New Year, Same Goal

Me vs. the noise

Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash

Personifying my eating disorder made her real.

Her voice is my voice laced with sweet poison. She is a seductress, selling me the lies of diet culture and the fantasy of the male gaze. The lie says that I am not worthy or beautiful if men don’t find me attractive.

But I am no longer the naive twenty-year-old seeking solace and love outside of herself. And what’s real can be told to sit down and be quiet. And that’s how I defeat her.

I haven’t stopped her voice from entering my mind. I’m not sure that I ever will. But I’ve learned how to silence the noise, how to tell her to shush, that she is not welcome here. So when that voice spoke, saying that I ate too much queso on new year’s eve, I told her to bugger off (verbiage, no doubt, a product of the British shows I’ve been binging).

Over and over and over again, she speaks up and I shut her down.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the past twenty years: It’s not the voice that’s the problem. It’s listening to and believing the voice that gets us in trouble. It’s the story we create.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

I wish I could tell you that you can snap your fingers and the voice (or voices) that say you’re not enough go away. But that’s not how life works. You can, however, in this moment decide that you’re tired of listening to that voice.

Ignoring the voice, changing your beliefs, shifting your thoughts from the default, dis-empowering one to the new, empowering story takes practice. Over and over and over again, a cycle of you building the habit of silencing the voice.

I’ve distilled this new habit into a cycle of three practices:

• Practice: Notice - What is your mind telling you?

• Practice: Non-judgment - Drop the story.

• Practice: Shift - Replace it with something else.

All three often happen in succession with more steps in-between. The more you practice, the faster the shift happens.

Here’s what it can look like in practice:

Mind: You’re a fat cow.

You: Okay. Thanks for your input. Please go away now. I have fabulous things to do today.

Practice: Notice - my mind said I was fat.

Practice: Non-judgment - okay, thanks… (there is no story needed).

Practice: Shift - I heard you, and you’re not needed here.

Simple but not easy at first.

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Here are some questions to ask yourself to start:

• What did you just think?

• Is it true? If yes, what makes it so? If no, where did you learn the dis-empowering thought?

• Do you have to believe every thing you think?

• What can you replace the thought with?

• What would it sound like if you were kind to yourself?