Category Self-talk | Michelle Brewer

January 11, 2016February 7, 2016 by Michelle Brewer

My Year of Blogging Vulnerably

At the beginning of this year, I committed to blog 100 times in 2016. That is an average of roughly twice a week with a couple of weeks off for good behaviour (or vacation or sickness). Here it is January 11^th and only one post to date. Hmmm. I am a little bit behind schedule.

I can tell you that it is not a shortage of things to say. My mind is constantly whirling with one of two things. To start, ideas about how my relationship to food is a mirror/substitute in my life for my life. This is important to explore and discuss because I constantly hear how my experience is representative of many other women’s relationship to food, and because I am convinced that it has so much to do with our situation as women in this still patriarchal Western world. What I mean is “internalized oppression:” that is both about how we have internalized the social-political limitations of yore as negative self-talk about our appearance, especially about our bodies, that continues to limit us, and how we use gossip and criticism of other women–again about appearance and body–to police and confine them so that they don’t have lives bigger than ours. (Yes, there is a fuller blog post in there sometime soon).

I am enough.

How can something that feels so wrong actually be oh so right?
Why you shouldn’t always believe what you’re thinking.

Oh my God…what have I done? What was I thinking to share my ideas like that? Who am I to think I can be on a mission to spread the word about mindful eating? I am still working through eating issues myself. Who am I to think I can be a specialist in this?

This is exactly what was blaring through my head when I woke up Monday morning after two days at the amazing workshopping weekend “The Good One Hundred Experiment” for businesses and projects out of Edmonton that focus on the social and local good. Even though I loved the weekend, got amazing feedback on what I was doing with mindful eating, and met some truly fantastic people, my overall take away at that point was that I was a fool for sharing myself like I did. I was sure that the people there were thinking what a quaint little project I had but was truly out of my league, or what I loser I was for talking so openly about something that is better seen as a private and shameful issue that only belongs to weak and undeserving people. (Underscore the word shameful–more to come.) When I was thirteen and started to gain weight, I learned pretty quickly that my ‘go to’ position on my weight gain was to give the world the impression that it did not matter to me…in spite of all the pain I was feeling inside. That way, people wouldn’t be able to use it against me. Now, here I was some thirty years later telling a room full of participants that it was my issue, and it meant the world to me. I felt naked.