I get we need to be reminded sometimes. But why is it that when we are feeling tired, we need to be told to sleep? Can we not tell that stress is making us feel stressed and about to bitch-slap someone? Are we so disconnected from our hormones that we can’t tell when we are horny?

I felt it crawling up the back of my neck all damn day. Maybe even a couple of days before, though it might have had more of a prickle on the backside of my skull. I knew where I would take it out, and I fought it like it was a malaria-infected mosquito buzzing around my head. I failed.

Every new year, I start out just the same as everyone else: determined, with goals tucked neatly under my arm, to climb the highest mountain and claim victory at the peak over partaking too heavily in crappy food/caffeine/alcohol, getting through all of my work assignments with ease and efficiency, and whipping this holiday-infected body into Shape magazine-like goddessness. Every new year, I fail and pretty much end up where I began.

As my brain tried to zero in on my pointed middle-finger in Warrior II, his voice seemed to get louder and more insistently crude words frothed at his lips. I wanted to drop the rest of my fingers and just leave the middle one pointed in his direction. Still, as I struggled to breathe more deeply, to fight against the insistence of my brain to focus only on him and my reactions, I got the lesson for something else I was currently struggling with in my life. And focus is the key to both.

I’m not talking about looking in the mirror and appreciating what you see staring back at you. Nor I am referring to being proud of a work accomplishment, running a triathlon, or remembering a friend’s birthday without a Facebook reminder. Self-love is about something deeper than these important – yet surface – traits. It’s about giving into the feeling of satiety within your skin. It’s about loosening a grip on those thoughts of what you are doing wrong. It’s about sitting across from another person and feeling safe, warm, and easy in their gaze.

Sometimes I wonder if there was ever a time that I didn’t believe in a compass that could help direct me; I think these times existed. I’m almost saddened for the former me who couldn’t take solace in the ebb-and-flow of life, and the deeper meanings that came with depression, anger, resentment. The wish for it to all be over, and yet thinking it would be with me for the rest of my life. It certainly is hard to be optimistic when all you have in your hands are those biting, diminishing feelings.

I’m interested in how people move past their body stories, the ones deeply implanted by their mothers, or their friends, or the TV. Or all three. How they get through the rest of their life still hearing the same words leave the mouths of their fathers, their lovers, or the magazines that cover the shelves at the grocery store. Changing the story for a moment is easy; changing for the rest of our life is a daily struggle.