I’m insecure about my slowness.
It’s stood out my whole life.
Noticing how it trickles into every corner
Procrastinator.
We’d laugh because I was always the last to get up from the dinner table
My cousins and I would have competitions
my milk would be room temperature by the end of each glass.
I’d smile and say that’s how you enjoy things.
Treating a glass of milk as if it’s the finest bottle of wine.
I walked slow
I’d be late for school
Well late for everything
I still am.
When I went to Italy, how at home I felt when it was offensive to get up from your meal too quickly.
No time limit, hours on end, just savoring every bite.
rushed conversations give me anxiety.
I can sense it so fast and I immediately shut down.
I don’t want to be hurried.
I feel it in my body.
Won’t you slow down and walk with me. Breathe with me. Stay in step. Wait for me.
And how as an adult, I struggle to keep up.
Most of all, with myself.
Photo by Elisa Fay
I understand now that it’s a part of the “disease” I’ve lived with my whole life. That the medicine doctors decided on for a little girl tried to cover up but didn’t.
I saw a post awhile back talking about Hashimoto’s Disease and how it’s okay to grieve the days before you were sick.
I asked myself, what if you don’t know those days because you were too young to remember? I’m unsure if I’ve ever lived a day without, honestly. I’ll never know.
Those days without medicine are now.
Is it okay to grieve the days, the years, the life you lived on medicine?
This season is a lot of things, but maybe there’s space for that too. to grieve the medicine. Grieve what the medicine stole, what it taught my body, the toxins it allowed.
These days, my body tells me every time I’m too fast. Slower, Elizabeth. Be gentle with yourself. Breathe into it. Be intentional with every movement.
My legs give out, or worse- they seize up. The blood forgetting where to go.
We live in a society that’s trying to escape pain so fast when maybe the real way to erase it is to work through it, feel it, look it in the eye, and deal with it instead of suppress, numb and run from it.
Maybe it’s trying to tell you something of importance.
Maybe it wants you to live truly healed and full and free, not absent of pain.
My body isn’t wrong. It’s just reminding me to slow down.
It doesn’t mean I need medicine. I could choose it if I wanted to. But it wouldn’t fix the issues. It doesn’t even cover them up well. Just complicates things more.
I never knew I could be this in tune with my body. How many sensations I’ve missed out on. One of this season’s greatest gifts. Learning a whole new facet of God making his home in me and honoring what He’s created. What he’s building.
My brain doesn’t process things as quickly. I swear, I was much smarter when I was younger. It scares me because I know how young I still am. It’s okay if things take time. Isn’t that way meditating is? Thinking, abiding, soaking.
Slowly, merrily, slowly.
Life is but a dream.
It’s okay to be slow.
It’s all yoga. Slow flow. Flow, slower still.
Photo by Elisa Fay
The Father tells me He likes my slowness. Isn’t that just like him? Pouring love and gentleness and kindness into all the things we don’t like about ourselves if we acknowledge them long enough to let him.
It’s uncomfortable, requires you to be vulnerable. All the places where shame and guilt and fear want to say otherwise. O Lord, give us your eyes to see ourselves the way you see us. You get the final word.
My mother calls, asks me what I’m doing.
I tell her I’m standing over my sink, writing a poem, procrastinating washing dishes.
She’s asks if that’s what the poem’s called.