Scarcity vs. Abundance

When I was visiting my parents last week, my mom noticed I was drinking more water than I used to (read: any water at all) and asked why I was doing it. In the past, I've exclusively drunk diet soda. I wrote recently about changing over, and, honestly, I think the biggest reason was just boredom. We're all stuck at home, and you can only handle so many days of opening all the blinds, making breakfast, cleaning up, brushing teeth, making lunch, tidying up, checking the mail, making dinner, brushing teeth again, closing the blinds, going on a walk, and heading to bed before you're just itching to shake SOMETHING up.

Then yesterday morning, I had a shower thought:

The question to ask isn't why am I drinking water now, when I didn't used to at all.

The real question is: Why didn't I used to drink water?

And I know exactly why I did not.

For YEARS, I lived from a mindset of scarcity. There was never enough of the things I wanted most: acceptance, emotional stability, and, most of all, FOOD.

My mom made me a Diet Coke birthday cake when I was 16, so obviously I have a history with the beverage. But then once I started dieting in college, diet soda was one thing I enjoyed consuming that I could continue to enjoy without feeling guilty, or having anyone judge me for it.

Also, I didn't and don't and never will believe the causation argument that consuming artificially-sweetened beverages makes anyone gain weight. Yes, I've read all of the things. But none of it is very convincing. If a person does the mental gymnastics "I'm drinking zero calories, so I can eat an extra hamburger," that's nothing about the beverage itself. And it's impossible that the body somehow metabolizes a no-calorie sweetener the same way it metabolizes sugar because "the body doesn't know the difference." So no. I mean, drink it or don't, but it's not the devil, and I've always drunk diet soda, whether I was heavier or lighter.

Anyway, I was restricting. I wasn't eating things I really wanted because I was trying to maintain a weight that would be esthetically pleasing to people who wouldn't like me if I were larger. Then I also experienced a BUNCH of outside control in terms of what music I was "allowed" to like, and which movies were "appropriate" for me to watch, and how often it was "reasonable" for me to interact with various family members.

It was a lot.

But I could drink my diet soda and be quietly happy without annoying anyone.

Fortunately, I don't live in a place of scarcity anymore. I have unconditional love and acceptance from my family and my church, and no one tries to control to whom I talk or how much I love a recording artist or gives me a dirty look for throwing down a slice of pizza at 10:45 PM because I have the munchies.

At some point, I guess it occurred to me that I have enough to enjoy, food-wise, that I had the space to drink water, which wasn't my favorite. I'm also drinking other things. Like I'll have a mug of milk with cookies, whereas for years, I didn't want to "waste" the calories on the milk (which wasn't my priority) when I was calculating intentionally "spending" calories on cookies (something I wanted); it seemed too extravagant. Also, I've started drinking a can of V8 Sparkling Energy drink as my morning "coffee" and it has a whopping 50 calories; I literally used to disavow ingesting calories on liquid, unless it was a smoothie with which I was replacing a meal.

I don't have to live that way anymore. I'm allowed enough pleasure that I don't have to cling to the tiniest slice of happiness or risk fading away.

I'm living in abundance, and I can tolerate water now. Yay.