I have a question

Sandra Butel beautywalk mental health citalopram body is not an apology Gretchen Rubin Sonya Renee Taylor Better Than Before Self Love body image women questioner questions coaching — *Curious Boris* Photo by Sandra Butel

I am Sandra Butel and this is my beautywalk.

beautywalk is a pathway towards discovering the deeper meaning behind the sometimes arbritrariness of our daily lives.
beautywalk is an internal and external place where we can focus on acceptance and discovery as we open ourselves to what the world, in all its wonder; dark and light, has to offer to us.

I have a question

A white and grey cat with a perky green and red neck scarf stands at attention on the faded rug in the bedroom of my latest pet sit home in La Petite Patrie area of Montreal. Our eyes meet and then we both wander off back inside our heads to see what might be going on there. At least I can confirm that this is what I do and I anthropomorphize Boris to not feel so alone in my ruminations.

Today I have a few hours on my own to get started on the next blog post. I have a vague inkling that this piece will have me delve back into the magic of developing habits, with a specific focus on the work Gretchen Rubin has done on this topic in my latest read “BETTER THAN BEFORE: WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT MAKING AND BREAKING HABITS - TO SLEEP MORE, QUIT SUGAR, PROCRASTINATE LESS, AND GENERALLY BUILD A HAPPIER LIFE.” This book is full of practical tips and in depth research on both the scientific and personal experience of habit building.

As far as my ongoing Serotonin (SSRI) weaning journey is concerned, I have been experiencing a growing confidence that I may just be able to arrive at a future life without an SSRI in my life. I am half way there and this week I am down to 20 mg from my regular 40 mg dose. I am looking forward to a time where I no longer have an alarm set at 11:35 am each day to remind me to take my pills. I estimate the weaning process will be complete in 6 weeks, barring unforeseen strange side effects that present themselves in this last leg of my journey.

I have figured out some of the things I need to choose to do and some things I need to be careful to avoid doing in order to get and keep my mood stabilized. As is my practice I looked to writers and books for tips and tricks and understanding that will help me on this journey. I picked up Gretchen Rubin’s aforementioned book to help me get my habits to a place where they assist my body in producing serotonin on it’s own.

The 4 Tendencies

Gretchen Rubin builds a rather enticing argument of 4 distinct types of people when it comes to getting things done and responding to expectations (both inner and outer).

The 4 Tendencies are: Obligers, Questioners, Rebels, and Upholders.

While this particular book doesn’t delve that deeply into the 4 tendencies (she comes back to this task later in a book of the same name), Rubin touches enough on the role the tendencies play in making and/or breaking habits that I was inspired to find out more.

When I googled Gretchen Rubin 4 Tendencies I found the 4 Tendencies Quiz and after quickly answering a series of somewhat odd questions, I confirmed that, as I suspected, I was a Questioner. I sent a link to the quiz to Francis and we had a super interesting chat about our questioner tendencies on our two hour drive to Montreal from his sister’s chalet in the Eastern Townships earlier this week.

The basics, paraphrased from Rubin’s work, are:

Upholders love habits and rules and they end up doing both what others expect of them and what they expect of themselves.
Questioners do what they think is best, according to their own judgment. If something doesn’t make sense a questioner refuses to do it.
Obligers do what they have to do to not let others down and often end up letting themselves down in the process.
“Rebels resist all expectations, both inner and outer alike. They want to do what they want to do, in their own way, in their own time — and if you ask or tell them to do something, they’re very likely to resist.”
Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before

The Questioner

Rubin’s outline about questioners resonated strongly with both Francis and I. We are both motivated by reason, logic and fairness in choosing actions or in making decisions. We wake up each day and ask ourselves “What needs to get done today and why?” We both resist doing anything that seems to lack purpose. We are intellectually engaged, willing to do exhaustive research and will not follow a directive if it is arbitrary, inefficient or ineffective. We take direction only from those we respect and we need plenty of justification.

Sometimes others see us questioners as defiant, disrespectful, undermining or as poor team players. Questioners stick to habits only when we are convinced of their usefulness. As can be assumed, questioners really really like asking, and getting answers to, questions.

I can imagine times, as Rubin suggests, when others may have found my endless questioning exhausting, especially the Upholders and the Obligers. The Rebels and I have a whole lot in common and sometimes I have mistakenly seen myself as a card carrying member of this leather clad family. I do a pretty good impersonation at times (especially when drinking or puffing on some MaryJane) but I just can not get behind the idea of continuing to resist behaviour and actions just because someone (including me) suggested they might be good for me. Rebelling against myself and my support team and what I know to be good for me is a futile response to some image of myself as “special and unique” and does not strengthen the way I wish to live my life. I am working on letting go of the idea that the rebel is the role model for the coolest version of me.

New lens more clarity

OMG, this all makes so much sense. I can see some past experiences clearly under this new lens. Times when I was stuck in rationalizing and in trying to find the answer that made a course of action make logical sense. When I go into conflict mode I tend to fall back on the rational, the logical, the efficient and expedient and I forget to bring in my super power of empathy and openness and deep deep love and care for others. This is something I have to watch in myself and be aware of with the other questioners in my life, who are trying to get to a place where things make sense and are likely not aware of how intrusive and cold their questions may sound.

As a questioner I realize that any new habit I hope to integrate into my life needs to make sense before I can hope to keep at it over the long-term. The ones that strike me as arbitrary or expected, the whole societal “because I said so” does not work for me. The habits that are intended to guide me towards an outcome that I either don’t believe in, that seems impossible or that categorically go against my beliefs also won’t work for me.

Rubin’s strategies to help the questioner in me stick to new habits:

* The strategy of distinction which means that I design habits that are specifically made for my own idiosyncratic self in mind.
* The strategy of clarity implies that I do my research, I read my endless books, listen to my podcasts and interviews and I figure out what the deeper purpose is behind a habit that has been deemed healthy by those teachers in my life whom I admire and respect.
* The strategy of monitoring has me tracking my habits and this makes sense as I am endlessly motivated by the apps that track my steps and how many consecutive days of meditation I have clocked.

The shape we are in

I am understanding that my tendency towards questioning everything and looking for sound reasoning is why the idea of having to be a certain shape to be acceptable has never jived with me. The motivation here has been focused so often on fear and shame and self-loathing. Our society feeds into that to weigh us down with the hidden but heavy ‘shoulds’. That, to be beautiful, women have to conform to one specific ideal shape. Of course, this ideal shape has changed over time from Rubenesque to Twiggy to Marilyn to androgynous to uber sexy with puffed up lips and wrinkle-free foreheads and super sized breasts.

I remember the hilarity of a gathering with a group of friends, that came with the snazzy title of “Thursday Night Drinking Club”, as we looked on in glee and horror at the videos and ads that showed us how to properly bedazzle our vajayjays. To think that this was a thing women were doing was something we couldn’t wrap our heads around. We laughed and yet, I’d be curious to know how many of us secretly wondered, “Is this something I should be paying attention to?”

Being a woman in our image obsessed society has never been easy. Bombarded by touched up images of the feminine ideal we can’t help but feel the pressure to conform. So we add this extra beauty work onto our already maxed out to do lists, somewhere near the top, high above the tiny print of the dream we dare to dream of one day just giving up all this futile fervour and skipping ahead to the finish line; where we love and accept ourselves, exactly the way we are.

The Body is Not an Apology

Sonya Renee Taylor’s love letter to herself and to all other people living in a body, “The Body is Not an Apology,” stopped me in my tracks when I first came across it a few years ago. The questions she asks so boldly and beautifully forced me to question whether or not my latest “healthy” practices were reward or punishment.

The overview of the book, written by Kimberly Crenshaw, says it all so eloquently, “To build a world that works for everyone, we must first make the radical decision to love every facet of ourselves. . . ‘The body is not an apology’ is the mantra we should all embrace.” This book is full of gems like Taylor’s concept of “Radical self love” which is one important step we can all take towards a more just and equitable society. Taylor provides a list of questions here that guide us into an unflinching examination of what we have come to believe about ourselves, our bodies and the world we live in.

“Radical self-love to me is our inherent sense of worthiness.”
“As long as we’re tied into these systems that say there are good bodies and bad bodies, we’ll always be inside this mix of oppression.”
Sonya Renee Taylor

The faucet of self-love

When I look back on photos of my younger self, I am shocked and cannot fathom how I could ever have thought my body needed fixing. The gift of looking back is that our vision gets clearer and we can see reality without the chorus shouting rhymes of our imperfections and warning us of the dangers that lie ahead if we don’t follow the latest set of rules and get our bodies in check. The passage of time also brings the addition of extra pounds and wrinkles and less fluid movement of our muscles and joints and our younger selves start to look pretty darn good from this new vantage point.

Instead of making excuses for, and engaging in, punishing rituals to make up for the sin of taking up too much space in the world, and for not being young enough or pretty enough or curvy enough, we can all just turn on the faucet of self-love and wash ourselves clean. With tender touch we can lather the soap up and caress it all over the mixed terrain of our bodies, in awe at the beauty we find there. Ready now to cleanse ourselves of the years of coating our bodies with the muck of shame that the outside world has thrust upon us. Ready to embrace the wonder of who we are, beginning with the awesomeness of the body that carries us from place to place, that dances and sings and hops up and down with glee. Sonya’s work and my work at integrating these beliefs into my own inner dialogue left me with the firm belief that I am enough and that diets are no longer needed as I am already perfect the way that I am.

Love every facet

Fast forward to the moment where I recently learned that serotonin was produced not in my brain, but in my gut and to the beginning of my education on how what I put into my gut impacts how I am able to be in the world. This makes sense to my questioner mind and this is a habit I can embrace and follow. Making and keeping my gut happy by steering away from foods that bring inflammation and a decrease in the well being of serotonin is logical, rational and do-able.

After my initial 72 hour gut reset I have found it easier to stick to clean and whole foods and my focus on ABC (always be counting) the diversity of foods that go into my body has become second nature to me. I know why I am making these specific choices for myself. These choices are coming from self-love and deep wisdom and not from fear and self-loathing. As soon as I understand how much impact what I put into my gut has on my levels of serotonin and thus of calm, sustainable joy, I will have no problem sticking to a diet that will decrease any inflammation in my gut.

The tone of my internal voices when they ask me if I want a) or b) or c) is not of disgust or deprivation but rather of care and love. I love this being who the world recognizes as Sandra Butel. I am on a lifelong beautywalk and my daily companion is my radical dedication to “loving every facet” of myself.

I am Sandra Butel and this is my beautywalk. I invite you to join me on this journey as we weave our ways to a world “that works for everyone” and take our first steps together.

Resources for Further Study and Personal Growth

For all things habit and happiness related check out the work of Gretchen Rubin whose book The Happiness Project was a #1 New York Times bestseller.
Sonya Renee Taylor is a powerhouse of self-love and radical self-love activism. A deep dive into her work, especially where you can hear the deep power of her voice, is an experience you will not soon forget.
My offering as Coach Sandra is to listen and be open as we co-create a space where you are seen, heard and understood. If this sounds interesting to you please do not hesitate to reach out to chat about how we might best work together on making your life a little bit more the way you want it to be. Sign up for a free beautywalk session.
My new program From Worry to Worthy offers you an opportunity to investigate your own internal experience of the negative voices inside your head and help you to find ways to connect to the deeper truths of your own heart. Check out the full program details and book your first free session with me to get started. Friends and Family discount applied to all newsletter subscribers and your friends and family too!
If you are interested in signing up for TrustedHouseSitters you can get a 25% discount (as well as pass on 2 free months of membership to me in the process).

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