An Introduction

I've kind of gone through life just trying to keep my head down, just trying to survive.  It seemed to work for a while... then I hit 25, last year, and it became full on quarter life crisis.  I was full of anxiety.  I had graduated from college the previous spring and was struggling to find a job in my field.  Granted, I knew going into photography that I would have to fight to start my career.  But when 25 hit, I started questioning everything.  Had I chosen the right field?  Maybe I should have stuck with the pre-law track or psychology major that I had started out with when I first started college, 7 years earlier.  I didn't know what I was doing or where I should go.  I was hurting right down to my spirit.

For the next 6 months, I tried to find my way, but I felt like a boat set adrift without a paddle.  Things only got worse and worse from there.  Finally, it got to the point where I would sleep until noon, get up and sit around for two hours until I had to get ready to go to my waitressing job.  I felt lost and hopeless.  Nothing was panning out and nothing was making sense.  At this time, two very important things happened.

The first, was Cricketsong, a tarot card reader at a local metaphysical shop.  I had met her once before and we had stayed in touch for a little while.  I am a very private person and do not like people "in my business," but I trusted her with whatever the cards might say about me.  When I sat down to have her read my cards, we chatted for a little bit.  I explained that I felt lost and alone, and suddenly I broke down and started crying, even though I rarely cry in front of people.  I was so sad and lonely.  I couldn't see my friends back home because they were so far away and my work schedule didn't match up with theirs and I don't have many friends around here, so I always feel like I'm bothering them or am too clingy.  She was so kind and asked if I wanted to come over to her house just to hang out.  I was so grateful and we made plans.  She then read my cards and gave me some reassurance.

When I went to her house, we talked and hung out for a bit.  I told her that although I had considered myself Wiccan since I was 16, I'm starting to wonder whether or not it is still the path for me.  She nodded and just listened for a while.  She asked how I was feeding my spirit and I said that I was having trouble feeding it at this point.  We talked some more, and then she said, "I don't know if you'd even be interested in this or not, but I really like your energy and I think you'd be a great fit for our coven, so what do you think?"  I wasn't sure at first.  I had had previous experiences in a group setting and they were very negative.  I was very apprehensive at first, but she told me to take home the coven workbook and look it over and even if I wasn't interested, it was ok.  I took the workbook home with me and spent the next week looking it over and writing down questions.  When I went back, the following week, I shared my questions.  She took the time to answer each question thoughtfully, which was more than I could say for my previous group experience.  I felt strongly that being a part of this coven was the right thing for me at this time in my life.  I started my studies and after a few weeks, I met the rest of the coven.  I felt at home immediately and knew deep in my heart that this was the place for me.  Two weeks later, I study-dedicated, and thus began my transformation.  I have profoundly changed and so has my view of the world.  Love is the word now, and I am learning to come from a place of love on everything.  Do I always do that?  No, it's a process, but I always try.

The second change in my life came up around the same time as the beginning of my spiritual changes.  I went in for my physical and my doctor told me everything was normal, my blood pressure was low to normal, I was nowhere near diabetic, but my cholesterol is high.  She immediately jumped to medicating me.  I've heard that statins can reduce your fertility, and while I don't know if I want children, I don't want to rule out the possibility.  Right as she prescribed the medication, there was a lot of bad things in the news about statins.  She pushed me and told me I really need to take them.  I decided that I wanted to change the way I eat and exercise instead.  I knew that if I try to make too many changes at once, I would keep up with it for a little while, but I would quickly lose steam.  I read somewhere that the reason why people's new year's resolutions so often fail is because they try to make too many huge changes at once.  Instead, it is better to make several small changes over a long period of time.  I subscribe to this, so I started trying to eat better, first.

Eating better was an uphill battle for me.  Food is a tricky thing in my family.  My parents have always seemed to have strange relationships with food.  I would often get speeches about how I should be more health conscious, but then I would see them embrace fad dieting which I knew was not healthy.  My mother's relationship to food is particularly difficult as she is a recovered bulimic.  I never really took them seriously.  You see, I don't really have their relationship with food.  I don't abuse food.  I'm not a boredom eater, nor am I an emotional eater.  I love food!  I love everything about food!  I  love the way it looks.  I love the way it smells.  I love the textures in my mouth.  I love the way it sounds when it's cooking and how it sounds when I'm eating it.  I love the way it tastes.  I love food.  I think my relationship with food might be what drew me to waitressing.  I like working with people and I like being a part of a positive experience with food.  I feel that food and eating is such a personal experience.  What you put in your body to nourish it and the experience you have while eating that food is important.  But when this cholesterol thing came up, I knew I had to find the middle ground.  Heart disease and diabetes runs in my family on both sides, and that is not the way I want to go.

I started making small changes with my eating habits.  I started with breakfast, my favorite meal.  I cut out the toaster strudels, the super sugary cereals, and I stopped eating bagels regularly.  I switched my main breakfast food to smoothies made with frozen fruit, fat free yogurt, flaxseed meal, and occasionally a little honey to sweeten it if the fruit is a little bland.  My cereal of choice became apple cinnamon cheerios and started eating more oatmeal.  I switched from whole milk, first to 2%, and then to 1%.  I won't drink skim milk (except in my coffee, but only because at Dunkin Donuts only gives you a choice between skim or whole milk in your latte).   Speaking of coffee, because I love caramel lattes and can't give them up, I tried getting them with Splenda at first but don't let them fool you, it doesn't taste like real sugar, it's tastes diety.  Instead, I gave up any sort of sweetener and decided to let the caramel do the job.  It took some getting used to, but it wasn't a change I couldn't live with.

In addition to my breakfast choices, my snack choices were also very important.  I started eating a lot more fruit.  I stopped baking as much, much to my boyfriend's chagrin.  I do still bake from time to time, but not every week.  I laid off the ice cream and only eat it once in a while.  I started buying 100 calorie snack packs to get my sweets fix.  I stopped eating a sleeve of cookies by myself, now I can only eat a couple if any at all.  I know this all sounds so obvious, but not in our junk food culture.

Dinner was always fairly healthy.  I cut out frozen and most "pre-fab" dinners when I was a junior in college.  I'm always sure to eat a protein, starch, and vegetable.  Dinner hasn't needed many changes since I did make these changes three years ago.  The only major changes to dinner were to stop eating out so much.  Don't get me wrong, I still eat out from time to time, but at most once per week, rather than the the three to four times that I was before.

I think the most important change that I've made happened inadvertently though.  I am a waitress in an Asian restaurant and every day that I worked, I would eat the food that the kitchen would prepare for my co-workers and me.  It was often fried rice, some kind of noodles, or a stir fry.  Don't get me wrong, most of the time it was tasty, but it also isn't at all healthy.  Four months ago, I had a very bad muscle spasm in my back, that was proceeded, a month later, by a debilitating back injury.  I had a rotated sacrum, and it was excruciating and I was unable to work.  I was on pain medications and bed rest for much of the first month.  These pain medications stimulated my appetite and all I wanted to do was eat.  I assumed that with the way I was eating and the lack of physical exercise that I was getting, I would gain weight.  However, because I was making healthier choices, and I was off the unhealthy food from work, I actually lost twelve pounds in the first two weeks.  I did gain two pounds back after a while, but it was clear to me that the work food was a huge part of the problem.  Toward the end of my first month out of work, I started going to physical therapy and in the second month, I was able to actually start doing some exercises at home.  Finally, just after my three month mark of being out of work, I was approved to go back to work.  I resolved to not eat the food there, beyond the salads and clear soups.

I bring my own food to work.  My co-workers laugh at me and try to pressure me into eating the food there.  They told me that it didn't matter what I ate and to just do those P90x or Intensity workouts.  Now I'm not saying they're not good workouts, but I am saying they're not for me since I have fibromyalgia, so I need a slightly more gentle workout.  If it takes me longer to lose the weight, then so be it.  If I make life changes, then I know that I, personally, will be able to keep the weight off.  Work is my workout: I get cardio and weightlifting; I do my stretching at home in the morning.  People who have never waited a table often laugh at me when I say this, but they clearly don't understand how physically intense the job is.  Any calories we eat in the beginning of the night are gone halfway through it.  Anyway, my co-workers have been completely unsupportive, but as my sister reminded me, they are not my friends and they are not there to be supportive.  It's a hater's job to hate, so let them do their job.  I was feeling kind of down on myself at first, until I started doing my weekly weigh ins.  At the end of my third week, I had lost nine pounds, bringing my total lost in three month to nineteen pounds.  That's honestly more than I expected to lose in that time, as I had been told by a doctor to only expect to lose one pound per week.

So here I am a few days after my 26th birthday, optimistic about the path my life is taking, both health-wise and spiritually.  This is the best I have felt in a long time.  My soul is getting the nourishment that it needs and so is my body.  As both of them get the nourishment that they need, I am confident that my fibromyalgia will become more manageable again.