I ghosted a friend who I deeply cared about because I had gained a ton of weight since I last saw her and was ashamed of how I looked. I don’t think she would have cared at all. But I did. I cared a lot. 💭💭💭

I was thinking about how I’ve felt guilt around this for how I showed up as a friend – or didn’t show up– for so many years. I’m talking like… at least a decade that I’ve felt like shit about this whenever I think of it. Yes, it would have made sense to reach out to her and apologize, but then I would have to talk about the fact that I felt so ashamed because of my weight gain. Yeah, I wasn’t about to do that. No thank you. Please, slowly pull off my fingernails, one by one, with dull, rusty tweezers instead. 🥢

I was not at a place where I was able to even come to terms, myself, with the literal and physical baggage I had accumulated. I’m sure as hell not going to talk about it with someone- even that person who I felt I could have told anything to.

I have no idea if this person remembers this, cares, or ever gave it a second thought. I don’t know if she even feels like I ghosted or that I was the shitty friend I know I was. I’ve never asked. I just ignored it. That friendship, and the chance to make things right, drifted out to sea to join the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of my psyche. The place where all overwhelming, negative, habitual and persistent thoughts we have about ourselves end up.

We pollute our minds in the same way we pollute the ocean when we don’t properly dispose of our “trash”. The ocean holds the gyre of plastic trash and swirls it around with the currents and our minds do the same with our emotional debris. It just floats around, slowly killing us. Killing our connection with others. Killing our inspiration to go do the things that would make us happy and make our hearts sing. Killing our fledgling businesses before they get off the ground. Killing any hope that we can even make a change in our lives and making us live small in a body that wasn’t meant to hold onto all of this.

We can wake up and see the environment we’ve living in. We can see the damage that we innocently did when we believed those thoughts. Fleeting thoughts we have. Flippant remarks by well-meaning parents, spouses and friends, count, too. Busy Busy minds swirling with trash ALL THE TIME and we don’t even see it.

Sure, we could pluck each one of those thoughts out of the ocean and examine them. Think about how they got there. What it means that it’s still around. Try and figure out what to do with it now… this is starting to sound like some therapy sessions I used to have! 🧐

Or, we could just prevent the accumulation to begin with by not holding onto the thinking about ourselves that makes us feel terrible and do stupid things.

Thought ➜ Feeling ➜ Action/Behavior.

Swinging back around to me ghosting my friend, it went like this.

THOUGHT: Damn, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other. I was thinner then.

FEELING : Oh shit, she’ll see me now – in the flesh. I can’t meet up with her. I look terrible. What will she think? OMG I’m so fat. I really let myself go. How did I do this to myself?

BEHAVIOR/ACTION: I ghost her. I don’t act in a way that is in integrity with my beliefs.

And then all the feelings come up and what was a fleeting thought has swirled into some sea trash that even the seagulls won’t touch. Nice.

See, I didn’t know that was happening. I didn’t understand how the mind works and that the voice in my head is not ME. I didn’t know that I was living in the feeling of my thinking, not in reality. We experience what we think, not what’s actually happening in the world. 💥 At no point in time did my loving friend see me and say wow, you got fat. I imagined all of that happening and I made myself really really sad. I created a reality where I thought I needed to pull away from people because I wasn’t good enough.

I was thinking about all this today because I was noticing how I’m posting on Facebook more. I’m rekindling relationships. I’m feeling more a part of the world again. I’m feeling alive. I had the thought – Oh, it’s because you lost all this weight and feel good about yourself again. Years ago, I would have agreed with that thought and said – totally! If you want to feel good about yourself then you need to make a change in the world. Losing weight will make you happy!

But this time, I noticed that thought didn’t ring true. It felt off. That wasn’t it. Because we don’t need to change things on the outside to make us feel better on the inside. 💥 That’s a huge misunderstanding that we have that seems like there’s evidence for it. I do feel better when I have a beer after a hard day. I do feel special when I have that piece of delicious cake. I do like how I feel when I get into my brand new car.

We’re sold a lie that we need to buy some material thing to make us feel better. More worthwhile. Complete. To be accepted. It’s part of our culture and very human of us, honestly. I don’t even think it’s done maliciously most of the time. ❌🔪

I didn’t lose weight and now have more self-esteem and confidence. It was actually the other way around. I understood who I was – on a soul/spiritual level – and knew there was nothing wrong with me. I understood that it’s those trash thoughts that I was believing that was making me feel so bad. I realized, oh, thoughts just happen and we feel them. 💥 The more we entertain them, the more we experience the feelings of those thoughts and the more we live in that feeling state.

It became clear to me, insightfully, that I don’t need to believe my thoughts. And then I saw that noticing how I was feeling was actually a really good guide to tell me what kind of state of mind I was in. I was able to see the thoughts that were going on in my mind that I wasn’t recognizing and were taking me off the path of doing what I actually wanted to do.

In this case, I wanted to get healthy. When I started thinking about how I’d failed to lose weight in the past and that I was definitely going to have to suffer to lose weight, it got hard. And then I added on more thinking/noise about how do I even do this? 100lbs is soooo much weight to lose. Ughh. Now I want a twinkie.

Do you see how much harder we make it by adding mental weight whenever we try and do hard things? We end up sabotaging ourselves. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

When I saw how thought worked, I realized that when I see it for what it is, it can’t touch me. 🚧 Without all the thinking about ourselves, we’re amazing. Our natural state is well-being. That looks so true to me because why would we instinctively try and feel better when we feel bad if that wasn’t true?

Everything we do is to feel better or feel good, ultimately. Those bad habits we have that we’re trying to break – yeah, we’re actually super smart humans just trying to feel better on some level. Because we know we can get back to feeling better. We just sometimes do things that end up harming us more in the long run so we can get that short term better feeling. All addictions make sense when you think of it like that. On some deep level, we know our natural state is mental health and we’re just trying to get back to it. 🥰

And when you can quiet the noise in your head. Things get really clear. You feel resilient. You feel ready to take on any challenge. You get a second chance. I got a second chance to get healthy without the weight of my past (oh, a pun!) interfering with it. My own inner intelligence was there when the clouds of my thinking passed! It was so clear: Go call your doctor and ask for help. It was that simple, the answer to my “weight problem”.

So no, losing weight didn’t give me some new-found courage and confidence. Realizing I was never broken was what did. 💣 Really, truly, seeing and believing that there was nothing wrong with me brought me back to reality. I had been watching this shitty, B-rated movie that I called my life where the shallow plot was centered around the limiting beliefs and scary thoughts I had about myself and what I was capable of. And when I learned about how the mind works and that we have innate wellbeing, I saw that I was innocently writing, directing and producing this rotten ass tomato movie. So then I did what made sense. I walked out of that dark theater.

And let me tell you, it’s gorgeous out. 🌞 I want to do something that sounds fun. Maybe I’ll go have a nice Hefeweizen beer. Or eat a slice of Juniors’ Chocolate Fudge Skyscraper Layer Cake. But first, maybe I’ll see if they’ve come out with a new Subaru Baja, yet.

Because, from a place of well-being, material things are just fun to have.

This is the kind of thing I work with clients on – seeing you’re not broken, understanding how thought works, getting unstuck. If you’d like to talk about what you’re going through, I offer a free initial call to see if coaching might help. Send me a message here