One of the lessons I’ve been learning from the season of illness I’m in is how much I need routine. While I’m good at to-do lists and making schedules for myself (which either flicker out or burn me out) I’ve never tried the kind of self-disciplined, steady approach to life that routine offers. To be honest, I crave a fancy-free approach to life, which is both my joy (free floating creativity that fully immerses me) and my biggest failure - because while I’m excitedly (or sometimes maniacally) pursuing whatever I’m focused on in that moment I’m also forgetting to eat, hydrate, stretch, or just generally take a break and relax. This has not served me well and chronic pain, digestive issues and anxiety have plagued me.
Even so, the thought of adding more discipline in my life felt like a jail-sentence. Why would I ever want to give up all of my wandering, captivated, creative freedom for a disciplined routine - especially when such discipline felt so unattainable?
For the past 9 years, my focus has been on nailing down what I do (and don’t) eat while simultaneously hanging on to beliefs that adding more routines in my day-to-day schedule would be oppressively limiting. It took my recent illness pushing me to a place where I could understand that controlling what I eat is no longer enough. Now I’ve been faced with having to carefully moderate portion sizes and maintain regularly scheduled mealtimes in addition to tightening up my safe-foods list to a very small rotation. Because it’s become necessary to cultivate routine around mealtimes, I’ve finally started to see some benefits to routine.
Benjamin (the master of routine) has long known of these benefits. (Don’t get between him and his morning routine, it’s sacred time for him!). Paying more attention to when I need to eat has helped me identify systemic lifestyle problems. For example, as a night owl who loves working deep into the night on the second-wind that comes to me post 10pm, I sleep in late. This throws my eating into disarray because when I pair that sleep schedule with what my new, regulated eating schedule asks of me, I’m not finishing breakfast until 11, or lunch until 4, or dinner until 8… and since I can’t go to bed on a full stomach, I stay up… it’s gotten quite out of hand! None of this was a problem when I ate erratically as I floated through each day.
Perhaps if I lived alone this would be no trouble. But when I’m finishing lunch about the time others are starting to think about making dinner, I’m not present to be part of family activities the way I’d like to be. Then, working on going to bed earlier has necessitated evaluating my wind-down routine in the evenings (which is mostly non-existent). I’ve become more aware of the amount of time I spend in front of screens before bed and I’ve made a concerted effort to read more before bed instead - and to read enjoyable fiction for pleasure instead of just nonfiction to learn. It’s created a cascading Give-a-Mouse-a-Cookie effect where I’m having to build an entirely new structure of daily practices from the ground up due to re-evaluating so many things at once.
On my good days, I can find gratitude for the digestive woes that have come to stay for a while because they’re helping me build a healthier, more mindful life. I’m not only seeing the value of routine, but I’m starting to crave it. Over the years I’ve gained so much skill with knowing what to eat. Now I’m finally learning how to eat, and it’s this ‘how’ that’s exposing all of the other habits in my daily life for what they are: chaos.
There are two lovely friends in my life who excel at self-discipline. For the past few years I’ve watched them and wondered how they do it. In fact, I’ve felt intimidated by them, thinking: “they’re so perfect! I could never measure up to that!” What I failed to see and have only just realized over the last few weeks (as I’ve been receiving even more comments about my food and weight since arriving in Texas and also as I’ve been having lovely correspondence with these friends back home) is that they don’t do it because they’re more pious or have discipline as a superpower, they are doing it for baseline survival so they can feel normal instead of terrible. Just like me with my diet.
While I used to look at my friends and not understand (and feel intimidation) I now see that routine is the best way that they know how to make life feel more manageable and friendly for themselves (and that they’re right!). I was thinking the same way about them that others think about me and my diet: that they were somehow more perfect or that discipline came easy to them. I was wrong. I’m not more perfect than those who comment on my food habits, I’m more desperate - and the byproduct of this desperation is better health. What if my friends are not more perfect than me, they were just more desperate to cope sooner than I was and the byproduct of their desperation manifests as impressive self-discipline in their routine? Just as I feel others don’t really see me when they comment about my diet and my body, I wasn’t fully seeing my friends and how their struggle has shaped them.
Photo of me sipping tea by Katie at seekwalfare. Katie is one of the aforementioned friends who knows how to nurture routine. She also nurtures others with her writing and creative work.