i've had molly moons on the mind, lately. it probably has something to do with an email from my mom with a link to their new cookbook... (you mean i can have molly moon's lavender honey ice cream at HOME?) excited is an understatement. although i'll admit the release of the ultimate ice cream cookbook gave me a small dose of anxiety, too. see, the only time i've made ice cream was a total flop. sure, it froze up okay and we devoured it and loved every bite. but see... it didn't thicken at all. as in, when i finally gave up, stopped the machine, and put it in the freezer, it was still liquid - an incredible amount of chocolate milk.
i'll have to practice. ice cream, anyone?
anyway. molly moon's has me thinking of seattle. in lots of different ways.
i think i mentioned a while back that i'd finally come to terms with the city itself. i decided i actually loved the place quite a lot. it's a beautiful place with interesting people and a food culture to covet. the experience is still requiring mull time, though. i'm still not sure where i'm at with it. with most life experiences, i can attach a general word or emotion to help me sort through the memories, put them in their mental boxes, all organized and resolved. for example, i can say with surety that the last summer i spent in my ivins home was bliss. pieces of my life were in disarray and i wasn't happy the whole time, but looking back i can say good memory and stick it in the wonderful box. i can pin several relationship memories clearly in the negative life experience box.
but seattle? i just can't peg the experience. i guess most things in life aren't as simple as just good and bad, and probably most can't even be put on a gradient scale of black to white and all the shades in between. all experiences have good parts, bad parts, weird parts and funny parts. but it makes my organizational mind squirm to have things our of their boxes, sometimes.
despite the continuing mental confusion, there are a few things i can label specifically with good. maybe even with fantastic.
molly moon's is one of them. before seattle, ice cream was just ice cream. if it was offered, i'd gladly take part in its consumption, but it wasn't ever my treat of choice. molly moon's changed all of that. i can't count the times i went that summer. too many - or never enough depending on the viewpoint. i ate more ice cream that summer than i'll probably eat this year. okay, maybe more than i'll eat in the next two years. and i fell in love with it! the crunch of the waffle cones, the fresh vibrant flavors... honey lavender was a reining favorite. but i really love their sasquatch flavor, too. this ice cream taught me how to live.
it took a girl who would always and forever choose chocolate over anything else and transformed her into someone who couldn't wait to try the next seasonal fruit flavor. i started buying waffle cones, not giving a darn about how many calories they were (or how many extra dollars it would cost). two different flavors if i get an extra scoop? bring it on.
never before had i eaten a treat with such freedom. i appreciated their commitment to local ingredients instead of caring what the calorie content was. i savored the taste as long as possible instead of shoveling it down like most strictly rationed sugar in my life. i learned that food, enjoyed, is food at it's best.
in part, molly moon's is to thank for helping me end unhealthy restriction in my life. not that it's all the way done forever - just a bigger step in the right direction. and in the right direction i'll continue to go.
now somebody get me that cookbook! ;)
Showing posts with label my adventure on the west coast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label my adventure on the west coast. Show all posts
Friday, July 6
Friday, May 18
the city that cries at least once a day
i think about seattle quite a bit, lately. about how i've come to really love the concept of seattle in my mind despite how difficult it was to be there a year ago. i hated seattle while i was there. at least, i thought it was seattle i hated. after the passage of time has dulled the experience slightly, i've been able to separate the experience (which was something close to hell) from the city, which i distinctly remember falling in love with (at some moments). i miss it, i'll be honest.
what really keeps my attention though, when i think of the whole three-and-a-half months that was my adventure on the west coast is how impossible it was to write. sure, i tried. for the first few weeks, i woke up early and wrote while i was eating breakfast. and then i started work, and then i started feeling less and smaller and not enough. and then i stopped eating breakfast and stopped running and didn't wash my hair for days and days and days at a time. after which i stopped writing altogether.
several times i've heard eating disorders described in a nutshell as simply not-wanting-to-feel. yeah, there are a multitude of other things that go along with it, but if i had to boil it down to one thing, at this point in my life i would say the same thing. the desperate suppressing of emotion, to the point that everything becomes distorted and simple tasks like getting out of bed and dressing yourself are. so. impossibly. difficult.
during the past five years, my struggle with food has dragged me underwater several times. sometimes it's been a fight to keep my head above, and every so often i've had a short period where i simply floated. in seattle i was drowning with my hands tied.
and that's why i stopped writing. once in the cycle of negative emotion, numbing and food abuse, it makes complete sense to do all you can to stop feeling the negative emotions in hopes that you'll be able to feel happy and function normally again. so i stopped writing because in order to write i had to open myself up. i had to be vulnerable and ask myself what i was thinking about and what i was feeling. and i couldn't do that without risking the start of the cycle all over again.
so i stopped.
it's still a wonder to me that from a place so void of self-compassion i exited my stay in seattle with something akin to determination. toward the end, there was healing. or the seeds of it.
but it's taken me longer to be able to write again. at first, the idea of writing at all was daunting. i didn't want to be that vulnerable ever, ever again. old habits die hard, i guess. i've always loved to write and after forming a three-year habit of writing several times a week, a summer-long hiatus didn't break it. i started writing about every day things, common things, at first. in places no one would ever see.
but i'm getting braver.
and if there's anything i've learned from my experience in seattle and the relationships that spanned over and through the dark time, it's that you can't bury those emotions forever. they'll always find a way out.
so i'm going to start writing more about my adventure on the west coast. because it's been on my mind. and because i'm working on feeling again. and because a lot of things happened in seattle that most people don't talk about. and because we'd all be a lot better off it we did talk about those things.
so here goes.
what really keeps my attention though, when i think of the whole three-and-a-half months that was my adventure on the west coast is how impossible it was to write. sure, i tried. for the first few weeks, i woke up early and wrote while i was eating breakfast. and then i started work, and then i started feeling less and smaller and not enough. and then i stopped eating breakfast and stopped running and didn't wash my hair for days and days and days at a time. after which i stopped writing altogether.
several times i've heard eating disorders described in a nutshell as simply not-wanting-to-feel. yeah, there are a multitude of other things that go along with it, but if i had to boil it down to one thing, at this point in my life i would say the same thing. the desperate suppressing of emotion, to the point that everything becomes distorted and simple tasks like getting out of bed and dressing yourself are. so. impossibly. difficult.
during the past five years, my struggle with food has dragged me underwater several times. sometimes it's been a fight to keep my head above, and every so often i've had a short period where i simply floated. in seattle i was drowning with my hands tied.
and that's why i stopped writing. once in the cycle of negative emotion, numbing and food abuse, it makes complete sense to do all you can to stop feeling the negative emotions in hopes that you'll be able to feel happy and function normally again. so i stopped writing because in order to write i had to open myself up. i had to be vulnerable and ask myself what i was thinking about and what i was feeling. and i couldn't do that without risking the start of the cycle all over again.
so i stopped.
it's still a wonder to me that from a place so void of self-compassion i exited my stay in seattle with something akin to determination. toward the end, there was healing. or the seeds of it.
but it's taken me longer to be able to write again. at first, the idea of writing at all was daunting. i didn't want to be that vulnerable ever, ever again. old habits die hard, i guess. i've always loved to write and after forming a three-year habit of writing several times a week, a summer-long hiatus didn't break it. i started writing about every day things, common things, at first. in places no one would ever see.
but i'm getting braver.
and if there's anything i've learned from my experience in seattle and the relationships that spanned over and through the dark time, it's that you can't bury those emotions forever. they'll always find a way out.
so i'm going to start writing more about my adventure on the west coast. because it's been on my mind. and because i'm working on feeling again. and because a lot of things happened in seattle that most people don't talk about. and because we'd all be a lot better off it we did talk about those things.
so here goes.
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