ROAD BLOCK!

I have been trying to gather my thoughts today, because last week has thrown me like a tumbleweed through the air. I have been drifting, falling, and trapped this week. I have failed in my journey. I haven't tried. I have avoided, ignored, and in turn become what my enemies see and believe. The enemies who see only your weakness to define you. Who see your failure and assume your worthlessness. The ones who cannot see your strengths and goodness because of the blaring weaknesses you possess. The ones who doubt, judge, and assume. The ones who have predicted your failure and laugh.

I was told once, that I couldn't possibly be truly happy, because I was overweight. In that moment I had the clarity to know and respond that, "Happiness is not dictated by my weight." Yet those remarks have haunted me. I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that happiness comes from making right choices, living a righteous life, and striving to be better today than you were yesterday. Can my happiness be dictated by my weight? I believe not. I believe that happiness, true happiness is deeper than that. I believe that happiness comes through peace and joy. That in the midst of the difficult trials, and hardships, one can be happy. It is through the abiding gift of the Holy Ghost, that one can feel and gain a sense of true happiness. When we lose or lack that companionship, we lose the happiness.

Here is my road block. When I was younger, and dealing with striving to gain attention from my parents, striving to get along with my siblings, and finding my niche in the world, I made a conscious decision. I decide that my own needs, and wants will have to be forgotten for the sake of others. Now I know that to make such a decision, was good in many ways. I became flexible, content, and easy going. But I also trained myself to forget about my needs. And now as an adult, and striving to take care of those needs, I am frustrated.

There is the big battle going on in my head. One part saying that my needs are important and I need to focus on myself, and the other part saying it is selfish to do so and there are so many others that are more important than me. I feel lost. And it has caused me to regress.

How do you give yourself permission to fulfill those needs?

This may seem like a simple question with a simple answer. But for me it isn't. Here is an example:

Seven years ago, I found out I was pregnant. Two days later at church I started spotting. I came home and told my husband. ( It happened to be Halloween too.) I tried calling the doctor but since he was on-call reaching him was difficult. My girls wanted to show off their costumes at their grandma's house. I was worried about going, my spotting was getting worse and I still had not talked to the doctor. I decided that we would go down, because I didn't want to be selfish or have the girls miss out on an opportunity, and I wanted to keep everyone happy. The pain kept increasing, while we were there, I went quietly upstairs, and miscarried. I called Garrett up, shed some tears and we left not saying anything to anyone, since no one knew I was pregnant. I suffered alone. It is difficult to miscarry, even more difficult to not be in a warm, safe, environment.

I know that most people would have stayed home. I didn't feel like I could. Somehow I have trained myself to believe that what may be important to me, isn't important to others. And their needs will always trump mine. When you cannot justify the expense of four dollars a week for an online program to help, you know you have a problem!

And this is the battle I face. I know I need to regain my health. Yet, how do I give myself permission to do so? How do I teach myself that my needs, wants, desires, hopes, dreams, and life are just as important. And that in order for me to fulfill those dreams, I need to change. I have carried a lot of hurt and pain through my life. I have experienced a lot of loneliness, and I have used the weight as a buffer, my armor, so the precious parts of me are protected from the hurt. I have been a giver my whole life, and I am proud of that. But I realize that there is a large part of me that needs to be a taker, that I cannot do this alone. But if I don't believe my needs are important enough, then how can I convince someone else that they are.

So this is the bear that I am facing. This is why I keep gaining weight. Because I lose sight of myself, I hide myself. Yet, inside I am screaming for the attention. I am frozen at the edge of the bridge, not daring to cross for fear I am making others suffer at my own expense. I am striving to sort through this, to emerge from the cocoon that has captured me. I don't know what the solution is, and that is the hardest part for me. I see the problem, the equation blinks blankly at me, as if the mathematics of it all are simple. Yet I fail to plug in the right numbers, to find to solution. I fail to see what X is. And in order for me to succeed and move forward, to not be the typical yo-yo, this is what I need to answer.