite the awesome powers of technology many of us still do not live very well. We may need to listen to each other's stories once again.

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Real stories take time. We stopped telling stories when we started to lose that sort of time, pausing time, reflecting time, wondering time. Life rushes us along and few people are strong enough to stop on their own. Most often, something unforeseen stops us and it is only then we have the time to take a seat at life's kitchen table. To know our own story and tell it. To listen to other people's stories. To remember that the real world is made of just such stories.

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Until we stop ourselves or, more often, have been stopped, we hope to put certain of life's events "behind us" and get on with our living. After we stop we see that certain of life's issues will be with us for as long as we live. We will pass through them again and again, each time with a new story, each time with a greater understanding, until they become indistinguishable from our blessings and our wisdom. It's the way life teaches us how to live.

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All stories are full of bias and uniqueness; they mix fact with meaning. This is the root of their power. Stories allow us to see something unfamiliar through new eyes. We become in that moment a guest in someone else's life, and together with them sit at the feet of their teacher. The meaning we may draw from someone's story may be different from the meaning they themselves have drawn. No matter. Facts bring us to knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom."

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I just realized that I'm not sure I know my own story. But I intend to find out what it is, and maybe to learn through other people's stories as well.

The Wisdom of Letting Your Heart Break

New Year's Resolutions usually include the resolve to lose many unwanted pounds...but if you do decide to lose weight, do it for the right reasons. Reading this article, I could relate so much to it! Often when people let themselves go, they stop giving themselves permission to live a happy life. I know I am the same way. I always say I am not ready to be the heroine in my own love story because I am not pretty enough to be a heroine in real life. But if you can't be the star in your own real life, what is the point to being alive?

So for everyone who is (was) like me, unconsciously punishing themselves by not letting their own hearts break, read this! It's a good resolution to start the new year with.

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Let Your Heart Break

When you accept that hurting and healing are part of living, you can give up the fantasy that being thin controls your happiness

By Geneen Roth

His name was David, and I was crazy in love with him. The way his shiny dark hair curled around his collar, and how his long fingers waved oh so eloquently in the air as he talked. Every breath he took, every word he uttered seemed as if it was designed to crack my heart open. I wanted to spend my life with him, grow old with him, have more children than Angelina Jolie with him. The only teensy problem was that he didn't feel the same way about me. "I'm not attracted to you," he said. "It's not the same for me as it is for you!" he exclaimed.

Picky, picky, picky, I thought.

I was certain I could persuade him to love me, that he wasn't seeing clearly, that it was my job to show him that we were meant for each other. I was also certain that when I finally lost the 10 pounds I'd been losing and gaining for a hundred years, he'd be smitten.

And so I pulled out all the stops. I developed a sudden fascination for 18th-century architecture (his field), I baked coconut layer cake (his favorite), I dyed my hair blond (his preferred color). And most of all, I starved myself. I ate nothing but Grape-Nuts without milk for six weeks (don't ask). I chipped a few teeth, leached most of the calcium out of my bones, and probably depleted my muscle mass by half, but I did finally lose those 10 pounds. A few months into Project David, he fell in love with a size 16 brunette and moved 3,000 miles away.

Most of the people who come to my retreats and workshops believe in Control-of-Life-and-Death-by-Weight. They are convinced that loves and losses can be titrated in pounds. That if only they were thin or thinner, everyone who didn't love them would love them. Life would be magical, easy, illuminated. In other words, they believe what many of us believe: If we control what we put in our mouths (and the size of our bodies), then we can control everything else. So we spend our lives focused on losing weight, believing that thinness will provide invincible protection from rejection, grief, and sorrow.

But as you probably have already guessed (or experienced firsthand), when you are as thin as you can ever imagine, the people who didn't love you before will still not love you, and the people who did love you before will love you still. People will come, go, leave, and die, no matter how much you weigh.

Talk about busting childhood myths. As children, we all believed that it was in our power to make our parents happy. If our mother was depressed, if our father was absent, if our parents fought incessantly, we were convinced that it was in our power to make things better. It wasn't. But how we self-medicated those hurts with food was, and still is.

Listening to me say this, one woman in my workshop said, "But wait a minute! The problem is that I'm not in control of what I put in my mouth. If I were, I wouldn't be here!"

I responded, "If there is one thing about which we are in absolute and irrevocable control, it's what we put in our mouths. I understand that you don't feel that's true. I understand that you feel at the mercy of potato chips and pizza, but truly — it's only you who lifts your fork or fingers and puts the food in your mouth. It's completely up to you.

"And," I continued, "if there is one thing about which you are not in control, it's who loves you, stays with you, gets ill, or leaves you."

As long as you are saying, "Well, I may not be in a relationship now, but when I get thin, I will find the perfect partner," you give yourself the illusion that you're in control. You may not be happy now, you tell yourself, but someday soon you will make a change and Prince Charming will suddenly show up at your door. You fool yourself into thinking that you have total control over when your unhappiness will end and perfect happiness will begin. And it has something to do with your weight.

Next: How heartbreak can lead to overeating

Yesterday I received a letter from a woman who weighs 350 pounds. She wrote, "I have always believed deep in my heart that if I would just lose this weight, my parents would love me. They would also stop yelling, stop drinking, stop leaving. My husband would pay more attention to me. My money problems would vanish. My house would be clean. What if I lose the weight and those things don't happen?"

Losing weight does bring a feeling of lightness; more freedom to move; it puts less pressure on your joints. But it doesn't pay the bills, clean the house, or prevent people from getting sick or leaving or dying.

Before my father died, I tried everything to keep him alive. I bought him athletic shoes and exercised with him. I made sure he ate well. Part of my motivation, besides wanting him to be healthy, was that I was positive I couldn't live without him. But when he died, I grieved, I cried, and then life went on. When my cat, Blanche, died, I thought life was over. And then it wasn't. My best friend, Isabel, moved to Australia a few months ago, and I thought I'd never have another close friend. And then I did. Seems as if I've been wrong about quite a few things. But the thing I've been most wrong about is that having a broken heart is something to avoid at all costs.

It's the nature of hearts to break. It's in their job description. When a heart is doing what it's supposed to be doing, it holds nothing back. And sometimes it gets broken.

The hard part of emotional and compulsive eating is that in trying to avoid big heartbreaks, we break our own hearts every day. We eat more than our bodies want, we binge on foods that make us sick, we carry weight that makes it hard to move around. We tell ourselves mean stories about our thighs, our arms, our bellies. The cost of having the "when I am thin, everything will be fine" fantasy is that we end up trading the heartbreak of being alive for the heartbreak we cause ourselves.

And it's all to avoid something that can't be avoided. While we are postponing our joy for a future time when everything will be perfect, life is going on with or without our consent — and we are missing it. People come and go, pain comes and goes. But so does joy. And if our hearts are closed because we don't want to suffer, they won't be open enough to recognize the joy as it flies by.

Hearts are made to be resilient. Think about it: Is there one thing that's happened to you that you haven't survived? Here you are, right now, reading this article despite all the heartache you've had in your life. Something in you is still awake, alive, eager to learn, ready to be moved.

And once you know that your heart is resilient, once you accept that part of being here on earth is, as a friend of mine says, living among the brokenhearted, then you can take in the huge streaks of delight, joy, and happiness as well. Once you understand that everything will end, you can finally let your life — the one you already have, not the one you imagine you'll someday lose enough weight to deserve — begin.