Peggy, thank you for getting back to me as well! I like how you said that your way to feel a sense of deepened belonging would be to repeat over and over to myself that “I belong on Earth.” We can’t really argue with that!  Thank you for citing examples of connecting to nature to further reinforce this. Nature can be so powerful through its simple, quiet complexities that carry on whether we take time to notice them or not. Animals and trees do not need our attention to carry on in their daily lives, they just do it and that is perfectly understandable. However, when we as individuals, realize that we are not the center of everything (in a selfish way), we open our eyes to new beauty all around us. Sometimes even in the simplest of realms (observing a bead of dew, a blade of grass, a ripple in the water) we can find the most delicate and unspoken elegance.

I’m not sure how my family played into how I came to view my strained relationship with food. I am an only child, and my parents never judged me or gave me a hard time about my food preferences. If anything, they wanted me to be happy and realized how sensitive I was. I remember I have always eaten weird.. I remember when I was little my mom would make me a whole box of Mrs. T’s perogies or two packages of ramen noodles. I was not a morbidly obese child or young adult, but I was chubby at times. I would also get made fun of for my weight in school from time to time. Because of that, I would scale back my eating habits and I got into the vicious cycle of weighing myself every morning before I ate or drank anything. Then it got so bad in middle school where I was counting the number of pasta pieces (twisty pasta, seashell-shaped pasta) that I would allow myself on my plate. Then I became fixated on just eating vegetables and cutting out sweets. It doesn’t sound that severe in words here, but in person it was misery and depriving myself constantly so that on the outside I could look thinner. I don’t know what I was trying to prove. I always hear that people starve themselves for outside approval and maybe a little bit for self-approval. I feel like with me, it is more about self-approval. Luckily, I never really cared too much about what others thought of me to the point where it disrupted to overall quality of my life. I think I am usually trying to feel comfort within my own body, to look in the mirror and feel better about how I look, for my own self and self-approval. To feel that I am in control, in a good way, of the direction of myself, my life, my self-control.  I do enjoy cooking from time to time, Peggy. What do you enjoy cooking? What are things in your life that you truly get enjoyment out of engaging in? Being in nature, as you mentioned, and what about nature do you really enjoy the most, would you say?

Thank you for saying this: “Depression is the opposite of expression.  It comes from anger and/or grief that has not been expressed.  Loss of friends, family members, old relationships even the loss of a childhood counts as grief.  Releasing all your pent up emotions through tears is not necessarily a bad thing.” I have recently gone off my latest anti-depression medication. For years I have gone on & off anti-depressants (mostly NOT being on them), because I always felt that they never really worked well, and the handful of brands I have been prescribed don’t help me. So sometimes I wonder if I am not really depressed; that I just need to sit with my emotions consistently, gently, and continue to unpack past hurts, difficulties, and pent-up emotions that have left knots in my psyche that need to be untangled and analyzed on some level. I feel like we all experience so many things in our lives, that we may think we have forgotten a lot of what we have experienced, but I think our brains are more powerful than we realize, even though science supports how massive the capacity of our brains really is. I think our brains probably have stored away literally every face we have ever seen, every dream we have dreamt, every experience we have lived through and how each of them made us feel. I think the challenge in this lies in our ego or somewhere, where we need to actively try to recall these past memories, even though we think we may have long forgotten them, and to analyze what happened, how we felt, and how we can move past these memories to try and stop repeating these patterns indefinitely in our present lives (usually negative in nature). As of recently, I have given more than half a mind to reaching out to make an appointment with a psychologist/psychiatrist. However, sometimes I really do have my reservations about seeing a professional like this, because I know to their credit, they have gone through a ton of schooling and such to receive their prestigious title(s). But to me, sometimes that is just what it is.. a title, and that they receive lots of money to sit there and listen to you and provide you with feedback. It is their job to not get personally invested in your life, as it is also against the law as well. So I just feel like talking to a well-paid stranger who doesn’t and can’t care about you is not my idea of seeking the comfort and help that I need. I also fear that since I am an only child that I will grow old alone. I have my fiancé. He is truly wonderful. I am 30. I am not sure if I want children or not. I don’t think I have the “mom gene” in me. I have no friends. I think all of that paired with my strained food relationship has continually left me feeling like a shell of myself, a dried out prune version of the vivacious, beautiful soul I know is deep within me. I just need to learn how to better harness that divine power within me, within all of us, and to learn that I can access this eternal, unending power at any time. In a way, it is comforting to know that each of us all holds such beautiful wisdom, power, and love.