Far too often, being emotional gets a bad rap. People act like it's a downfall, a flaw, a hindrance to being logical or normal... but being emotional is necessary to being human. I'm emotional, and I'm proud.
It's when we don't allow ourselves to feel our emotions that we lose pieces of ourselves, or look to unhealthy coping mechanisms instead, or become robotic and fake.
Emotions mean we feel. And while feeling may sometimes hurt, it is also very wonderful.
If you choose to feel, to be an emotional being, you have to take the bad with the good. Because the alternative is being numb. Feeling nothing. Being devoid of emotion. So you get all (happiness, bliss, joy, excitement, sadness, disappointment, grief, love, etc.) or nothing.
Emotions help us grow.
Love to learn.
Learn to grow.
Grow to love.
Be emotional.
Here's today's video I just put up on the WeRFreEDomFighters collaboration on YouTube. This week we are looking at different emotions and I have a few words of advice about this one: helplessness.
Take it for what you will! <3
As usual, you'll have to click to view on YouTube, as embedding is disabled.
"In these years of anorexia, I've stopped eating a lot of different foods (most of them, except fruits, vegetables, yogurt and meat), and some of the foods I've stopped eating, they have become some kind of 'forbidden': I still can't eat some of them (such as pizza, ice-cream, hamburgers, wrustel, etc...), while I eat hardly some others... So, I wanted to ask you: have you lived something similar? If yes, have you solved the problem, or are there 'forbidden' food to you, right now? Moreover: how did you solve this problem? How can you resist to put out again some foods from your nutrition?"
It may surprise you to know that I have no "forbidden" foods. I also have no "safe" foods. I eat everything, and I do mean everything. I'm not even a picky eater. There are a few foods I naturally dislike like creamed corn, french onion soup, and scallops, but I've disliked them since childhood. Other than those and a very few others, I eat anything and everything.
When I was dealing with my anorexia, I definitely ate very few foods. I had certain foods that I considered safe - usually low calorie foods. I had such little variety in my diet it was amazing (actually boring is a better word). I also had, as you call them, "forbidden" foods. At one point, I wouldn't eat anything with fat content. I had to have fat-free everything. I wouldn't eat sweets. I wouldn't eat hamburgers. The list went on and on.
I had to re-learn what it means to eat. I used food as a coping mechanism. As a form of control. There were problems behind the food - food wasn't really the problem. Once I was able to deal with the problems, I was able to realize that food was just food. It's what eating disordered individuals strive to learn every day - that food is just food. What a concept, you know? But it's true - food is to nourish and to be enjoyed. It's not a violent entity. It's not a weapon. It's not a punishment. It's not a reward. It just is.
I also had to slowly re-introduce foods that I had previously given up. Foods that used to scare me, I had to bring back into my diet one by one. It's really as simple as that. I can't promise you won't have moments of freaking out or feeling bad, but keep pushing through.
The following video can answer this question better than anything else I can say, and surprisingly enough it was this week's "Wednesday Warriors" video for the ED recovery collaboration on YouTube. Check it out! :)
