Humans are Humans

Every morning I follow the girls' school bus (we go the same way) and see a couple of the other bus stops along the way.  There are children of multiple nationalities that get on the bus, yet all of us parents sit there and wave and blow kisses to our kids who have gotten on the bus.  It hit me that regardless of where we were born or how we have been raised, we are all parents doing the best we can for our children, and putting them on a school bus and blowing kisses is just part of what parents do.

When I look at the statistics of this blog and where the page views are coming from, I am blown away.  I have friends in Germany and Austraila, so I'm glad to know they are reading, but Russia, France, Egypt, Malta, Brazil, and Turkey.  Wow, and then I realized, we are all human.  Whether we have a weight problem or not, the struggles I am having with my weight can be understood because they are issues of being human.

Everybody has their struggles and those who say they don't, well, my guess is they are not being honest with themselves or others.  How are my struggles any different than other people's?  They aren't.  Yes, I have an issue with food, and since food is necessary for my body to live, I am confronted multiple times per day with the opportunity to make better choices than I have in the past.  Some days I succeed, others, I don't, and that's ok; it is a process. 

When I was in nursing school, we studied Erickson in our psychology class.  Erickson endorses that there are stages in life that we must pass through, if we don't "complete" these stages then we are emotionally stuck there until we can find a way to move through that stage.  I take this theory one step further, that each stage has multiple layers, so the same issues that you dealt with in the past, come back around but on a deeper level.  It's like Shrek says, Ogres are like onions because they have layers, I have to say that the human psyche is also like an onion because of the number of layers that take you closer and closer to the core of who you are (and no, cake doesn't work for this analogy either Donkey).

Each time I focus on my health and working on how to get healthier, I go a little deeper than before.  I make more progress than before and utilize the lessons learned on the last pass.  Each dip into depression and not taking care of myself is shorter and the time between dips gets longer.  After this fight for 41 years, I am beginning to accept that I will get there, it just takes time and patience combined with desire and perseverance.  We all have those traits, it is Human nature, finding those traits and believing in them is a different story. 

So once again, I am singing Helen Reddy...I am strong, I am invincible I can and will do this and make progress towards my goal of health.