As I lay on a gurney in an ambulance, the entire left side of my body numb, I realized I couldn’t form coherent thoughts. Instead of sentences that sang in my mind, all I could feel were words floating in choppy waters, sometimes surfacing, sometimes submerged. That terrified me.
That’s the moment I realized I needed to become kinder to myself.
I’m grateful that it turned out to be a mini stroke — a transient ischemic attack — which has the same onset as a full stroke but the symptoms disappear within 24 hours. My doctor, whom I’d been seeing for 11 years, told me that I was lucky. “Whatever clot was in there broke up on its own.” He told me that all my tests had come back healthy.
Even the test to see if I had a hole in my heart, done by a young man who told me he and his girlfriend were big fans of my food blog. They’d made one of my recipes the night before! I nodded and smiled, for a second.
What had happened? I didn’t understand. And back then, I needed to understand.
“We know that emotional stress can cause physical damage. We know that the body holds all that stress. So I’d like you to make a list of everything that causes you stress. And slowly, over time, let it all go.”
This is the best advice I’ve ever received.
What I learned by going through that slow, unraveling experience my doctor recommended?
I know it all in my heart now.
We’ve been taught to doubt ourselves by systems that were built to make us feel small.
That’s why you’re always taking on a new self-improvement campaign and blaming yourself if it doesn’t work. That’s the perpetual cycle of frustration and disappointment.
For thousands of years, we westernized humans have been told that we’re bad. We’re sinners. We have to make amends for our wrong actions. We have to fit in. We must obey. Don’t be weird. Don’t be too loud. Be perfect.
That’s why we live in a culture that’s still guided by thou shalt not or remove all the moral defects of your character or lose that belly fat by drinking ½ cup of this liquid every night or your SAT scores are too low to gain admission to a “good school,” so you need to hire a tutor to get them up.
We live in a culture that isn’t kind to us.
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