The Night I Ate the Chicken Salad

The night I ate the chicken salad had been a long time coming.

Maybe months, maybe years, maybe even lifetimes.

I had been controlled by my fears for so long.

Fears that made sense and fears that did not.

Fears that fit with the circumstances of my life, and fears that were beyond rational understanding.

Fears of the future.

Fears for my body.

Fears of losing the things that brought me the most joy.

Fears of unfulfilled potential.

Fears of a wasted existence.

Fears of not finding what I was meant to do in the world.

And even fears of fear holding me back.

So you see the night I are the chicken salad, was about so much more than eating a chicken salad. For someone that had been a pescatarian since the age of about 10 and had then developed an eating disorder at the age of 18, life related to food had for so long been about control.

About rules.

About rigidity.

About keeping things the same and as they were.

Yet this was no longer serving me. My body was crying out.

Calling me to change the very patterns that were keeping me stuck, not just physically with debilitating gut symptoms, but mentally, emotionally and to the core of my soul.

You see we all wish on some level to be free. Free of the constructs of society, of the world at large, but even more than that, free from the constructs we place upon ourselves.

All our “I am- ness”. I am this or I am that. I eat meat or I am vegan. I am a yogi. Or I do pilates. Definitions. Labels. Roles. Rules.

In the end all coming from the same core. Ego. Fear based. The part of us that needs to create an identity to feel safe in the world, can easily turn our safety into prison bars keeping us trapped within.

These labels, these definitions, these constructs, these fears. All of them only serve to keep us stuck. Stuck in a limited small version of the full potential within us.

Yes, it can seem scary to surrender these rules, identifications and associations that we attach to ourselves to create a more solid sense of who we think we are or who we think we are meant to be.

But the reality is that when we do, when we finally realise that these limitations do not serve us, and take even small steps to let them go, we can connect with the realisation, that in reality we have unlimited choices, we have infinite potential, and we can do or be whatever it is we choose to be. In this moment and then the next, and then the one that follows after that.

When I ate that chicken salad what I was really doing was breaking through the prison cell of my own creation. I was shattering the illusory identity my ego had attached to myself to make me feel safe.

And the thing about doing this, the miracle, was that what I really felt, to the core of my being, was finally free.