Some days, like today, everything feels hard. My life feels overwhelming. I'm not giving up sugar in a vacuum. My life continues with all its other struggles as well, including renovating our home (which we bought a year ago), keeping up with yard work, cleaning the house, meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking, maintaining and nurturing my relationship with my husband, insecurities about my body, feeling inferior because I don't have nice clothes, balancing my household budget, spending time with friends and family, exercising, getting adequate sleep, working 40+ hours a week, caring for my dog...the list feels endless. I don't know how to do it all sometimes, and it makes me feel horribly depressed. I don't know how people juggle their own lives, not to mention the lives of their children.
Some days I barely feel that I am keeping my head above water. And on those days, all I want to do is escape. That's where sugar comes in. Usually I can escape in a handful of M&Ms from the candy dish at work, or some ice cream if I am at home. But without my escape coping mechanism, I am left to feel the full brunt of the difficulty of life. Jon Kabat-Zinn has a book called Full Catastrophe Living that talks about using meditation as a tool for a stressful life, and I feel the title of his book nicely summarizes how I am feeling now. I feel I'm living the full catastrophe. In some moments, I think feeling and living this way is beautiful. You can feel the pain and the pleasures of life more fully when you're truly awake for it, and without sugar, I have nothing to numb myself from the full catastrophe. On the other hand, being fully present for the full catastrophe is hard, and it's obvious to me why I go to sugar to help ease the discomfort. All I want right now is to forget about my list of responsibilities, but I have to learn new ways (and Jon Kabat-Zinn would suggest meditation is an excellent way, and I agree with him) of coping.
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