What You Ignore Is What Eats You

Pretending that something real has gone is called delusion.

I’m currently taking this poetry class with Megan Falley, and to no surprise and my great frustration, the only good poems I seem to write have roots in my eating disorder. It’s apparently all I can write about here, lately, too; how boring it must be, my dear readers. Thank you for sticking with me. I, frankly, am tired of thinking and writing about this same old thing that has haunted me for half of my short life. I should just write the damn book so I can move on to different content.

It’s taken me until now to start learning that ignoring something that is real and present does not actually work. Every time the eating disorder surfaces significantly in my life, I think, with fervor, This is the Last Time! Never again will I let this corrupt me; I am Letting Go. Then I ignore it for six months or so, until it rears its head in some kind of dramatic way, and the cycle repeats.

. .

Pretending something is gone when it isn’t is not called letting go, it is called delusion. You have to make room for the things that scare or haunt you; otherwise, they will find a way to dominate your life. The longer you shove something aside, the more persistently it will try to worm its way back. 

You can’t get away with ignoring what’s real or what’s trying to make itself known. It isn’t sustainable, nor will it work. Whether “it” is some kind of illness, a silent fracture in a relationship, a nagging problem or grief you have not yet touched: what you ignore is what eats you.

Life is your collaborative partner that wants you to grow and thrive. When you aren’t looking at something important, life will give you plenty of opportunities to look at it before forcing you to. It starts with tossing little pebbles at your feet; if you kick them aside, you’ll get bigger and bigger rocks in your path. Eventually, if you keep ignoring what is trying to show itself, you’ll get a brick thrown at your head.¹

Is it as simple as paying attention to the pebbles in our path?

. .

So much of self-growth is about practicing letting go; turns out, you can’t always let go entirely. It might be that trying to let go of everything is just another form of evasion; a kind of spiritual bypassing. You don’t have to let go of everything, and unless you’re enlightened, you can’t. You can be well and lead a beautiful life, even if your baggage and problems and disorders are still hooked to you in some way.

As Michael Singer says in The Untethered Soul, “everything will be okay as soon as you are ok with everything. And that’s the only time everything will be okay.” I have to be ok with the fact that there’s a part of me that will always be tied to the eating disorder. It may be completely gone someday, but that’s not really up to me. Perhaps, as my love suggested to me recently, the trick is to just allow a little space for it to be there. Because it is there. Instead of trying to ignore it, or let it take over my life, I might just need to acknowledge it and let it be. The simple practice of noticing something can take its power away: awareness does wonders all on its own.

. .

It’s probably true that whatever you don’t want to look at is exactly what you should look at. Then, it’s easier to do something about it—it’s no longer charged with such great fear.

Don’t let yourself get eaten.

Maggie

1. This metaphor is not original—I don’t think I have an original thought in my head, honestly. But it’s a good metaphor I think of often.