Hi Mark, thank you for replying to me. How long were you engaging in the bike rides and marathons? What finally was the breaking point that allowed you to realize this was no longer serving you and that it was time to let go of it? Sometimes I think I get so tired of having a routine but hold it closely to my heart in terms of having a comfort zone. So while I feel the desire to break out of routine, there are certain things in it that I cling to (not going out to socialize, drink socially, spend money frivolously on going out to dinner when I can just eat home). I feel torn because some of these things I know will introduce excitement in my life, but I fear sometimes that the possibility of spreading myself too thin either energy-wise or financially will cause me stress. Also, I feel conflicted because I do realize the importance of giving, generosity, putting in the effort to make a positive difference. I always make it a point to give weekly to my church. That to me is important. I also give to the homeless/needy. Sometimes I don’t really feel the need to spoil myself that much by spending $9 on a margarita or $70 on a pair of jeans at the mall. I kind of have grown out of that phase years ago, the need for a ton of materialistic stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I do purchase a decent amount of stuff, mostly groceries and gas for the car (welcome to adulthood.. lol). But sometimes I don’t feel the rush of excitement from buying a pair of shoes or  something that will stop with me being the end recipient all the time. I like gift giving and volunteering my time too. I do like exercising. I think the past few years, I have been dabbling around with finding activities that give me more of a sense of purpose, fulfillment, and make me feel more interesting and wise. I like writing to penpals around the world, and the idea of travelling and taking day trips always gives me reason to look forward to. I have been very fortunate to have done a decent amount of travelling. I love that. Mark what are some of your favorite things in life that make you truly happy and give you that feeling of “Wow, I am so excited that I have this to look forward to?”  Thank you!

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.

Anita, also following the ending of a grounding, things would resume back to normal, but I still harbored feelings of animosity towards my parents for “making” me feel badly, for punishing me, for banishing me to my room, where I couldn’t play with my friends. It was a perceived total loss of control and the inability to get it back until they said so. I hated it.

Dear Anita, it certainly did. I felt powerless and hopeless. Felt like my life was bleak and over with even though I was very little. I felt like I was hopelessly in despair and had nothing to look forward to during these times of what felt like exile. While I had myself, my mind, my toys, space to play and let my mind wander, I essentially had an infinite amount of possibilities to explore and to discover on my own. However, it felt so narrow and suffocating, like none of this stuff mattered. It was all just that.. toys and inanimate objects. The one thing that wasn’t was always my mind. That’s the one thing I wish I could have utilized in more positive ways (and still do want this for myself) to leverage my mindset out of such a bleak outlook, to shift it to a golden, abundant world of excitement and possibilities, and to find the humor in the situation somehow. Maybe knowing this now, as life wisdom & experience has presented some of itself to me over the years, I can apply this to my life now going forward. The issue is shifting the mindset to positive thinking, and keeping it there. To not complain. It is easier said than done, even if we make the intention not to do so. It is easier said than done to find humor in situations when we can easily shift it to feeling sorry for ourselves and whining about it. It takes strength yet surrender to let go and laugh and feel free.

Thanks Anita. Yes, I switched my username to “K” for personal preference. I look forward to hearing from you then!