Reinventing Your Self Part 1

by | Jul 22, 2020 | Growth, Starting Over

peeling an onion

Thoughts  on onion peeling

How many of you have peeled an onion? Lots, right? When you peel an onion, you start at the outside and if you have a good one and want to preserve the maximum vegetable you peel carefully, one layer at a time. With each layer you check out what’s left and see if you need to go another layer. And, if you’re like me, there are tears all the way.

My history with my body has been like that. I’ll admit it, I’m a round woman. And I’ve been holding on to every inch on so many levels. When I was younger, my mother told me I was fat so many times, I started believing it. I look back at the few pictures I have, and realize it wasn’t so. I’ve always been healthy, thankfully. But I inherited my mother’s height (I’m 5’3″) and my father’s build. He was 5’11″ and for most of the time I knew him he was about 245 lbs of nothing but muscle. Yet Mom constantly harangued the both of us about our weight. I never understood how someone who was supposed to love me no matter what could be so mean. I felt so betrayed. In High School, I was on 4 varsities and didn’t have an ounce of jiggle anywhere. Yet, I was constantly told I was fat.

I think I kept the size as a barrier between myself and the world. When I was in elementary school, it was very dangerous to be a little kid. I was in my first knife fight in fourth grade, was driven to school by body guards when my parents weren’t available and was constantly the target of vicious attempts until I left my home to go to my first boarding school at 13.

My drug of choice let me down

My days in boarding school were not pleasant, either. From being the new kid from the weird place in Honolulu, to being an ethnic disappointment because I wasn’t a token “foreigner” they assumed I would be when I started high school in Boston, I was always the outsider so I carried my world with me and around me to protect me from those who meant me harm.

I’ve been one of those people whose drug of choice has always been food, I’m not addicted to any one kind, mind you, I’m an all-inclusive addict. But I’ve always had raging hand to mouth disease and when things go badly, I tend to crawl into the refrigerator and pull the door closed behind me. (And yes, folks, the light does go out when you close the door). My current weight is up in the you-don’t want-to-know range and it used to really bother me. I’ve even blogged about my experience at a workshop where I discovered I’d been withholding from my audiences on a completely subconscious level because I had a dirty secret they’d hate me for if they found out — I was overweight. But enough about me.

Reinventing yourself again and often

How wonderful is it that we can reinvent ourselves when what’s going on isn’t working for us? When you realize something in your life is not in alignment with what you have chosen, you can stop right then and there and choose another direction in which to proceed. If it’s a situation, a career, a relationship, an appointment, you can stop and begin again. We constantly have a bag of NOW’s to pull out and use. (We have a bag of other options to be touchstones, too!)

There’s no single stopping point or end to anything, Just like your computers have a restore point that you can return to when you’ve downloaded something that doesn’t really work and has your computer not running at it’s most efficient, you have restore points, too! And you get to choose what they are! Your restore point can be yesterday, five years ago, twenty years ago or even 10 seconds ago. It’s your Created Life. Have at it.

I’m finally ready to unveil what lies beneath the layers. I’m stepping away from my protection and letting the walls go away once and forever. I’ve taken them down before and always I built them back up. I no longer feel the need for them. I thank my body for always being there, being healthy, being protective and able to withstand all it has had thrown at it (literally and figuratively). So, dear body of mine, that has been with me though thick and thin (yes, pun intended), you may rest now and just let go.

What I am creating going forward is health, strength, confidence and grace.

It isn’t just weight issues!

Having a restore point, being able to go back and start again, sloughing off what doesn’t work and finding new options extends into all the areas of our lives. Many coaches use the life wheel as a demonstration of all the different facets our worlds contain. If yours looks more like a lug nut than a wheel, perhaps we need to talk.

 

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