When I have anxiety, it’s this strange heat in my midsection. It starts just under my chest and pulses in all directions. I feel it tingle my fingertips and radiate down my legs. It travels up my chest, into my face, and up to my head, where I reel from the sheer weight of having to deal with this unwelcome reality every single day of my life.
I think, in my ways, I really used to be the kind of person that scoffed at New Year’s resolutions. My tendency was always towards taking the side of “you can make a change whenever you want – you don’t need a new year for that,” and while that’s still true in many cases, I have to say that I entered 2018 with a deep fire and a vigour for the burgeoning creativity in my life.
I’m sitting in my parent’s kitchen in Ottawa – the city in which I was born and raised. Two of my nephews just left, and I’m here writing this blog post, a cup of coffee next to me, and the most amazing fall weather just outside these four walls.
People read calorie counts to me, comment on the number of carbs in the menu item, and rationalize their decision to eat one option over another because “maybe it has more protein.” I use to feed into this mentality – the one so many of us have been conditioned to accept and perpetuate – that tells us it is not only necessary, but entirely healthy, to obsess over what we put into our bodies and share that information, as if saying it out loud and expressing your understanding of a 1,000 calorie meal being “unhealthy,” before anyone else can, makes the act of eating it entirely justified and acceptable (as if the act of eating it needs to be justified for being unacceptable).
Here’s something to consider: I don’t give a fuck what you eat, how much you eat, when you eat, or where you eat.
I’m never been one to dwell on numbers, let alone age. But, when you’re hit with another year, your beliefs and attitudes are suddenly eclipsed by thoughts of your own mortality, desperately dwelling on everything you thought you’d have accomplished by now.
