I don’t try to shrink my body anymore.

That doesn’t mean I never think negatively about my body or my eating habits. I do sometimes.

But I haven’t been on a diet (AKA a wellness kick / lifestyle upgrade / juice and/or intermittent fast / “eliminating calories because of my calorie sensitivity” / etc.) in years.

It would be super (self-) righteous if I could report that self-love caused the change. Maybe self-love catalyzed the change, but it was a competing need that made the change stick: a need for capacity.

I love myself but I REALLY love my time and my energy.

Here’s a fact: I have been thin before and you know? It’s fine.

But once I realized I’m not here for FINE, I couldn’t sustain the ritual offering of my time and energy to efforts to shrink my body. All the thinking about eating and meals and exercise and guilt. That ritual offering eats up (pun intended) so much capacity!

We need space and time to cook ideas, to sift the stories from those ideas, and to return again and again to a writing practice where we tell those stories.

CAPACITY—i.e., earthly space and time—is finite. When we’re writing, we need to divert capacity from elsewhere in our lives into our creative endeavor.

So, whenever we recognize sectors of our lives that are burning through time and energy in a whacked-out proportion to the good they’re bringing to us, like I did when I realized I didn’t want to try to shrink my body anymore, well…

Yahtzee! .. UNO!... GIN!

We have found a pocket of additional capacity.

In my case, I didn’t even have to pay for a lakeside Airbnb or take any days off work to access it. (Which, obviously, do those things, too.)

Do you have an energy-sapping sector of your life that you can seal off, and re-route the ensuing freed capacity to your writerly life?

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M