The host discusses being sick and how illness heightens eating-disorder symptoms, struggles to prioritize self-care, and the small win of making soup while practicing self-compassion and rest during recovery.
The host opens the live with a greeting, mentions she's under the weather and may cough, and shares initial details about her symptoms and expectations for recovery.
She explains how illness triggers increased ED symptoms, struggles to take care of herself when unwell, and how she sometimes over- or under-prioritizes self-care while trying to recover.
She mentions making soup as a self-care win, reflects on how we care for others more easily than ourselves, and updates viewers about her dog Milo getting sick after eating a plum pit.
She shares that she began therapy with a new therapist, outlines the initial session topics, and expresses hope that therapy will help with behaviors and emotional challenges, especially outside of drinking.
Celebrating six weeks sober, she describes unexpected gains like increased self-trust, self-respect, better boundaries, and being present in life, as well as some challenges that remain.
Happy Monday, Cadre Crew! Hello. Wow. Sorry, I just want to give you a caveat. I'm a little sick, so I might be coughing and hacking and sniffling on this slide. But, um, we are here. We are here, and mentally, we are here. Shit. Yeah, I developed a lovely little cough yesterday. I was like sniffly on Friday and Saturday. No fever, no other symptoms, but definitely have developed a little chest cough, so I think it's something that's going around right now. So my lips look blue, but that is not because of my sickness drinking a blue Gatorade, so I guess that's purple.
sick for my trip I know I'm leaving Thursday morning I'm going to Japan with my cousin and I have I am confident I'm going to be well by then the fact that I don't have a fever tells me that this is just a cold that's going to pass through me and I'm pumping myself full of medicine and liquids and I'm sleeping and resting so I think I'll be fine um and At the very least, by then, I won't be contagious, so that's good news. I am emotionally and mentally a little bit not my best today either. I have been sort of struggling a little bit the last few days with some ED stuff.
A lot of that is pretty common though when I get sick. I notice that my ED symptoms increase because I feel like I don't have as much control, especially over my body, and not being able to move or not feeling well enough to do the things that I want to do can trigger a lot of that feeling of being out of control or not having autonomy in my body or not being able to just be as active as I would want to be. And so that always brings up a lot. So I'm trying to have a lot of grace for myself and some self-compassion and just know that this is pretty typical when I get sick.
This is something that happens and that my body knows how to recover and bounce back. So high speak wonder. But yeah, I've definitely noticed that has come up quite a bit. And I've written a lot about this before if that's something that you're interested in reading more about. I know Rach subscribes to my substack, but I have written a lot about that there. Rach says, love how it's so easy to go overboard on the self-care when something is coming up. We are looking forward to yet any other time.
It seems like too much. Yeah, that's so true. Like it's interesting because like I have when I'm sick, I have a hard time of taking good care of myself. Like I have a hard time buying myself medicine or like choosing to eat foods like soups or broths or easy to digest foods that I know are going to be easier on the body or like just literally making sure that I'm resting and drinking enough water. Like I will push myself or just eat crap or not take medicine. But if there's something that I really want to get better for, then it's a lot easier for me to try and do that.
And last night I actually like made myself soup, which I don't ever do when I'm sick. I don't make myself soup. So that felt like a big deal. Yeah, it's funny though, how we like how it's hard for us to take care of ourselves. Even though like it's so easy to take care of somebody else, right? Like if somebody I loved was sick, I would immediately like do all the things. It's also like when we're sick, it's harder to like do stuff. Like it's harder for me to wanna cook or like go to the store just 'cause I'm not feeling well.
So I understand that there's a component of like energy and resources too. But yeah, so Milo also is not feeling well. Milo threw up this morning, he ate a plum pit at my mom's house this weekend. But he has no other symptoms, so luckily, I think he probably just threw up whatever he was not feeling good about. But never like, oh, my baby's sick. That's never fun. So good news. I started therapy today. I have a new therapist. It was kind of like just like an initial session of like, you know, going through why are you in therapy?
What are you hoping to get out of it? Like very just like run-of-the-mill rigamarole. Looking forward to having that one-on-one support and hopefully starting to see maybe some shifts in some other spaces and areas of my life outside of not drinking. So I'm excited about that and I hope it's a good fit because it's taken me a long time to find someone as we all know. So yeah, it's been a whirlwind. Rach says my dog got into protein powder a couple weeks ago. Oh, yeah. I don't know if I told you guys this, but Milo ate poop one time at the beach.
I feel like I've probably shared this on a live before and he threw up poop. So I had to clean up, poop threw up, which was really, truly just like the highlight of my life. Really like such a great experience for everybody. But yeah, so yeah, but it's yeah, I have found that It is really interesting how much like the whack-a-mole of my different sort of diagnoses and symptoms exist like especially between my depression and my eating disorder and my anxiety and drinking and how like not drinking has decreased my depression but increased my anxiety and how my eating disorder is still sort of like very much active and present and especially like in the evenings when I find myself having an urge to drink and I'm not drinking, I find myself like reaching for food.
And so there's still stuff that I'm not coping with or that I'm sort of like shoving away or that I'm having a hard time interrupting behaviors still that are just very ingrained. So I'm hopeful that therapy will be helpful in that and I'm excited to share all the things I learned about that along the way. As far as not drinking has gone, today I'm six weeks sober. Yay! Very, very proud of myself, very happy. And I think one of the most interesting things that's happened is my relationship with myself has improved so much.
Like I said I was going to do something and I'm doing it, which has built so much self-trust. and self-respect. And I think that it has allowed me to also stick to and maintain better boundaries. I'm also showing up in more places in my life that I wasn't able to before, which makes me like myself more. So it's really interesting to notice how just by committing to not drinking, My relationship with myself has improved and I didn't expect that. That's been like a really lovely, unexpected positive change.
And there's also a lot of things that haven't happened that I thought would happen. Like I thought, like I read all this, you know, people talk all the time about like you stop drinking and like your skin, your skin clears up and there's like this, none of that shit happened. Like if anything, I'm breaking out more. I'm sick. I don't know. I guess I had this expectation that by stopping drinking, I'd have some other physical glow up and that has not happened. I look the same. It's just not, at least I feel like I do.
So that was kind of funny that I had that expectation and that didn't really happen. And I also thought that I was gonna lose a lot of friends or that my social life would change a lot because all of my, All my friends drink and a lot of our social activities revolve around happy hour or going out to dinner or like grabbing drinks or going to concerts or whatever, there's alcohol. And I was really concerned that like either my friends would stop inviting me places or I would find out like I actually didn't like doing the things I was doing or that my social anxiety was actually too high to even do those things and that's why I had to drink.
And while the first couple of weeks were really hard, I have found that A, like My friends don't care if I'm drinking, they care if I'm well. So they don't give a fuck that I'm not drinking. And B, I have found the part of me that is silly and playful and engaged and cares about people in my life is actually who I am. And I am still able to participate in things without drinking and still feel like I'm included. Yeah, I do go home sooner from events. My social battery runs out a lot faster. But in the end, that's actually a positive thing for me because I'm not burning myself out.
I'm not exhausting myself socially and draining my battery the way that I was because I would drink and then stay out later than I needed to or wanted to or exert more social energy than I actually have capacity for. So I have found that I'm not actually missing or losing things that I expected to. And it's really cool that I feel like my relationship with myself has improved as a result as well. And I know that that's not always the case for a lot of folks. I know a lot of people do lose friends when they stop drinking or get sober.
And I think that if I had made this choice a long time ago in a different part of my life with a different friend group, I probably would have lost friends. Luckily, I'm in a season of my life where I spent the last few years after getting divorced really trying to form relationships with people that were rooted in shared values and real connection. And so I do know that because of that like the friendships I have now and the relationships I have now are really solid and they're not rooted in you know what we can do for each other or like you know filling a certain hole but rather like we care about one another and want each other to thrive and survive.
So I feel very lucky for that, and I know that if I'd made this choice a long time ago, it would be a totally different outcome. So I also wanted to acknowledge that that's not always the case for folks, and it can be a big deterrent. It can be a really scary reason not to. So... This girl needs to be healthy. I need to be healthy. So anyways, that's my little life update, my little spiel today. A reminder that because I'm going to be out of town, that's where my live is today and not Thursday. And then next week I won't be going live because my time zone will be so whackadoodle.
But I will be back the first week of October. Is it the first week of October? Is that? Let me look at my calendar. October 6th is. I guess it's sort of the second week of October because it's October 6th but that week I'll be back to my regular scheduled programming and we will have a new theme on cadre. The theme for October is harvest so I'm excited to see how that kind of plays out in the kinds of videos I share with y'all. I'm going to post a new video this week my last video on the safety series so please feel free to check that out and let me know if you have questions or if anything resonates or doesn't resonate And as always, I'm so glad you're here and that you're showing up for yourself and I'm proud of you and I'm excited to share more about my trip and to be healthy.
To be healthy. So here's to being healthy and I will see you all in about a week and a half.
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