The Year of No Nonsense

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Start Where You Were

NEARING THE END OF 2015, I WAS THIS PSEUDO-INSPIRATIONAL, Z-list social media character—with just enough of an audience to be dangerous. I was a former-fat-still-fat-girl who slogged through triathlons, authored a book, lawyered, and helped people live their best lives.

I was inspirational as fuck.

I was also a bit of a fraud.

After changing my Life “big time” through triathlon and acquiring all sorts of coaching certifications, a growing business, and race finishes, I had ended up in a similar place to when I started the whole shebang—isolated, overweight, tired, sad, and angry—only with “triathlete” and “author” to add to my ever-growing résumé of bullshit.

And worse than that, I knew it.

But actually I had come far from where I started—a jiggly, can’t-run-a-mile-out-of-shape mom to an IRONMAN finisher. I had built a community and shared my story. I had made some changes. Life became better, but it was like a weird airplane upgrade. I had a seat closer to the front and a few cheap perks, but everything else was still middle seat, economy class, with a crying baby kicking my headrest.

I had upgraded, but I was still suffering. Yes, suffering.

And I was suffering in the exact same ways that I had always suffered. My suffering at age thirty-five felt the same as my suffering at age five, fifteen, and twenty-five. Unworthy. Enormous. Disappointment. Failure. Crazy. Hard to Love.

I made good money. (So why was I broke?) I worked out all the time. (So why was I still “morbidly obese” according to a chart?) I was a triathlete. (So why did I hate my body?) I had a kind, hardworking husband and two healthy, beautiful kids. (So why did I feel unloved? Unsafe? Unhappy?) Am I crazy? became the drumbeat in my head.

On the outside, I was (still) the wife and mom who held it all together. Even when I drank a martini and two bottles of wine and ate a large pizza (after a substantial dinner), I appeared okay. I never said I felt wonderful, but I made Life happen even though I felt miserable, struggled with depression, and wore pants that kept getting tighter and tighter. No matter how destructively the night before had ended, however, I would spring out of bed with the sun, throw on my workout clothes, announce that it was time for school, and drag my hungover, swollen arse to the bus stop with the kids and a death grip on my coffee cup.

I would think to myself, I got this. I can do this. I will not kill anyone today. I can be nice to this annoying woman on Facebook Messenger (Ding! Ding!). I can smile at the bus stop moms. I can smile. I can smile. I got this. You got this, Meredith.

I was full of crap. I gots nothing, Meredith is what churned in my head. Deep down, I knew the bottom was coming. But I was deep in the River Nile as well.

One particular morning, I saw the bottom.

I got smashed the night before and stayed up too late listening to Tori Amos and wondering what had happened to my Pretty Good Year. When the alarm went off—on a school day—I did something unprecedented: I turned it off, rolled over, and went back to sleep. I did not get dressed for the gym. I did not get the kids ready for school. I did not whisper to my husband an excuse like, “I am sick.” I did nothing.

I did none of my duties.

Hell had clearly frozen over. I always did the required things, no matter what.

Except on this day, I said, “No.”

I said no to Life, to my kids. I said no to my job, my workout, my husband, my responsibilities, the teachers at the school, and everyone. Literally, if Oprah had called me, I would have said no to her too. I pulled my puffy middle finger out from under the covers, shot a massive bird into the air, and said, “Not today, Life. Fuck you.”

And I meant it.

A few hours later, I woke up in a sweaty ball of covers, crusty-faced and surprised at the mere experience of waking up. Where am I? Oh yes. Home sweet crap horrible Life home. I pulled my heavy body out of bed and slogged downstairs. The desire and need for any workout had vanished. The kids were gone, so I assumed they had made it to school (or were missing)—in that moment I shrugged at either outcome.

I saw a note on the counter.

The note was strategically placed next to two (empty) bottles of unoaked chardonnay, a pint of ice cream (also empty), and (one of the many) overdue credit card bills.

The note contained one line. One sentence, in my husband’s bitter, scientific-smartypants handwriting:

I blinked. I read. I reread.

I pulled my phone from the dirty back pocket of the sweatpants I had been wearing for a few days (weeks). I began texting the tirade of anger that righteously flies from the fingers of a wronged, amazing wife and mother. I wanted to reach deep into my résumé drawer (not that I have one) and pull out my résumé, text it to my husband, and say, “I am amazing! Look at all the things I do! And am! And have done. Look at this! Look at this one! And this! What about this one? Oh, and I do all of these things FOR YOU and THOSE KIDS!”

I was mad—an understatement. I lived with this guy. He was witness to all the things on paper that I was. And this was what I got? This was the thanks? Harumph.

I finished composing the longest, angriest text with accompanying violent emojis, and I almost pressed send. But something caught the corner of my eye. It wasn’t the downed wine bottles or empty ice cream container. It wasn’t the blasted sticky note on the sticky counter.

What caught my eye was a wrinkly, kid-stained poster board. A poster with purple and black marker scrawled across it.

My heart lurched into my throat.

There it was: a first-grade science project that I had promised to help complete that morning. A poster that meant something very important to a very small, yet important person in my Life. I had not only failed to help our daughter finish her project, but I hadn’t even gotten out of bed to fake a reason why I couldn’t help her.

I didn’t bother to show up.

Worse than that, I didn’t care.

I was angry, yes. At myself. At the world. But I was most angry at the fact that my husband had called me on the giant greasy bucket of Kentucky fried bullshit I had been selling myself and the world. I wasn’t holding myself together—my mind, body, and soul were as if Scotch-taped together by a kindergartner. I was disappointing people left and right. Mostly, myself. I was pretending to be all inspirational—when I was a damn liar and a fake who couldn’t even get out of bed on a random weekday.

I had created a mess for myself.

It was all there—before me in black and white, with my foul cactus mouth, poster board, wine bottles, empty Ben & Jerry’s, and soggy pizza box. My choices had turned my reality into a real-time frat house: a messy, stinky box of bad beer and worse ideas.

My sour stomach turned on me with a vengeance, and the Truth shined in with the power of a search-and-rescue spotlight. I backspaced the text message. I called in sick to work (as if that was even necessary at 9:30 a.m.), and I began to clean the kitchen.

All of the sudden, I was awake.

And deeply, darkly, and dangerously ashamed.

I could not live this way, not a second longer. I couldn’t live with the current bad habits, thoughts, anger, and addictions. I couldn’t live with the shame and regret of it either. I couldn’t live with the same suffering I had been experiencing year after year, decade after decade, for as long as I could remember. I knew something (else) had to change.

Unfortunately, that something was me.

Which meant, I still had a lot of work ahead of me.

YOUR HOUSE, YOUR RULES

Soon (but not that soon) after the famous sticky-note-pocalypse, I quit drinking.

Step one.

And a year after that, I hightailed it out of the legal profession.

Step two.

Two good and big things—yet I did not seem to have the time or peace I thought I would. Each month without a real and regular paycheck was interesting as well. I wasn’t sleeping (no news there). I had made strides with nutrition and body image, but I would still find myself on multiple-day food binges. Loads of resulting self-hate. Destructive cycle. Pain. Suffering.

Another shift began to shimmy and shake. I felt like I was living on a fault line, and the earth was going to crack open and swallow my ass whole. Something (bad) was going to happen—and it was going to rock my Universe. I could sense it. I began to live in a low-boil sense of dread.

I failed to start almost every major sporting race I registered for. My grandmother died—a loss of huge proportions. I experienced major betrayals, epic professional explosions and implosions, failures. I took over a struggling business and sank way too many loans into it, attempting to prop it up. Also, turned out that my friend circle was suddenly shaped more like the Ultimate Fighter Octagon.

I wasn’t innocent in all of it either. I did my fair share of fighting (wrongly and rightly). I could have handled things differently. But that’s part of the narrative now.

I call this particular time The Year That Can Kiss My Ass.

I realized I was at the bottom of my new bottom. My Life, the fraud, was in need of a complete overhaul. I needed to do something, but wasn’t sure what.

During this time, I stayed sober—I had to because there was much, much work to be done. Inside I carried the common theme of struggle. I still wasn’t getting it—whatever “it” was. I was missing pieces of something.

What was it?

My world felt like it was closing in. And when I feel like my world is closing in, I make lists.

The Going Well List was unremarkable.

This was not a gratitude list, mind you, but a list of objective things that I believed were going well in my Life: relationships, Health, and career sorts of things. Things that “on paper” I could tick the boxes and say, “Going well. Check.”

The list was scary short. I stared at it for a minute.

Then I wrote, in messy scrawl, across the page, “Ripe with Potential.” Welp, I thought. That was short and easy. Let’s make another list.

Across the next page, I scribbled at the top “Things That Suck Ass,” and I started writing—the TTSA List.

The main issue I gleaned from my TTSA List was how much time and energy I spent doing things like managing drama, pretending to be friends with people who hated me, and texting people I didn’t even like. Also on the list was eating food I didn’t like, then eating all the food that I loved and subsequently binged on and hated myself for eating. Giving copious amounts of money to those who never even said thank you—and then shockingly would ask for more. Giving folks my focus and attention and then watching them run over me with it. Saying yes to things and people who zapped energy from me. Taking on projects that I should have said no to from the beginning.

As I looked at the TTSA List, I wondered when the job description for my Life became “pushover,” “let me give you something else for free,” and “punching bag.” I certainly had a responsibility to be kind, to take the high road, to be an example or whatnot. Dude, I worked on that—a major challenge at this stage of my Life. But after several outrageous encounters, I struggled.

I had officially become a diplomatic, people-pleasing, high-road-riding punching bag.

A lot of it came with sobriety too.

When I was drinking, I would fire off my mouth or fingers (on social media) and pretend like I didn’t care. As a sober person, I had learned the art of keeping my mouth shut. Because I had so many drunken regrets. But as a lo siento, I became gullible, timid, ashamed, and somewhat pretendedly indifferent.

After I made the TTSA List, I felt nothing.

Then I felt everything at once. After reading and rereading my list, I panicked. My TTSA List was huge, and my Life was clearly not going as I had meticulously planned. I was “Ripe with Potential,” according to the other list, but yet, I was spiraling.

I took the time to stop and breathe for a hot minute. I looked at the things on the TTSA List and saw the whole list blob together like one of those weird “Magic Eye” posters from the 1990s.

I unfocused my eyes, refocused, unfocused—and BAM. I could see it.

Nonsense.

My TTSA List was a list full of Nonsense. So much smelly, rotten Nonsense. My fault, not my fault, but Nonsense. Why had I not seen this before? How had I lost track of what mattered to me?

I immediately sensed, “If I can get rid of the Nonsense on this list, or this whole TTSA List altogether, then I will be able to breathe.”

Suddenly, I felt like a kid at Christmas—unwrapping present after present of Nonsense. Everything was revealing itself. Is this Nonsense—yes or no? Is this Nonsense—yes or no? Is this Nonsense—yes or no? So much Nonsense! Perhaps you have seen the YouTube video of a kid unwrapping an avocado for a Christmas present. The moral of the video is that he very politely shows extreme gratitude for his “gift” of an avocado.

He says, all gleefully, “It’s an avocado! Thankssssss!”¹

Now, you can buy me an avocado any day of the week, and I will express true and heartfelt gratitude to you. However, as I opened the layers of my day-to-day Life, I was unwrapping Nonsense avocado after Nonsense avocado, like a Nonsense-avocado clown car.

As much as I love avocado, I was gritting my teeth at this point and saying, “Thankssssss.”

I intuited that all types of Nonsense had to stop. Not just some of the Nonsense but literally all of it. I was done. D-O-N-E in so many ways. The clown car was going to the junk yard, along with all the Nonsense avocados inside.

The late Dr. (Maya) Angelou,^* in an interview with Oprah, reflected about a time when someone told a racist joke at a party she was hosting in her home. She ordered this person to leave the second she heard it. She said that nobody did that in her house, and she removed the guest.²

Why does that seem so radical? I wondered. But I knew why. We try so hard not to offend anyone that we literally let people run over us. That makes no sense, right? Our Lives, our energy, and our emotions are our houses, our homes. I was putting up with all sorts of crap in my house—real and proverbial. I was dishing out and participating in Nonsense. The combination of my texts and emails, social media interactions and friends—all of that was part of my Life too. Apparently, I had a lot of Nonsense going on in my house.

Channeling Dr. Angelou, I thought, Nobody’s gonna talk badly in my house. My Life is my house, and I don’t want a house of Nonsense.

Get out of my house, I whispered. The sensation felt strange. Powerful.

All the things I had made better, all the changes had mattered. But now I knew the magic. I knew exactly what I would be working toward. The magic? Well, the things I needed to change and eliminate now had a face and a name: NONSENSE.

When something has a face and a name, we can identify it.

We know it.

We can’t unknow it.

I was looking Nonsense in the eye. I could see it.

Likewise, because I could see it, I knew I could do something about it.

Get out of my house.

And that’s how The Year of No Nonsense began.

HOLD ON TO YOUR ASS BECAUSE HERE COMES THE RIDE

So I created a project for myself: What if I had an entire year with no Nonsense?

My Year of No Nonsense was epic.

I unearthed some major shit that I had been internalizing for, I don’t know, all of my decades. Ugly, hard stuff—new memories, uncovered beliefs. Honestly I was sort of sorry I embarked on this little project once I was in the middle of it. During this Year, I couldn’t help but think, Stupid me. Why did I feel that I needed to get rid of Nonsense? Why was this a thing? Whose idea was this? I wanted to run away. What a stupid idea—a Year of No Nonsense. What freaking Nonsense this No-Nonsense Nonsense is.

I went to the doctor because something was wrong about five months in. My whole body hurt. I was exhausted. I couldn’t sleep, and when I did sleep, the sleep was never enough. Doc took blood, and a week later she called me to come into the office, giving me no explanation why. (I don’t think that’s ever good news, right?)

The summary: I was amazingly healthy. My bloodwork, perfect. Inflammatory markers that had plagued me for years were gone. My blood pressure was 116/75. Vitamins, minerals, thyroid, cholesterol were fine. Even my allergy sensitivities were much improved. (Thanks for the heart attack, Doc.)

So what in the world was wrong with me?

Doc looked at me and said, “I vreally don’t know what to do with you.” She is from the Middle East and incredibly blunt—which I enjoy. “You are very healthy. But you are fatter than last year. You need to eat more vegetables.” Should I be offended? Well, uh. It’s true. I am fatter than last year. And I do need to eat more vegetables. Check, check.^*

Okay, so Doc didn’t know what to do with me—her own words.