Fun fact, over the last eight years I’ve lost forty pounds, gained back thirty pounds, and lost thir t y pounds again. I’ve gone through a series of fad diets partly to lose weight and partly to just see what it’s like. I never thought once about a diet growing up. I mostly just sucked down just about every soda pop I could get my hands on. When I turned twenty one that then became true for beer. Needless to say I was bound to be overweight at some point but having been skinny during the entirety of my childhood I figured turning things around and thinning out again would be no problem. I learned I was wrong about that “turning things around would be easy” bit. It actually became pretty challenging. Losing weight is an effort in and of itself, but keeping weight off is always an interesting game. I figured it’s about habit. Just eating salad from here until death. Those things were sort of myths I’ve glomed onto about other people losing weight and gaining it back, then

  I wrote the following piece April 2016. Thank you to David Allen for helping me out through all types of disastrous brought on my negative view of the world.

  To anyone else he would look fast asleep. He lay on top of the covers of his bed with his eyes closed and body relaxed. It was possibly a dream state of sorts, but he was suspended here somewhere between conscious and unconscious. Behind those closed eyes his mind was active. It was actually a bit more than that, his world was active. It wasn’t always easy to get here, bu t it was one of his favorite places to go ever since he was a kid laying in the sunshine on the living room floor waiting to go to church. It was a sort of active relaxed state. Something like how he often heard meditation described. He hadn’t planned on being here. He just laid down on the bed and closed his eyes and slowly the tendrils of his inner world wrapped around him and pulled him in. He lay on his bed eyes closed and he wondered how many sounds he could pick out. At first the obvious ones jumped forward. The ceiling fan whirring above him. Then the clinking of it’s two pull chains for the l

Her: Do you love me? Me: Of course. Her: Then you must love yourself, because how can you love someone else if you don’t love yourself?   Those were the wise words of my best friend in high school Kara. I always hated that logic. What I heard that day wasn’t that I obviously must care for myself in some way, but rather that not only do I not love myself but I also don’t have the capacity to genuinely love others. I have a real knack for taking things the wrong way. I always thought self love was int r insic and effortless. Some people loved themselves but I did not. It’s not that I had done anything “wrong” per se in the morality sense. It was that I had a natural disdain for myself. A sense of worthlessness. I was steeped in bouts of depression from a young age and could never figure out why. I was always reminded that my circumstances were good and that I should be grateful. “There is nothing wrong with you.” was not to uncommon to hear shouted at me through the frustrat

  When you meet someone you say “Wow, you’re great!” and they respond “I think you’re great too!” Then you enter the Relationship Tunnel. At the beginning of the tunnel is ice cream and restaurants and what seems like endless sex. The Entrance! However that’s just the entrance. The tunnel is really mostly made up of mirrors. Big ones, small ones, ones that make you look skinny, and ones that make you look fat. Ones that make you bigger than you really are and ones that make you really really small.   That first mirror! At first all of these mirrors seem like a lot of fun. You and your partner can’t stop looking at yourselves and each other in awe and amazement. But then at some point when you get far enough into the tunnel you get disoriented. You lose your point of reference. You forget what your partner looks like and even worse you forget what you look like. The mirrors play tricks on you. You can no longer tell where they begin and you end. The next thing you know y

In the past 8 years I’ve attended over 600 therapy sessions and spent $239,874 on my mental health. Here’s what I’ve learned… The process of improving my outlook on life, or maybe just accepting my outlook on life, is not a straight forward one. Many times my problem is not that life is genuinely horrible, but my view of it has become so narrow that I’m incapable of experiencing anything but neurosis. Jung once said “Neurosis is a lways a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Essentially there is some wounding, suffering, or otherwise neglected feeling, often because it is to difficult to bear, so instead we suffer in some other way. Part of the difficulty of experiencing that actual suffering is that it may come with revealing to to me something that I do not like. For instance I have to realize the reason I’m suffering from a break up where I cannot understand the persons actions might actually be because of how ugly and selfish I have been. Looking at reality honestly is