Many older and wiser than myself have ruminated on the meaning behind struggle and pain. When life throws you a curveball, they say, it is happening for you, not against you. The world wants to teach you something. Quote after quote has been thrown out about why we as humans must face great challenges: “It is a blessing in disguise.” “Pain is a great teacher.” “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” And the like. However, when one is in the midst of pain or a life upheaval, they can be more of a hindrance than a help. I repeated these types of things to myself quite often during the initial phases of my healing process. When I was in pain, I would bypass my anger and fear and try to sit quietly, repeating to myself “this too shall pass, this too shall pass, this too shall pass.” When tears would start to well up I would notice them but try not to let too many fall. When anger came knocking at my door I didn’t let it in. Anger wasn’t part of the healing process, I thought. I never let myself be angry. Only patience and acceptance would get me where I needed to go.
By now I’m convinced that having this frame of mind held me back more than assisted me as I tried to navigate my way through what was happening. While these sayings have a good deal of truth to them, their meaning isn’t immediately apparent and isn’t supposed to be. Changing your daily routines and re-contextualizing the place of food in your life is an incredibly difficult thing. We humans tend to be creatures of habit, and being forced to overhaul the lifestyle that we are used to involves a great amount of confusion, frustration, fear and, of course, anger. The truth of pain’s teachings and purpose can only resonate when you have let yourself fully feel the desperation of a situation that turns your world upside down.
Here’s the thing: as much as I wanted to not have to feel the pain of my situation and tried to remind myself that it would ultimately lead to a stronger and wiser me, at the time it straight-up sucked. Sometimes the world throws you a curveball that, no matter how much it will serve you in the end, is just the worst. The lesson in the pain wasn’t at all apparent and being stripped of my ability to digest was nothing but a huge bummer. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t okay. And there was going to be no miraculous, spontaneous moment of healing. When it comes to food issues and digestive pain, the dailiness of waking up with such health restrictions don’t stop. There’s no pause button and you can’t decide to take a vacation from being sick and eat a tub of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream in front of the TV. When eating becomes a chore instead of something pleasurable, you don’t get to take weekends off. Your stomach isn’t going to cooperate just because you want it to. And you know what? That makes me angry! It makes me undeniably, irrevocably, out-of-this-world pissed. It fills me with blame and grief and regret and shame and fear. It makes me want to rip out my intestines and give them a long, strict talking-to. I thought that feeling all of these emotions was bad and wrong, and that the stress of them would exacerbate my physical symptoms. Once I started giving myself permission to feel them, however, I realized that it is quite the opposite: in order to digest physically, I was going to have to learn to digest emotionally. I was going to have to face these difficult emotions head-on and allow them to express themselves. No amount of “spiritual bypass” would make these very normal human emotions disappear.
Fully expressing my anger, my fear, and my shame has been pivotal to the healing process, and I still do so on a regular basis. When I have an exam to study for and a paper due but my body is throwing a fit, I don’t sit quietly and breathe my way through it. I write an angry letter. I punch a pillow repeatedly and throw it across the room, and then I sit down to study. When I haven’t eaten all day and I go into the grocery store to try and find something, anything that I can eat, yet every item I pick up has at least one ingredient that will give me a stomachache, I don’t just let the frustration pass and say to myself that it’s “part of the process.” I go into the bathroom, tight-lipped and fuming, let out a long, silent scream, cry angry tears, splash my face with cold water and go home to cook some food. When a wave of nausea and stomach cramps hit me right as I’m about to head out of my apartment to see a good friend that I haven’t caught up with in a while, I don’t feel particularly forgiving of my body. I begrudgingly cancel my plans, scream into an aforesaid pillow, let some higher power know just how mad I am, wander around the apartment aimlessly mumbling under my breath, then sit down to my favorite Netflix sitcom. My symptoms still relatively regularly get in the way of the things in my life that are important to me, and I’m not about to pretend like it’s okay. When I say to practice acceptance, patience, and forgiveness with yourself and your body, I don’t mean to deny all of the other feelings. True, acceptance and patience will come with allowing all of these emotions to be expressed, but they are also part of these emotions. It is important to have grace with the unpleasant feelings themselves, to fully express them and then forgive your body for causing you pain. Or not. Sometimes we aren’t ready to forgive our bodies, and that is totally okay, too.
Giving myself permission to feel exactly how I do in any given moment has been nothing short of revolutionary. Yes, I really do believe that I am and will be the stronger for it. Of course I’m learning a huge amount about who I am and my place in the world by undergoing so much strife. However, as a 24-year-old living in a body that sometimes feels like it’s 90, I have a right to my anger. Of course I’m angry, who wouldn’t be! And, seemingly contradictory but nonetheless true, the amount of patience that I have for my situation has increased because I have let myself feel completely devastated and hopeless, not in spite of these things. Anger has been a massively important stepping stone on the path to acceptance of my new lifestyle.
You, too, don’t have to spend your journey with food, whatever it may be, grateful and patient. It is completely, one hundred percent fine to feel like what is happening to you isn’t fair. Odds are, it isn’t. It gives you a lot of perspectives to walk through the world with certain limitations, but it would be so much easier to not have them at all. This day in age, the spiritual element of a lifestyle change doesn’t mean you’re going to become the next Buddha and understand the transitory nature of all things and let every sensation or emotion pass. It means that you have full permission to feel exactly how you feel in any moment. It will pass, but that’s not the point. Let yourself feel things. Embrace the frustration and the grief, be angry, digest your emotions and feel the world in all of its joy and all of its pain. Believe me, life opens a lot of doors when there’s nothing left to lose.
For more of Anna’s story, please visit Anna’s Corner.
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