Recently, I received a group text from my husband, Avoider of Group Texts. When the man I married decides that sending a group text is worth the potential for continual responses, I know it’s going to be a good one.
The text was a picture of him, me, and a group of our friends. Those friends held sacred space for each other during a tough season in our lives. They buoyed me for a time and helped me learn a little more about what it is to be a true friend. In the picture, all of us had gathered together around a long table after being separated by miles and time. We were about to share a meal and enjoy each other’s company, one of my very favorite things to do.
That picture also held something else that isn’t obvious to the casual observer: I was absolutely stressed over the actual eating of the meal.
The food served at the restaurant we met at was the thoughtful kind that I love to see. The meat came from very local animals that had lived their lives eating the food that works for their bodies, spending most of their time doing what animals naturally do. The bread was probably locally baked, and the produce was probably locally grown.
When a person tries to address needs that can’t be addressed with the right diet, the “right diet,” can’t meet those needs. It is a thief .” I looked at the menu offerings and decided they didn’t match the exact “eating plan” that I had deemed the “best way of eating for me.”
I was surrounded with two beautiful children, some of the dearest friends I no longer got to see very often, and I spent so much energy on how I could possibly navigate the meal and feel good about it.
The picture my husband sent captured a table full of people who gave me a soft place to land during a time when I didn’t know how to ask for what I needed. Back then, when I didn’t know how to make friends because letting people in was terrifying, these people offered me real, up close and personal friendship.
I have many more stories like this one- otherwise perfectly lovely memories tainted by my desire to eat the perfect meal, to eat only the “right” things (the “right” things, by the way, changed depending on who I had been listening to and what food ideas I had been reading). I know now that what I really wanted when I stressed over the exact foods I allowed into my body was control and peace.
Maybe you know the feeling of being painfully distracted from a beautiful moment. Maybe for you, the distraction is something else like how you look compared to other people, or when you’re going to get your next drink or your next cigarette, or something else.
The good news is, this isn’t how our story has to end.
Sarah's Table 