Here I Am Again
(this is an excerpt from Sheet Cake Diet: How to Build Resilience From the Inside Out)
About eight years ago I changed the way I treated my body.
This transformed my life. I started on a path that ended with The Ageless Diet, a book about how to fix yourself on a cellular level through diet and lifestyle. The book and lifestyle sent me on a journey. I became an evangelist for good living. Ageless Diet worked! I never felt so vibrant. I never looked as beautiful. I was smug in the way a rich person believes their good fortune is earned. Like any healthy and successful person, I assumed I would always feel good in my skin. I was proud of the work I created. I walked my talk. I lived agelessly until I didn’t. I stopped doing the things that kept me healthy.
One day a bad thing happened, then a second awful thing, a third, fourth, and suddenly feeling ageless was not enough. I made mistakes. People hurt me. I finally processed those painful experiences, and now I’ve been composting those scraps of hurt and shame into something life-sustaining.
I thought fixing my gut and making my skin glow was enough for long-term contentment.
I never thought to examine why I thought and acted the way I did. When a person feels good almost all the time, there’s no need to delve deeply into why one feels good. When a person feels bleak, there’s nothing but time to analyze why.
The summer I turned twenty kicked my ass. I was severely depressed, self-medicating with gin and junk food, sleeping most of the day, and getting drunk at night. I dug myself up and out of that hole, but it took time and effort. Once I was mostly well again, I stopped wondering why I fell so easily into a depression. I never explored my self-destructive tendencies. I never delved into the why behind my incessant negative thinking. Why I was a loser? Why were my flaws bigger and worse than anyone else’s? By the time I turned thirty-three, my mental state was less important than fixing the physical. I couldn’t bear the headaches, constant colds and sinus infections, bloated belly, roiling gut, and fatigue. I was young. Why did I feel bad more often than not? I was sick and tired of feeling lousy.
I began the years-long work of creating a lifestyle that addressed and fixed these ailments.
One built on the foundation of real, nutrient-dense foods. I ate too much junk food, sugar, and dairy, and not enough plants. I changed that. I improved my sleep hygiene. I meditated daily, and I exercised regularly. I finally addressed my gut issues with the aid of probiotics. It worked. I felt better. So good, in fact, I failed yet again to look at why I sometimes, for no particular reason, found myself anxious and sad. I didn’t think to wonder why I sometimes hated myself. My childhood was something I revisited when I needed an amusing anecdote, not because it was the genesis of damaging thought patterns.
Several things went wrong these last few years. I was living my lush life, then a few major and minor setbacks, and I crumpled.
I had more healing work to do with the way I thought and felt. Patterns created when I was a scared child needed to be looked at. Why did I react this way to trauma? Why do I think the things I do about myself? Why am I prone to anxiety? The time had come to look inside at the monsters in my head. Luckily, I’m a writer who enjoys research. Turns out some of the reasons I go dark so quickly are related to chronic inflammation, triggered by trauma from the past, aided and abetted by lifestyle choices that sent cytokines, which are known to promote inflammation, scurrying through my body.
The ways our brains work don’t always help in healing trauma.
The brain creates habitual thought patterns. Think certain thoughts often enough, you build neural pathways, and your brain will lay down tracks so you can more easily travel them.
At a certain point, it becomes all you think about. There were a good eight months when all I thought about was what a loser I was. I counted the many reasons why over and over until they were the dominant thoughts. I had to rewire my brain and fix myself again. Healing is an ongoing process.