Remembering Who You Are; Part Two

Last night I crashed at my family home in Mississauga. I like crashing at my parent’s place from time to time because the only two morning people in the house are my Dad and myself. My Dad leaves for work around 5 am and I usually wake up around 7:30 am if I’m not training any early morning clients. Since my Mom and my sister are not morning people at all, I get the entire house to myself. It’s great! The fridge is stocked, free coffee, and all the quiet in the world to get my work done early. This morning, I decided to have my breakfast and coffee outside on the deck while listening to my new favourite podcast Dissect. Just as I started to eat my breakfast, I noticed a male cardinal (red cardinal) fly out from one of the trees in our backyard to the roof of the house directly behind ours. You might be wondering, why is this important? Well, if you weren’t already aware, a cardinal is known to be a spiritual messenger. My Mom used to tell us that a cardinal is a symbol of a loved one who has passed away coming to visit you. Both my Mom and sister have noticed a male cardinal coming to our backyard on several occasions, and we believe that it is a symbol from God letting us know that Nonna Battaglia is still watching over us. This morning, the cardinal stayed there for a while making its own bird call. Because I’m aware of its meaning I was immediately moved, and I thanked God for sending me this sign. I was already planning on writing this piece, but that symbol was just further confirmation of the things that I already know to be true. To me, it further confirms the importance of my heritage, and the things that I believe. These are the things that give me strength and courage. These are the things that keep me grounded, especially when life can feel overwhelming. I can’t lie and say that I don’t currently feel overwhelmed. That’s not to say that good things aren’t happening for me, they are. In fact, a lot of things are changing for the better, and to be honest it does feel like it’s happening all at once. But seeing the cardinal today gave me comfort in knowing that I’m on the right path and I’m protected. I’m being watched over, and that everything is going to be okay.

If you don’t know much about the symbolism or meaning behind Cardinals, then I highly suggest you look it up, and you will have a better sense of their meaning. Cardinals are very important to me and my family because in a lot of ways they symbolize our own values. It’s funny how a cardinal showed up when I’m writing about exactly that, God or the Universe works in mysterious ways, but they are always listening. In fact, if I’m going to be completely honest, I was asking God for protection and guidance over the past few days because I’ve been feeling so overwhelmed. The universe answered my prayers by giving me signs like the cardinal. However, this piece is not about the cardinal. In Part One of this series I talked a lot about the importance of honesty and speaking my truth. I also talked a lot about the importance of having a strong tribe of family and friends. These are two fundamental values for me. Family has always been at the centre of who I am as a person. If you’ve read my letter to Nonna Battaglia that I wrote earlier this year,  you will know that for me family isn’t just the people you are related to by blood. Family is bigger than that. Family are the people who lift you up, the people who help you to become the highest version of yourself. Nonna Battaglia taught me that, and I am forever grateful. It is that core belief that has given me the support network that I have today so that I can speak openly and freely about my depression and experiences on a platform like this.

My Family has also given me many other gifts. Today I want to talk about the power of food. I know a lot of people talk about how much they LOVE food, and how much they eat, and maybe they do. But for me, food has been at the forefront my entire life. Food is probably second to family in the scale of importance in my family’s upbringing. For us, food is love. Feeding your family and friends is how you express your love for them, and as an Italian Canadian, you wouldn’t just feed your loved ones just anything. No! You feed your loved ones the best. Only the best will suffice. My family takes a lot of pride in our food. To my family our food is a direct reflection of us. Growing up, I used to always joke that my Mom was “crazy.” In fact, I still joke that she’s a bit crazy! Especially when people come to visit, my Mom will make an exorbitant amount of food. She would always say “we need options in case someone doesn’t like one thing, they can have another.” To which I would reply, “okay Ma, but they don’t need to have three other choices!” My Mom would go out of her way to make sure that her guests were well fed and taken care of, just like she would for her own family. I was definitely spoiled growing up, and I knew it. Especially as I grew older, I began to realize that not everyone lived the way my family did. Not many families had grandparents on both sides who had extensive gardens, or who would make their own tomato sauce, wine, homemade sausage, fresh pasta, pizza, pizzelle, waffles, cookies, I can go on and on. Now that I think about it, we could have fed armies of people with the amount of home cooked meals we’ve made as a collective. Both sides of my family would stress how their food was “the best,” and I was obliged to agree even if I didn’t fully believe it, because food is so personal to us.

I’m very proud of being an Italian Canadian, and I’m very proud of my upbringing. I’m so grateful to have been given the gift of food. I have been trained since birth to be a cook, because food was everywhere in my life. I couldn’t escape it! But to be honest, it was love at first sight. I loved helping in the kitchen growing up. I would help both my Nonna Battaglia and my Mom make anything and everything that they would allow me to. My Nonna Battaglia passed away just before I turned eight years old, however, her recipes and traditions still live on because of my Mom. I know that one day these recipes will be passed down to me. In a lot of ways they already have.

Food is so powerful, to me it is love. It has the power to heal. We know this to be true. Keeping on with this family tradition of feeding your loved ones “only the best,” I have now done my best to adopt this notion towards myself. For the vast majority of my life I was cooking and baking to show my love for others. Recently, I’ve directed that love towards myself, doing my best to feed myself “only the best.” When I was bodybuilding I was “eating clean,” I was cooking for myself but it was very repetitive and boring. I was cooking out of necessity, not out of love. I needed to prepare my diet food, and make sure that I always had food ready so that I would win my shows. I guess there was love there, I did love how the sport challenged me, and how it made me feel at the time. Bodybuilding definitely kept my love for fitness alive during a time where I was very unhappy with my career in fitness, but I didn’t love the food I was eating. Now, I eat food I enjoy eating, and food that I enjoy making. I’ve been slowly converting myself into a vegetarian. Something that I’ve always wanted to do. I remember in my second year of university when I really got into fitness and eating healthy I told my boyfriend at the time that I wanted to be a vegetarian and he told me not to because it was annoying. So I didn’t, and I never revisited it until now. Right now being a vegetarian and maybe even one day being completely vegan, makes sense to me because I want to feed myself only the best. I personally cannot afford to eat meat that is hormone and antibiotic free, that is free range and organic etc. I’m not choosing to be a vegetarian because I don’t like the taste of meat, I do. I also can’t say that I want to be a vegan completely for moral reasons, even though I am deeply affected by animal abuse. I just know that if I want to be a healthy person inside and out, in a way that makes sense to me, vegetarian is the way to go. I also do believe that the meat industry, particularly beef is not only unhealthy for me, but for the planet as a whole.

Vegetarianism and Veganism has opened up my creativity. It has challenged me in the kitchen in new ways and it’s very exciting! I feel inspired. I’m healing myself through food. Not just by eating a plant-based diet, but through the act of cooking and feeding myself the way my family used to feed me. I’m feeding myself love everyday. I deserve to eat only the best because I love myself, and I share that love online through sharing my recipes. I take pride in my food, I know I’m a good cook, I know that my food is good. I used to joke that I’m “wifey material,” that “I’m a chef.” I never really thought of my cooking as something that was valuable outside of the context of domestic life and family. Therefore, I didn’t really think it could do much for me other than being able to take care of loved ones. Now I realize that my skills in the kitchen have value outside of the home, and that has been a powerful realization for me. I now value myself more because of this knowledge. I share my gifts in the kitchen with you because I love you, and I love myself.

A candid photo of me in my natural habitat making smoothie bowls for a friend and I.

Remembering Who You Are; Part One

I attempted to write this piece over a month ago. I wrote the title and that’s about it. I wasn’t even sure about the title at the time because I wasn’t completely sure of the direction I wanted this piece to take. It wasn’t until last week when I had dinner with my best friend, I was reminded of the importance of personal values and how they keep you grounded. How the things that you were taught by your parents, and grandparents inform you of where you came from, who you are, and what is the most important to you. These things were either taught to you in a positive way, leading by example, or in a negative way, where they show you what you don’t want in your life. I have to say that for the most part, my parents and family have been a positive influence. I was lucky. My family is not perfect that’s for sure, we are all human at the end of the day, but they have taught me a strong value and belief system that I still hold strong today. It is these core values that has helped me to fight against my own depression.

My depression has been a very humbling experience. I got into my depression by slowly forgetting about who I am, what I stand for, and who I dreamed I could be. Little by little, I let fear and self-doubt take over. Depression doesn’t just happen. It’s not like one day you wake up depressed, even though it can definitely feel that way. However, depression starts slow, it’s an accumulation of all the soul wounds you’ve experienced in your life. It comes from you constantly trying to “fight” your reality using defense mechanisms that only isolate you more and have you feeling worse than you did before. The thing is, when you’re living your life you don’t always recognize the negative events in your life as lessons, but rather as punishments. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be upset or feel pain when bad things happen to you. In fact, the only real way to turn these events into lessons is for you to feel all the pain that comes with it. Surrender yourself to the pain, don’t hide from the pain. Don’t drink your pain away, don’t smoke your pain away, don’t party your pain away, don’t try to pretend that you don’t feel hurt. Been there, done that. It doesn’t work.

For me, I lived the majority of my life deflecting my pain. When I was hurt deeply by someone else or by an event in my life, I would cry and be upset, then I would say “it’s fine, I’ll be okay.” I never wanted people to worry too much about me, seeing their fear for me would only amplify the fear I already felt. For example, my parents are great. They love me and my sisters more than anything in the entire world. I would always joke that my parents “care too much.” I know this sounds crazy, how could your parents “care too much?” Especially when some kids desperately want their parents to care about them just a little bit. I know this might make me sound like a spoiled little brat, and maybe I am, I don’t know. But eventually I stopped being honest with my family and friends as a defense mechanism. I was already feeling overwhelmed, and ashamed by the things happening in my life, I couldn’t bring myself to speak honestly about it with anybody, let alone the people who loved me most. I carried my crosses my entire adult life up until this point mostly on my own. I would sometimes drop hints here and there, but I would never allow people to help me. I would always say “this is my problem, don’t worry about it, I’ll figure it out,” or “I know you can’t help me, so what’s the point of talking about it?” So very foolish, and naive of me. I still do this, old habits die-hard. However, writing about my struggles in this way has helped to free myself of my own pain. It has allowed me to lift some of the heaviness I feel. It has slowly freed up space in my mind, body, and soul. Depression is like wearing chains and restraints that you have put on yourself, as punishment for not being able to do better, be better, for you basically being unworthy of happiness for whatever reason.

I think that we forget that we ourselves are human. We make mistakes. Whatever we did “wrong” in the past only happened because we didn’t know any better, or it happened because we weren’t ready to change. If you weren’t ready, it’s because you were scared. And that is OKAY!!! Punishing yourself for being scared, only keeps you living in fear. For me, I was always pretending that I wasn’t scared because I didn’t want anyone else to be scared. I was doing that to protect other people but also to protect myself. For me, it was easier to focus on helping other people because I would never have to really face my own fears. The things that scared me most. I’m extremely extroverted, and so I poured a lot of my energy into my friendships with others. Always being there for them in any way I could. I don’t regret this. Yes, doing this has put me in the place I’m in today, but at the same time it has allowed me to establish a really strong foundation and tribe for myself that allows me to now focus on myself fully and freely without fear. I know I don’t have to worry about loosing my friendships or my family. No matter what happens through this healing process, I know I have several people who love and support me. It is so very comforting. I now know that I don’t always have to be “around.” I don’t need to see them every single weekend like I used to. I don’t have to do EVERYTHING with my friends. I can be alone with myself and my thoughts now more than I ever could before. Not only is this important, it is healthy. I needed to learn to love myself, and to forgive myself for all the things I used to punish myself for, even things that I would punish myself for that I couldn’t control. I needed to let go of the shame and guilt that I’ve been carrying. The same feelings that brought me to my lowest point on New Years Eve 2018. I was with all my best friends, in a beautiful Air B&B celebrating the New Year, new possibilities, and I felt so scared and alone. I had this heavy guilt and shame on my chest. I broke down, I was bawling my eyes out, and I was hyperventilating. The thing is, I wasn’t alone, and my friends reminded me of that. Having all my closest friends there during my lowest point reminded me that I was safe. It reminded me that no matter what I am deeply loved. That is so powerful. New Years Eve may have been my lowest point, but it was also the most honest I’ve been in a while. I could no longer keep the barriers up that I worked so hard to build in order to protect myself. They were no longer helping me, instead they were preventing me from my own healing. That moment, looking back now, showed me just that.

This knowledge, that I can be completely vulnerable and show the parts of myself that I don’t like about myself to the people I love the most and they would still love me was huge. It gave me the courage to continue to be honest. A value that my parents, especially my mom instilled in us at a very young age. Honesty was probably the one value that my mom stressed the most. This is probably why I’m actually a terrible liar and why I wear my heart on my sleeve. I’m actually a very genuine and honest person. I only withheld the truth because I thought at the time it was what I needed to do to get through the shit I was going through. I now know how detrimental it was to go against my own values and intuition. It only made me feel more isolated and overwhelmed with the stresses going on in my life. It’s still very hard for me to talk candidly about what’s going on in my life. I still find myself focusing more on the positive aspects of my life when I speak to my loved ones, because again, I don’t want them to worry about me. I’m in a better place today because I’ve found healthy outlets for myself. Writing these blogs allows me to speak my truth in a way that feels safe to me. I have complete control over my story in this way. When I write about my thoughts, feelings, or the things that I’ve been through, I am the protagonist of my life story, and I am no longer the victim. It is my story to tell, and well, I’m a story-teller. Always have been, always will be. Another truth about myself that I’ve rediscovered. If you’ve been following my blog, you will know that there have been lapses in my posts that would last months. I lost my inspiration, my creativity, my motivation. I couldn’t bring myself to write. My life was too stressful at the time, and when I did write it was out of “necessity for my business.” It wasn’t really for me, it wasn’t genuine. I guess you can say I’m grateful for my depression, because it’s humbled me to come back to square one. To come back to my roots. To learn to be honest again, and to learn the importance of telling my story, of speaking my truth. That is the only way I can really help myself and therefore the world. We’re all human, we make mistakes but if God or the universe loves us then we’re gonna be alright.