By Dina Aldabbagh

In order to be free, you must be willing for the opposite of who you are, what you want, and what you believe is right to happen. Then, once you’ve let go of the need for it to happen like that, it still will anyways. But you just first have to be willing to let go of it. I get that it sounds backwards — but you don’t do this with the strategy of reverse-psychology-ing it. You genuinely let go of the need. Then, as nature does what it does, it will happen anyways. 

If it has to happen in order for your wellbeing to remain stable, it’s not just who you are, it’s also your dependency — and therefore your biggest weakness and most sensitive pressure point. It’s the thing that will always make life heavier for you. Thus, you have to be willing to let go of it — even if it means also letting go of that outcome you want — because if it’s truly in line with who you are, it’ll happen anyways.

Your nature will prevail. You don’t have to worry so much about securing everything — about making it all happen. Actually, the work sometimes is in just trusting that, because it’s just who you are, that’s what will eventually happen. It just doesn’t need to happen in this moment.

You could be a healthy person — exercise daily, meal prep, and have many life choices centered around moving your body and feeling good in yourself. This is a good thing. However, what if you need to physically look a certain way in order to feel okay? How healthy is that?

My friend’s thesis was on addiction in her psychology masters, and she told me something that stood out as a consideration I have never before had or heard from anywhere else. You know you’re addicted not just by how much time you spend doing your addiction, but how much time you spend planning it. She described how drug addicts aren’t just addicts because they often take drugs, but rather because they spend a lot of time planning how they will do it. “Okay, I’m going to do cocaine on Friday, so Monday through Wednesday, I won’t do anything. Thursday, I can have a little bump.”

They spend so much time planning it — planning self-restraint— yet are actually overtaken by it the moment it’s there. They lack control over it. They lack sovereignty. Addiction, then, is not just the commitment to doing the thing, but the fixation on it.

Any constant fixation rules your experience. It defines your thoughts. It orders your priorities. It sets itself at the top of the things to look at. If you are so heavily fixated on it all the time, even if it’s healthy, it’s an addiction. You will never be free unless you rid yourself of that addiction. Not the thing itself necessarily, but the addition to it. 

Even if it’s objectively “healthy,” if you’re ruled by it, it’s not healthy for you. If you can’t allow the reality of the moment to be your guide, but rather constantly overrule your sense for this thing you are heavily fixated on, then you are its slave. Even working out everyday can be “unhealthy.” What if your body is never allowed to rest? Even when it needs to? Even meal prepping/planning can be unhealthy. What happens when you are completely unable to be flexible with the moment’s plans and normal life changes. Will you go hungry until you can reach your prepped meal? Will you be overburdened with anxiety by having to eat something unplanned? Is that healthy?

My consideration is that, maybe…if you’re so afraid of what will happen to your body if you skip a workout or have a bad meal, what you really need to hear is, “It’s okay if you’re fat.” I think, ultimately, you need permission to be your worst self. Your life needs permission to be its worst self — and yet still be deemed worthy of living. If your worst nightmare happens, is it okay? If the answer is yes, then you are not its slave. 

That’s freedom. It may look, on the outside, like giving up, but it’s actually just saying, “I don’t have to be afraid of this possibility.” If you’re allowing yourself to be fat…if that’s completely okay — and you are not punished, shamed, or suddenly have a different identity…then you also suddenly don’t have to have so much anxiety around living a normal life. Around having a little too much wine. Around getting the full-butter noodles with extra lemon-caper sauce. I think people severely underestimate how much chronic anxiety impacts their wellbeing. I’d suggest to you that that constant anxiety you feel is less healthy for you than just being fat — without anguish, that is.

Further, this isn’t me saying to resign to being whatever and whoever, with no goals or desires— it’s me saying that you can trust your nature. If this is truly who you are, it will simply prevail. The fruit is born from the seed. If it’s you, the fruit will match. Okay, sure, maybe it will take some time. You might have to go through a period of things not looking how you think they should, but I suggest to you that if you are the identity that matches that outcome, then long-term, there’s no other possibility.

If you are the personality, the habits, and the thoughts of the person who is lean, then even if you’re “fat” for a few months, the scale will inevitably even out. There’s no other possibility. It’s who you are. 

I think that’s kind of…super scary… to face at first because it’s like, “Is this who I really am? Am I safe to believe that…to trust it…and let go? Are my actions vulnerable if their foundation is trust?” And that’s where this risk is the biggest favor you can do for yourself. Allow yourself permission to be the thing you don’t want, all the while knowing that your nature will eventually bring you to outcomes that feel like you.

Let’s say you are someone who is super loving, warm, and emotionally ept. Even if you experience a series of bad relationships — be that friendships, family, or in romance — inevitably, you will have the positive, loving relationships that match you. Because it is your nature. It is your nature. You can’t control the world in order to get what is meant for you, but you don’t have to. We will always, eventually, get the things that match us. 

In every area, your nature will prevail. Even if it’s a bad season for crops, the seed will eventually produce its corresponding fruit. There’s no other way. If it’s in the genetic makeup of that seed to produce strawberries, then strawberries you will have. And you will never have bananas. 

I understand that it’s easy to think that maybe something that’s wrong for you will be what you end up with — but that’s only because you haven’t experienced enough life and its particular cycles yet to prove to you otherwise. You’re just too early to know the pattern. But it reigns true every time: if it’s who you are, that’s what you will see. Eventually, if not immediately. 

And I just think you should free yourself from the anxiety that you need to control everything. Maybe, as an experiment, you could temporarily relinquish the intent to control the outcome and instead listen to the moment’s signals. I think then you would see that the “worst” doesn’t even come to pass anyways. And that, actually, your nature just steers you in the right way. You just get to avoid all the anxiety and exhaustion of trying to control it.

Don’t be addicted to that thing. That’s not freedom, even if the prison is a mansion. It’s much better to experience the consequences you fear — and see first-hand the underwhelmingness of reality — than to live in the constant surveillance of yourself. Do not be in a prison of your own making. Do not let fear justify your chains.