I want to be big

As a self-proclaimed control freak, the unknown is anxiety inducing for me. And since the entire future is unknown, its safe to say I have a lot of anxiety.  When I first realized I had anxiety, which was surprisingly pretty recently, a lot of things in my life started to make sense.  I realized that my entire disordered eating episode had to do with my anxiety.  It's almost as though my disordered eating was a form of self-medication for my anxiety.  It gave my brain something to control.  Controlling my body shape and size meant controlling my food intake, and that led to controlling my entire day.  My life revolved around managing my energy to make it through the day.  I talked about this concept before in another post.  My disordered eating gave my anxiety a purpose.  It's kind of effed up now that I'm thinking about it.

At a certain point in my self-guided recovery, I realized that this obsession with body weight, body image, and food was just keeping me "small."  I mean small in a few different ways.  It was keeping me physically small, but it was also keeping my presence in the world "small."  When I was focused on myself and nothing else, I wasn't making a very big impact on the world.  Now I can see that this was self-sabotage for my innate greatness.  The same innate greatness that we all have.

This quote from Marianne Williamson speaks to this idea.

 “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? ... Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do.... It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” 

I can see now that I took a very literal approach to "shrinking".  I think there may be others out there who are also doing this on a subconscious level.  It's time for us to stop.  I don't want to be small anymore, I have too much to say and too much to do.  If I stay small, it's selfish because I am only serving myself, and I don't want to be selfish.  I don't want to have a small impact on the world, I want to help and fix what I can.  I want to inspire and lead and teach and shine.  I want to be a mirror and reflect back the shininess that's in you.  I want more for myself and I want more for you, too.

Imagine if everyone out there who is consciously or subconsciously devoting time and energy into keeping themselves "small" in whatever capacity that means for them, just decided to stop and focus on something bigger and better?  I can picture big things for our world.  Let's do this.

xo,

Amy