I launched this blog a year ago with a warning: prepare for anything. And I feel like I’ve delivered on that – we’ve jumped from diet culture to ADHD to shopping my closet to eating tortellini with kimchi.
I also promised to share my story and experiences honestly and with a bit of humor as I try to figure everything out.
In light of that promise, I want to tell you a story about cheese.
The enemy?
We just returned from spending 2 weeks in the south of France visiting some of my husband’s family. We all stayed together in an old barn that my father-in-law has renovated over the years into a lovely home in the countryside.
My husband’s family is Dutch and 40% of French people eat cheese every day, so I knew I’d be surrounded by amazing bread, cheese, and salami. However, I didn’t expect how triggering that would feel.
I didn’t want it to be obvious, so at first, I’d have one or two slices of bread with a bit of cheese smeared on (but no butter). But I was watching everyone else happily tucking into baguette and cheese multiple times a day and wondering why I felt like I couldn’t.
What’s wrong with me?? I thought. Here I was, on a relaxing family vacation, staring down Camembert, Reblochon, and Époisses de Bourgogne as if preparing for a wild west shootout.
(*ominous whistling* WAAAAHH – WAH – WAAAAAAAAHHHH)
Breakthrough
Eventually, I had to take a moment. I took to my journal to reflect on three trigger-related questions I’ve learned through CBT:
- What am I feeling in this moment?
- Where are these feelings coming from? What is the source?
- How can I be kind to myself in this moment as I figure out what I need?
What I felt was anxiety and fear. Fat was the source of that fear. And it hit me that despite all of my efforts to unlearn and escape diet culture, I had internalized the “fat is the enemy” bulls**t of the late ’90s/early 2000’s more than I realized.
That was hard to admit, friends.
I felt incredibly guilty and frustrated with myself. What kind of person thinks this way on a beautiful family vacation? Also, I’m the first one to shout FOOD HAS NO MORAL VALUE from the rooftops, but somehow cheese and butter don’t count? How could I be such a hypocrite? How could I fail like this?
Cheese is not the enemy
But then, the third question – What can I do to be kind to myself in this moment? – popped into my head.
I took a deep breath, and told myself that I deserved grace. That I hadn’t failed, but that diet culture had failed me (and everyone, tbh). That receiving these messages around the time I developed my eating disorder was a “perfect storm” that was not my fault. That the truth is cheese is good and deserves to be enjoyed.
And that the best thing I could do is to remember my worth and eat the dang cheese.
Healing is a journey
This experience was a good reminder that unlearning and healing is a journey, not a destination. Think of the process of refining gold with fire – a craftsman makes the fire hotter and hotter and continually scrapes off impurities that rise to the surface of the molten gold. Similarly, the deeper I go into therapy and recovery, the more crap will come to the surface to scrape off.
But that doesn’t make me a failure. Rather, it’s an opportunity to keep learning, using my voice to advocate for myself and others, and doing the work to heal.
As a good (and very smart) friend put it, “You practice it rather than achieve it.”
Turning to those questions in a moment of crisis for my brain was uncomfortable, but it showed me how far I’ve come in this past year of therapy. And I’m really proud of that.
Thank you for being a friend
Throughout the last year, a lot of you have shared how much The Britt Blog posts made you laugh or think. It means a lot to me that people are even reading the blog, as well as getting enjoyment from it.
So thank you for being here. I hope you stick around. And please share The Britt Blog with your friends!
