Choking it down
I’ve been having mad digestive issues for the past year and a half, meaning it’s been hard to get through a meal without feeling like a snake trying to swallow a horse or getting heart-attack-like heartburn.
Don’t worry, this post is not headed down a medical-TMI rabbithole.
One of the things that has made this time so frustrating (besides the obvious ongoing pain and discomfort) is the way it came out of nowhere and suddenly things that I’ve always done, exactly as I have done them, no longer work and are in fact problematic.
But this isn’t just happening in my intestines. It’s everywhere I look, because our knee-jerk reaction to change we didn’t want and didn’t ask for is to just try to force the reality of today to look like the reality of yesterday.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work.
You’ve seen it before too: it’s the relationship that has shifted over time but one or both parties desperately (and unsuccessfully) keep trying to make it the way it used to be; it’s the way businesses are trying to force butts-in-seats after the pandemic revealed other ways work just as well, only to have employees leave in droves; it’s hanging onto those clothes that don’t fit – in fact they haven’t fit for years – because they fit once upon a time.
We keep trying to shove that cat right back in the bag and she is scratching and clawing back with every fiber of her being, doing everything she can not to have to return to the darkness of that bag.
After a year of fighting reality, one source of relief (in addition to ACTUAL relief found with the help of a healing practitioner) has been a mindset shift that has me asking myself: What have I been tolerating that is no longer OK with me?
Clearly my digestion has been going with the flow for decades upon decades with no resistance, but that abruptly changed. And it’s waking me up to other things I might have been tolerating that I’m no longer willing or able to. Maybe there were things that were once fine, or even great, that now no longer have a place with me. And that has been the unexpected gift of this long mess.
What will you no longer accept?
