A conversation with the younger self

Sometimes I feel like I want to go back to younger Odelia and tell her how full of meaning her adult life would be when she grows up.

I remember there was a lot of preoccupation with external appearance when I was a teenager. I was thinking a lot about clothes, looks and body shape. I remember there was often a sense of emptiness too, to the point where it wasn't very clear that life was really worth living.

It's incredible to think that I hardly ever feel this way anymore. In fact, my life feels so rich right now that if there's any frustration it's over the thought that there's so much out there waiting for me and that I can't possibly get around to everything in this lifetime.

I'm currently reading the book Embodiment and the Treatment of Eating Disorders, by Catherine Cook-Cottone. One of the pillars for recovery in her work has to do with embodied meaning. She talks about how a sense of purpose and mission are one of the ways to create positive body image.

Reading about how engaging in disordered eating is often a way to artificially create meaning clarified so many things about my own struggle.

Around the time my struggle with my body culminated into an eating disorder, I was dealing with so many changes, at such a vulnerable age with so little support. I have moved around from place to place so many times by that point and that last one might have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. All the moving around set me up to struggle with my sense of belonging and I think that obsessing about looks and my body was a way that I tried to fit in. The trouble with that was that it could never fill my true need for connection.

When I look back I think that the eating disorder, among many other things, served a very important purpose. It was a scream for help, it was a way to feel in control but it also opened the door to a life of self-discovery.

At the lowest point, when I felt like things were actually getting out of control and I couldn't stop my spiraling down into starvation I reached out for help and that was my first encounter with therapy. Through therapy I started discovering who I really was, that I was so much more than just my body and that I had depth.

The rest is history but as I contemplate this I'm reminded of resiliency and how each one of us has a part within that always guides us towards wholeness and healing, even if the path seems really contorted and full of suffering. Looking back it almost seems like it was necessary for me to go through self starvation for me to get to where I am today.

I'm sure that if you look back at your own life you can also find many examples of how your resilient self has found itself in a challenging situation or even unconsciously created a challenging situation in order to to help you figure out how to grow and heal. In fact there might be something going on right now in your emotional or physical life that is asking for your attention. I invite you to treat that manifestation with much respect, curiosity and acceptance because it's possibly holding a deeply intelligent message from your inner guide.

As the violent events of the past days (and years) unfold and culminate in a climax of their own, I'm also thinking about how this idea of resiliency applies to societies and I want to believe that the harsh events of the moment are the growing pains of our shared conciseness and that as hard as it may be to see it at the moment, these events are so extreme that it's actually helping us clarify what we want and what we don't want as a society and make clearer and clearer demands for it to be just the way we want it to be.