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My Prison
Many of us think we are being honest when we say to ourselves, “I’m happy.” We think we are being honest when we tell ourselves and those we love, “I’m fine” or “Don’t worry, everything is all right.”
But often we are lying. Not on purpose. Not because we want to mislead others. But because we are in such pain, or feel so uncomfortable with how we look or how we feel, that we hide. We hide from our families, our friends, our doctors, our co-workers. We hide from ourselves. We hide because we feel ashamed. We tell everyone that we feel fine because how could we possibly admit that we are not?
For years, I lived my life in hiding, and coming out of hiding took some painful reckoning. When others asked how I was doing, I would reply in a defensive tone, “I’m fine!” The message I clearly sent with that response was “Don’t dig any deeper. Leave me alone.”
When I was seventy-five pounds overweight, I was heavy emotionally as well as physically. I gained the weight because I was out of touch with my inner needs and voice; remaining heavy was a way to continue hiding. Admitting and recognizing the power of that inner place is where my journey to permanent weight loss and health began. And it will be the same for you. Not the same story, but the same reaching inward to the place where you’ve been hiding.
To understand my weight loss journey you need to also understand what else I had to lose—small step by small step—before I could shed pounds and find my true self.
I grew up in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, with three siblings, one sister and two brothers. We had a happy home and my parents were loving and supportive. My dad was resourceful, reliable, and sturdy. But it was my mom who was in charge of things. She was strict and she set high standards for me and my siblings; she wanted the best for us all and pushed us to achieve.
I was always a strong-willed young girl. I loved the challenge of competition. I was an athlete—I ran, swam, and played soccer. I loved horses. I was always on the move, rarely looking behind me as I forged ahead into my next new adventure. Always in a rush, I sometimes didn’t look ahead either. I had more than a few run-ins with telephone wires and bushes and tree roots!
At university I studied science. I also fell in love hard and fast when I was just twenty years old. Since my then-love was a couple of years ahead of me academically, I interrupted my studies when he graduated and together we went out west. I believed in his dreams for our success and for our future together. We were married when I was twenty-three—not unusually young for the time, but definitely an age when I was only just beginning to understand myself.
I didn’t question giving up further education for my husband’s career: it seemed natural, something I could do to show him the depth of my love and commitment. Besides, didn’t I have the rest of my life to figure out what I wanted to do?
But very early into my marriage, my connection to myself began to disappear. I cannot tell you about one specific moment, or even one particular event that triggered my separation from myself. It was a slow build. But day by day, month by month, I began to lose a sense of my own importance. It probably began with the very simple act of giving up what had been important to me—studying science—for someone else’s dream.
Even as I was thrilled to have children, I think I really let go of the real Tosca when I became a mother. Like many women (of all ages), I jumped into parenthood and all its responsibilities and quickly became absorbed in making other people happy. What I can see now is that when I focused so completely on caring for my kids, I stopped knowing how to care for myself. But that wasn’t the only reason I began hiding.
Early in my marriage, we moved a lot for my husband’s job. The moves were necessary for his career, but they were also disruptive and I was more or less solely responsible for the logistics of each move and for helping the kids adjust each time. I loved my husband; the heavy lifting was a way of showing my support. But each move was stressful and each one took a lot out of me. It should have been goodwill that was building in our partnership, but instead there was mounting tension, and I felt I had to walk on eggshells. A lot of the time, especially at home, I felt nervous and vulnerable. This emotional environment made me withdraw from myself even more. It didn’t feel safe to simply be me. Even now as I describe it to you, the reader, I realize I was then and am still afraid to admit that my relationship was transitioning from love to routine, and ultimately to something very different from love; it was abuse.
When I was twenty-seven, I gave birth to our second beautiful daughter. Soon thereafter, we moved yet again, the seventh time in ten years. Again, I felt enormous joy bringing forth this new life into the world. But I was beginning to realize that there was a darkness creeping in and around me. I was busy, busy, busy and yet never made time for myself. My movements kept me out of my head and out of my heart. I scurried around for others. I wanted to think everything was perfect. I began to tell myself, “Everything is fine.” “You should be grateful.” But somewhere deep inside me I knew these words were just not true. And on the surface life was indeed grand. I loved our house, our great community, our pretty little suburban neighborhood. I got wonderfully lost in being a mom. I loved being with my girls and teaching them about school, life, and themselves. Isn’t this what I needed to make my life meaningful, my heart feel safe and purposeful?
The surface never tells the whole story. In reality, with each passing day, month, and year, I was becoming less happy, less relaxed, more stressed, and more sad. I found myself relying on destructive ways of covering my anxiety and dulling my own yearnings. “Time for myself” was time spent eating. I had a warped sense of what it meant to indulge my own needs!
My bad habits consumed me. Some of these habits may even seem familiar to you. I stayed up late after everyone went to bed, made myself comfortable on the living room sofa, and lost myself in a quart of ice cream or a jar of peanut butter. Swallowing one spoonful after another, I no longer tasted the food or felt the pleasure of its sweetness. Rather, I shoveled in food to obliterate my own feelings of sadness. My husband and I had drifted far apart—he busy with work and I busy managing the house and family to a self-imposed perfection. I berated myself if the house was messy or if there were things left undone at the end of a busy day. These late-night feed-fests were a way of battling back the feeling that I was a loser. I was desperate to block out the constant, gnawing fear that something was terribly wrong with me, with my life. One of the most basic human needs, according to Tony Robbins, master life coach, is the need to feel significant. Caring for everyone else was meaningful work and had my marriage been happy, I might have felt differently, but all I knew then is that the care and feeding of other souls didn’t satisfy my own soul’s need for significance.
When I got married, I weighed about 127 pounds—thin for a woman of my height (5′8″). But ten years later, the number on the scale had reached two hundred and four pounds. I was a bloated and obscured version of my former self.
At two hundred plus pounds, I avoided mirrors and cameras. I hid myself in big, bulky clothes. Everything about my body made me feel awkward, ill at ease, not good enough. The photo on this book is one of the only ones I have of myself at that time—it’s not that I threw them all away, but rather that I rarely stepped out from behind the camera to allow myself to be photographed! I didn’t want to document my unhappy weight. I didn’t want to document my sad truth.
In addition to simply gaining weight, I also started to be physically unwell. On several occasions I even passed out. This was hypoglycemia at work—my organs were beginning to complain about my poor diet. My blood sugar would soar, then plummet, taking its toll on my entire body. I was often sweaty, clammy, and dizzy. I sometimes had heart palpitations—an irregular heartbeat that caused a tightness in my chest. This really scared me because my father had suffered from heart disease all his life, and ultimately the disease took him from this world. I didn’t want the same fate for me and my kids.
As perhaps you know, food has a terrible way of being both a problem and a solution. With each passing day, month, and year, I continued to use food to calm me but also to squelch my dreams and block out my thoughts of my future. The more I ate, the more I felt further diminished, unworthy, and dependent. I had trouble even remembering who I had been as a girl and young woman before I married. Some days, I would quickly glance at photos from my childhood. The images staring back at me of the smiling, strong, confident girl had nothing to do with who I had become. Yet most troubling of all was that I couldn’t figure out how to connect the dots: I knew I ate too much, but how, really, had I become this person staring back at me in the mirror?
Not surprisingly, I was on edge all the time, and I took even a passing comment about my weight as a deep criticism about me as a person. I saw disapproval in other’s eyes. And I heard a nasty voice in my ear: “You look fat today.” “Why are you wearing that blouse?” “Those jeans don’t exactly flatter you.” “Are you crazy or something?”
How had I become this sad, overweight, powerless woman? And what was I doing to myself? Where was my belief in my own power?
The bigger I got on the outside, the more I retreated into my litany of self-criticism. I resisted listening to a deep part of me who wanted that frank inner conversation—about my marriage, about my future, about what I wanted to do with the rest of my time on Earth. I was depressed, lonely, and powerless to seek help. In truth I didn’t know where to look. I needed this book all those years ago but there wasn’t anything like it at the time of my crisis.
This feeling of paralysis kept me stuck in my destructive, repetitive behaviors. I didn’t realize these negative patterns were part of the prison I was building around myself. There were rare occasions when I allowed myself to peek out and have fun, usually with my children, but most of the time I was introverted and quiet.
I focused on the girls, wanting only to keep them safe and happy, and their busy lives provided good cover. But was this real? Was this even good for the girls if it was so wrong, so bad, for me?
Of course, children always see more than you want them to—they knew I was unhappy. They knew something was not right in the house. Because I was not taking care of myself, because I was eating fatty, sugary foods that sapped my energy, I was compounding an already bad situation.
I am certain many of you can relate to that experience: our families are our priority, but it’s a slippery slope from taking care of others to neglecting ourselves. It becomes—without our even realizing it—somehow more comfortable to put the needs of others before our own. And to be sure, this “giving up” and giving so much of ourselves feels good—it’s one way we can show our love for others. But of course there are many ways to show our love for others that don’t compromise our own needs and hopes and dreams. I didn’t realize that then at all. In a way, I think that I shifted into sacrifice mode so that I could mask my own fears of being who I was. But sacrifice comes at a price, and mine was to become emotionally, physically, and spiritually depleted.
But in those early days, the only voice I heard was small and squeaky, telling me not to take up so much space. Hide, the little voice told me. I suppose if I were really in a prison I would curl up in a ball in the farthest corner and keep myself from view. The dominant feeling I was experiencing was shame. I was ashamed at myself for being a failure, fat, insignificant, and worthless. This was not the way I was raised or the person I had expected to be. I had allowed myself and others to destroy my purpose.
Deep down, I knew something was wrong with my life. If I had had the courage to be honest with myself at the time, I would have admitted that what was wrong was my marriage: it had soured beyond repair. My husband and I had drifted worlds apart and weren’t supportive or communicative with each other. I was not happy and I did not feel respected, truly loved, or cared for. I felt uneasy in my own home, too vulnerable to relax and be myself. But even as I am now sure that my husband was as much to blame as me, I still thought I was the one in the wrong. I doubted my own instincts: Are things really that bad? Maybe I am just holding myself to impossible standards. Don’t all women feel this way about marriage after a while?
I would try to justify my feelings, my fear of change, always arriving at the same conclusion: You don’t have what it takes to live a different kind of life. You owe it to your family to try harder and stay with them.
So I soldiered on, and kept on eating in a silent battle with myself.
Food was the only personal joy I had. Food had become my medicine, my best friend, my only safe, reliable source of comfort. After all my work for the day was done, after everyone else was in bed, I retreated to the living room sofa. I might turn on the television; sometimes I read magazines and dreamed about faraway places that looked exotic or romantic. But then I closed the cover and settled in to eat my quart of ice cream, hunk of cheese, or spoonfuls of peanut butter again and again—and, often, all of them together.
Sometimes I was scared I would be caught eating, and I actually hid in the closet for fear that my husband would angrily criticize my eating and my weight. He had a temper and I was often the target for it. He thought my overeating was a deep flaw and a sign of weakness, and I believed he was right about me. I felt ugly, unsexy, and worthless. He didn’t contradict me or help me think otherwise. My late-night trysts with food had become one of the few sources of pleasure in a life that was becoming increasingly unsafe. Under cover of darkness, I thought no one would notice what was becoming of me.
It’s not like I didn’t try to get out of this mess of an existence. I didn’t try to leave the marriage—which would have been the healthy and self-loving thing to do—but I did try to lose the weight that I felt sure was part of the problem. If only I got skinny, I’d tell myself, I’ll feel better. He’ll love me again. I’ll love me again.
I’d try the latest fad diet—high protein, no carbs; pineapple for seven days; frozen diet dinners; complete restriction. Like most diets, they worked—for a while. But then I’d start my old, familiar, destructive eating patterns. I’d reach for my trio of favorite foods—the ice cream, the cheese, the peanut butter. They were my drugs, and I was an addict.
I know now what I didn’t know then: when we pretend we are happy when we are not, when we bury painful experiences inside ourselves instead of confronting them, we end up hurting others—and ourselves most of all. But at that time in my life I was not aware of that important lesson, nor was I ready for it.
At that time, I thought that I had some kind of control over what I was doing; I believed that I could handle everything life dealt me, and that if I could just stop being as weak as I’d come to believe I was, I would be fine. I thought that losing weight was about self-control. I didn’t have enough of it, I was told, and I told myself, but I knew this quality could only come from me so I didn’t ask for any help. I kept my focus outside myself—on my beautiful, unique, wonderful daughters. I ignored myself, my body, my heart. I ignored what my gut was telling me: that I was unhappy, and that I was not being honored or respected. I used food to smother my desires. To take the place of dreaming and setting goals for myself. And I got very good at it.
If you’ve ever felt backed into an emotional corner and terrified of changing even one thing about your life, you probably understand this fear. It’s not logical. It’s not rational. But the fear of change surrounds you just the same. And it can feel much, much bigger than you.
Then, slowly, I risked really looking at myself. I stared at myself literally in the mirror and figuratively by allowing myself longer periods of self-focus. As uncomfortable as it was to see the differences, I started to compare the woman I was and the woman I felt that I ought to be. I examined what was still beneath the extra weight in my face, around my tummy, and at the top of my legs. I would stare long enough to imagine myself the way I used to be: an athletic, spirited young woman who wanted to be a teacher. Who loved a good run on a sunny, cool day. Who was the captain of a soccer team. Who swam competitively.
Where had that woman gone?
Where was she hiding?
I began to search.
The Turning Point
In the summer of 2000, I finally changed my life. I’ll spare you the pitiful details of a bad marriage’s ending, but suffice it to say that I finally began to question whether my marriage was truly tolerable and if, in fact, I was teaching my daughters to hide from their problems rather than try to solve them. I asked myself what kind of life I was truly modeling for my children. Was I teaching them that it is okay to let yourself go, to treat your body with disregard, to allow someone else’s opinion of you to rule your life, to avoid and abandon your dreams and desires?
It was time for my girls and me to do the thing I had never thought I could do. I had to make a break from a marriage that had become toxic and from the life I was living. I didn’t want my daughters to internalize the same sense of helplessness they saw me act out each day. I knew it was up to me to show them a new way to live, one based on taking care of myself and bringing health back to my life. I realize now this step took a tremendous amount of courage, but I was standing on the precipice and I was going to either fall or fly. I was gripped by the overwhelming desire to fly, to survive, to appear as my true self in this world.
Decision made, within months our home went up for sale, and the girls and I moved into a townhome nearby. I had done the unimaginable—broken out of hiding, removed myself from a bad situation, and created my own separate space. That first step seemed giant, but looking back, it was just one moment I needed to get to and through. And then we were out and moving forward. It was terrifying, but more than that, it was exhilarating and exciting.
In many ways this move was my first Start Here moment. It was the first of several baby steps that helped me reconnect to myself, to the inner strength that was always there but held locked up because of my own fears. I had a long way to go before I would feel completely emancipated and truly ready to embrace the lessons of those years, but I was on my way.
You probably can imagine how frightened I was to be suddenly on my own, needing to make a living, learning how to pay the bills and take care of the many details that go along with raising three young daughters. I had not really worked since I was in my early twenties. The whole job market had changed. My education seemed far away and almost useless. I felt beyond overwhelmed. I can still recall many moments when I felt nearly frozen with fear. Did I really leave him? Am I really the one in charge of myself and my daughters? But instead of retreating from these questions, instead of eating ice cream to smother my own voice, I actually began to answer them. Soon, I began to feel different. I began to feel stronger, capable, and trusting. Finally, finally, I was really in control of my own life! I felt safe. I was beginning to feel purposeful and powerful once again.
Within the safety of our own little townhome, I began to make changes in my diet. My daughters began to copy and follow these simple yet powerful dietary changes, the first of which was to try to stay away from my hidden foods—ice cream, peanut butter, and cheese in quantity! Instead I tried to eat more vegetables, fewer processed foods, and more protein. Quickly, I began to see positive changes in my health that even my doctor noticed and for which she congratulated me. And I lost weight. The dizziness and heart palpitations subsided. I felt more energetic. I slept more soundly. I was stunned at how easy it was to take back my health. Even with the smallest of changes, like putting the lid ON the peanut butter jar or NOT BUYING ice cream, my body was beginning to respond. It was dizzying stuff for a fat girl to now see and feel such powerful change.
I was beginning to feel so much better.
Coming Out of Hiding: The First Three Questions
Many of us use food to help us escape something that’s wrong in our lives—it can be a huge, life-changing crisis, or it can be not-so-huge, everyday stress, fear, lack of satisfaction, lack of control, and countless other small feelings that grow into an all-consuming reality. We can also use food to block out feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing, feelings so old you can’t even remember their original cause. But when food starts to be something that we hide ourselves behind, rather than enjoying it as a balanced part of a fulfilling life, simply recognizing the emotional association is the first and most important step toward turning things around.
In my work today, I like to make a distinction between food and nutrition. Food is simply something we indiscriminately push between our lips. Food has the power to break us down and destroy us, leaving us weak in the face of illness. Nutrition, on the other hand, is what we consume that feeds and sustains the body, and we should place it in a position of strength against what may confront us. The two are vastly different in my mind. When I think about food this way, it helps me stay committed to the latter and with optimal health fully in mind.
But back then, when I was trying to make this transition, I asked myself three tough questions:
1. Did I have the courage to face my reflection in the mirror?
2. Was that reflection really me?
3. If not, then why was I hiding?
When I got the courage to stand before the literal and physical mirror, I will admit that I was terrified. I didn’t want to look at the overweight body standing before me. I didn’t like the outline of the woman I saw. In fact, I hated her!!
Nonetheless, I did take that step and look at myself in the mirror in a new way. Doing so was a powerful signal to my psyche. Something inside me decided it was worth the pain and a second look to stare myself down. And what I saw was this: I had enclosed myself in layers of fat, which now hung on me like prison walls—meant to both protect me and punish me. I was not really made up of that extra weight. The real me was deep inside, hiding. I began to look at my relationship with food and noticed three things:
1. I ate not because I was hungry but because I was looking for comfort.
2. I protected myself through food.
3. I was now imprisoned by food that had become pounds and pounds of fat on my body, and I didn’t know how to get out.
But I also realized that I was still a fighter. I just needed to believe it again. There I was, standing on my own, facing myself and my mistakes, and I didn’t back down. I could survive this. No one was going to get the better of me again. Now all I had to do was re-create the fighter I knew I was. What kept hope alive for me was the knowledge that on the other side of this pain lay the promise of something much better—better health, more happiness, self-respect. I was also motivated by my kids. I knew my job as a mother was to be truthful and real—to show up every day as the strongest, brightest version of myself.
I now saw this prison of weight that kept me from myself with utmost clarity. I had let my favorite foods—ice cream, cheese, and peanut butter—hijack my relationship with myself. All that was left of me seemed to be the immovable walls of fat, the seemingly ever-present focus on what was around me—my then-husband and the problems in our marriage, my daughters and their needs, and of course the negative voice in my head. All of that kept me incarcerated. I no longer tasted the food; I no longer knew the excitement of a day not touched by shame. I no longer knew when my body felt hungry or full. It was as if I had lost all sense of my body. I had stopped taking care of myself. I had not stood up for myself. I had retreated into hiding. Somewhere along the way I had forgotten the simple fact that I could make my own choices.
I can reflect on that time as an incubation period in which, though I was dormant emotionally, I was still absorbing truths. It is often said that when people are under anesthesia for surgery, they can still hear and process what is said in the operating chamber. So though I felt anesthetized by food, I was still processing acutely all that happened—the good and the bad—and I was quietly gathering the strength to turn all those negatives into positives down the road.
Today I am in a much healthier place physically, mentally, and emotionally. I can even be thankful for the many ways I learned how to grow, thanks to the life I experienced with my first husband. If he had not tested me, I would not have known I was a warrior. I would not have found the qualities in myself that helped me get to where I am today and that saw me through a recent tragic episode in my life.
In 2012, my beloved second husband, Robert, died within three months of being diagnosed with cancer. Losing Bob was profoundly shocking and a terrible loss, the kind of trauma that could well have had the power to catapult me back to my old self-sabotaging/soothing patterns. But I didn’t backtrack. My healthy eating is what grounds me; taking care of myself is what makes me strong, and I know that eating to cover up pain will only bring more pain. It was this attention to healthful nutrition and exercise that kept me from losing myself in my grief. I knew I could count on myself to survive. The hard-earned tools to do so were at my fingertips. It is a struggle to live without Bob, missing him every day as I do, but I have his gifts in my heart and I feel so proud to be able to carry them and him with me in what I do. This was true love as I had never experienced it.
Many life lessons are not learned, in fact, when times are good. They occur when the ground under your feet is unsteady. This is when you have to drill down into your core, searching for your true self. Not that I would ever wish to go back to the place where I started, but I do know now that without such tests, life is boring and leaves you emotionally shallow. I have become emotionally richer for all of the experiences I’ve had in my life, including the negative ones. I know how to be grateful for the complete range of life lessons handed to me.
I am a former fat girl. I was one of the invisible millions who are so threatened by the idea of change that we can’t figure out how to stop eating—someone who, like you, was so fearful of altering even the slightest thing in my day that I stayed immobile.
But I came out of hiding, and now it’s time for you to do so, too.
You Are Not Alone
Don’t worry if you don’t like what you see in the mirror. This journey is going to give you the power to change that image, once and for all, no matter how many times you’ve tried to take drastic steps forward before and felt like you failed. Your view of yourself can and will change.
You are one of millions trapped behind similar prison walls. I hear from so many readers and fans and friends that they, too, have found themselves far down an unhealthy road, only to come to some kind of turning point and know they must make a change. Sometimes these turning points are dramatic, sometimes they are mundane and subtle. And sometimes you see them only in your proverbial rearview mirror. But seeing them is the key, whenever it is you do so!
Consider Gloria, who had reached 260 pounds. As a young wife and mother of a four-year-old girl, her weight gain came from years of steady overeating. She and her husband were both obese and had been overweight when they married. Now she watched her daughter, who was a little plump, and thought, What am I doing to her? What kind of life am I modeling for her?
Gloria’s turning point came when the family went on vacation. “We went on a trip to Florida. We were in the surf and some teenage boys made rude comments about me being fat. I wanted to die right there on the beach. Innocently playing in the soft curling surf was my four-year-old daughter, looking up at me as if I hung the moon and the stars! And then I noticed the tears running down her face.”
For Gloria, her day of looking in the mirror was a result of once and for all taking responsibility not only for her own health but also for that of her daughter. Gloria opened her heart to that pain of the rude remarks, a powerfully emotional event, and had the courage to let the pain be the starting point of her journey. It was a tap on the shoulder to wake up and get busy changing her life. She received the message, did her personal homework, and manifested positive change in her life. She made the choice to fight rather than retreat.
You must discover your motivating moment yourself. Start here by asking yourself these three dive inward questions:
1. Do you have the courage to face your reflection in the mirror?
2. Is that reflection really you?
3. If not, then why are you hiding?
Now go to your journal and write down all that comes to mind.
In my journal, I wrote these responses to those questions:
I am scared. I am terrified. But I know I can do it. I know somewhere inside me I have courage even though I am shaking like a leaf. I look outside the window at the vast winter sky and have to believe that this is the beginning of my journey, not the end of my life. The fat person in the mirror is not me. I am covered up. I am not made up of blubber and rolls of fat. I am inside somewhere, and I am going to find her.
I wrote down those words almost thirteen years ago. Since that time, my life has changed completely. And so can yours.
In the next chapter, you are going to take the answers to the questions you just asked yourself and build on them. One little step at a time, you are going to take down the prison walls. I promise, this dive inward is not complicated, but it will lead you directly to your pain and discomfort. You have to wrestle with this heart space because that’s why you’ve been hiding—those feelings are what keep you imprisoned. Remember, too, that the ground must be unsteady under your feet for a little while before you can emerge from the pain, but it is a necessary unsteadiness that will yield a richness you can only imagine right now. Unsteadiness will actually make you feel totally alive. Stay the course!
The good news is that once you admit to yourself you do feel pain because you are overweight, you can look in the mirror knowing your reflection is not you. That reflection is only an altered version of you—and you are now prepared to let the real you come out. It is as if you are standing in your fat self ready to unzip the layers of pounds, allowing your new self to emerge in a shining brilliance you have never seen before. When I realized this about myself, I felt incredible excitement—I was impatient to see this new version of me! And I am impatient to see the new version of you, too.
Your Journal: Look Inside Your Heart
To free yourself of your extra weight, you must recognize that you are, in fact, in a prison of sorts. You need to look inside yourself and acknowledge your pain. Once you’ve acknowledged pain, you must deal with it by removing it from your life, replacing it with forgiveness and hope, dreams and love. This allows healing. This allows you to move beyond the inner place that thinks of you as a fat person, so it’s important to journal this valuable story for yourself.
On a blank sheet of paper in your journal, or on your computer, iPad, or smartphone, write a description of your prison (you can even speak it into a recorder or draw it if you prefer). Make a list of all the negative feelings about yourself that keep you imprisoned.
Throughout your dive inward journey, I will ask you to return to this place in your journal—to remind yourself of how you used to feel, to gauge how you are currently feeling, and to keep track of how you are changing. It may be painful the first time you do this, but you won’t be able to move forward without establishing this important reference point. Don’t wait for perfect words to appear. Just let the pen do the work while your heart empties out onto the page. Never correct what you write. Just write freely.