After giving myself three weeks off, it feels hard to get back to posting again. We spent most of the last three weeks in Canada, and after considering what it would take for me to post while we were visiting and moving from place to place, I decided to give myself the break. It’s very easy for this newsletter to slip into the “should” category, to become an obligation that I impose on myself and then resent, so I decided to avoid doing that during our vacation, and instead let myself enjoy my trip guilt free. I couldn’t be happier that I made that choice.
But it’s hard to get back into the groove. Earlier this week, as I contemplated my busy week and full Saturday, I started talking myself out of posting this week too. I have so many things to do and exactly zero personal time, so I’ve been staying up late to deal with things like emailing Ava’s new school, sending client notes, or even just replying to days worth of text messages because I don’t have the time or brain space to do that during the day. My passport needs renewing, stat. I already feel so sleep deprived that staying up late on the weekend to get this thing written is just not an option. Maybe I’ll just give myself a full month, the voice started. I’ll just take August off entirely and then get back to business in September, no problem.
There is also the voice that says With everything going on in the world, how could I possibly keep writing about my own life, my own thoughts and feelings, as though those deserve to take up the same space as stories of war and injustice, a world on the brink? To that I have no answer, except that I think we all need respite from the heaviness that surrounds us, so it’s okay that my writing doesn’t focus on that. That particular perspective, that if my writing is not speaking straight to the heart of the most important things going on in the world, then it’s not worthy, is a very old one. It’s been with me as long as the desire to share my writing has been with me, and it’s kept me from sharing more times than I could count.
While I deeply admire the people who are able write thoughtful, educated and nuanced pieces about the various crises we find ourselves in, that is simply not the kind of writer I am. And that voice is simply another way that I resist doing my own work, and talk myself out of sharing the type of writing that I feel called to share. It’s hard to assert to myself, week after week, that I have something of value to offer. And when I don’t feel that what I have to share is particularly valuable (which is much of the time), it’s hard to push through the resistance and simply put something out there, for the sake of honouring my commitments to myself.
So each time I step away, there is resistance as I step back in.
Every time I go “home”, back to Toronto, back to Canada, my routines go off the rails. This has always been true, and it is also a narrative that I carry, a story that both judges me for slipping, and simultaneously lets me off the hook. Before leaving on July 31st, I had a 121 day meditation streak going, and had just started a new 3x/week workout schedule. This is to say nothing of my eating and drinking habits, which had been feeling really good.
I always start these trips back home with the best of intentions, but by the end, after weeks of living in other people’s houses, eating food either in other people’s homes or in restaurants, being offered drinks because it’s summer and we’re all celebrating our time together, I come home needing to reset.
In the past, I used to really wrestle with this. It seemed so hard to not give in to all of the temptations around me, the cinnamon sugar donuts at the cottage, the drink or two at dinners out with a friend. And it all seemed so high stakes. My health felt more fragile then, and I would end up with a flare up of pain or just feeling super anxious and depressed after all of the sugar and gluten and especially alcohol. But it also felt like a moral thing, like I was failing because I couldn’t simply say no. Despite ample evidence that these foods and drinks did not serve my mental or physical health, I could not, in the moment, resist them. It felt like weakness, and I judged myself heavily for it.
I’m just not interested in being hard on myself anymore, and, as ever, there is a middle ground here. There is so much space between fully abandoning all of the habits that serve and support me and keep me feeling healthy and happy, and trying to hold too tightly to routines and ways of eating that, in a different environment, are very challenging to maintain. Each time we visit, I do a bit better at walking this middle ground. My seemingly inevitable slide into eating ice cream sandwiches and having a drink every day is ever more gradual, it’s more conscious, and I let myself enjoy it fully, while also saying You know what, I won’t have that freezie at 11am. I just don’t need it.
Even though it’s a blue freezie and those are my absolute favourite, and even though I haven’t had one in probably 25 years but I still remember exactly how it tastes. Even though it’s painfully hot outside and it gleams up at me from the cooler, a single vibrant blue amid a sea of reds and purples and oranges, those clearly lesser flavours. Even though it’s dusted with frost and deeply nostalgic, and a bead of sweat traces its way down the hollow between my shoulder blades as I bend over the cooler. Even though I must pick it up and cut it in half and bring half to Jamie after his bike race, I won’t simply keep the other half for myself. Even though it’s right here, in my hand…
I hesitate for a moment as I consider it fully, then realize I really don’t want a shot of sugar straight to my system at 11am. So I put the second half back on ice, close the cooler, and walk away. It’s a small moment, but it feels good. It feels like growth.
While we were at the cottage during our first week away, Jamie and I got out for paddle board rides almost every day, and those felt great, but aside from that I didn’t exercise at all. I think I meditated maybe twice on the whole trip, and while I didn’t eat ALL the gluten, I definitely ate some. When we got back to SF last Sunday afternoon, we ordered salads from our favourite takeout spot, got a rotisserie chicken for dinner, and I made seed bread for the week. Monday afternoon Ava and I did our usual grocery shop, and just like that, we’ve been back to normal. I’m appreciating how easy it has felt to pick right back up from where I left off.
With the time difference, I’ve been waking up super early, so sitting in my little sunroom to spend five minutes meditating before I get in the shower each morning has felt easy too. I joined my usual workout class on Wednesday morning, had my final personal training session on Friday afternoon, and did an awesome hike with a friend on Saturday. Just like that I’m back to 3x/week.
As I sat down to meditate the other day, it occurred to me that breaking my streak of one hundred plus days of meditating every morning wasn’t what mattered. The important thing was that, the morning after we got back, there I was, sitting down to begin again. I thought about food then too, reflecting on my week and realizing that, just like that, things were back to normal. With all of this in mind, I realized that writing this week was actually extremely important.
And so, here I am, and it feels good to be back. Thanks, as ever, for being here.
K
I've often had the thought that while bad habits are hard to break, so are good ones! I'm already back to my good ones since I got home myself, after doing some over-indulging while away.