If only...

Its one of those yucky grey days when everything looks just a little bit dingy and on your daily walk from point a to point be you say, if only the sun would shine a little bit... I had just entered my breakfast and lunch into my "daily plate"...718 calories consumed which is nearly half of my daily allotment. Irritated at the fact that it feels so unnatural to track myself in this manner and play this game of reward|restriction, it feels like lose lose. I suppose literally is.  I looked at my stack of O magazines and Women's Health on my coffee table and rolled my eyes at the latter.  It has gone from one of my favorite magazines to page after page of patronizing trash.  I read tumblr posts that say nothing worth having should come easy, or if you don't work hard for something then you don't deserve it and I just wonder how true that is.  I do not work hard at my relationships and they are by far the best part of my life.  I work...but it is not an arduous thing.  Everything about them is rewarding.

Then I found myself with Shirley, one of my favorite fashion bloggers...

As I scrolled through her blog I thought the following thoughts that make me embarassed to even be writing:

• I love her hair...I need to save some money and get some hair
• Ugh, long hair would be great for summer, why am I always too broke for good hair
• I love her bag, I wonder where she got it
• I love the orange shoes, they'd be cool for homecoming...I probably won't be able to go to homecoming because once again I'll be too broke to go
• I never have enough money to look good, or at least the way I want to

I listened to myself make these comments and then suggested, well but whenever I do get weave I immediately miss my natural hair.  I always love my pictures with natural hair better too...I wish my own hair would just grow, what is wrong with me? And it started over again.  Somehow there is, at the deepest level of me, a sense that I am not right. And I play this game of "if only" which just serves to drive me crazy and deeper into discomfort and unrest.

Eckhart Tolle said, "See if you can catch yourself complaining in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness." It is madness! It would seem that to combat this it takes not a calorie counter, or a pair of new Nikes, or even a goal to run a half marathon...it has to start with acceptance.  In my head I literally just said, god damn it I thought I was done with that...I thought I did that!

I want to be done with it.  With these thoughts, with these feelings, I wish I could peel them off like wet clothing, and wrap myself lovingly in the warmth of grace and just be.  I am so tired.  And sad.  I really thought I was past all this, and I'm not sure that knowing is any consolation.  I feel, in this moment, the very worst kind of defeat.  The kind where you don't even know how to proceed because for all the effort you just exerted you seem to be right back at the beginning, years older and none the wiser.