To Your Health

One thing that’s been on my mind a lot lately is health. (Gee, I wonder why.)  This has been a super challenging year for me physically. Pregnancy at 46 is taxing, and Alice’s birth utterly knocked the wind from my sails for months, not days or even weeks. After a short window of what I’d call “feeling mostly normal,” I found myself sick with a cold that inched into pneumonia. And then came That Which Will Not Be Named. (I’m leaning into Voldemort or, as one of my children suggested, Videmort.)

Anyhow, I’ve felt frustratingly not well for most of the year. My body feels depleted and tired mentally, that’s a very taxing thing. I want to feel good. I want to be healthy. But goodness, it’s so easy to fall into a cycle that looks like this:

feel tired and icky
lack energy to do things that might help in the long run
stay tired and icky

I know it’s not just me. All of us fall into the trap and goodness, it’s hard to pull yourself out. Especially when you’ve got so many reasons that validate your feelings— and we all do. My reasons are adorable. I love every single one of them. But as much as they are hurdles to health, they are also the very reasons to invest.

Lest you think I’m talking about weight loss here, I’m not. Well, not specifically. It’s an easy side effect, but really, what I’m focusing on in my thoughts is how easy it’s been to default to shortcut meals, and how it’s felt hard in the humid creep of the last few weeks to get outside and feel the sun on my face. I’m thinking about the processed stuff that’s crept in, and how checking labels on everything— from what’s gone into our bodies, and onto them, to what’s been in our environment— has been less of a priority.

So here I am, recommitting to being on guard. Saying out loud that while I have so many reasons not to be thoughtful, I recognize that it’s not negotiable. I’m tired of not being 100% It’s time to do something about it.