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Posts Tagged ‘love’

“To Be or Not To Be”

At some point, perhaps years before the night of my book party, alcohol and drinking began to occupy an increasing amount of my mental real estate. During the workday I eagerly anticipated cocktail hour. Or I perseverated over where to purchase a bottle of wine on my way home from work. Among my shopping criteria were selection, price range, and distance from my condo. But most importantly, how frequently or recently I had purchased from a certain place. I feared becoming recognized as a “regular” so I rotated my patronage accordingly.

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Very happy to have been reviewed by Kirkus Indie:

 

“Hollenstein (Understanding Dietary Supplements, 2007) makes it clear from the start that her book has none of the drama of typical addiction memoirs. She has no harrowing, cinematic rock-bottom moment to report, for example; instead, she focuses on her slow realization that “[a]lcohol numbed both [her] pain and [her] joy.” This quiet process of introspection, however, proves to be just as engaging as any tale of alcohol-induced havoc. Hollenstein writes eloquently of the complex role that alcohol once played in her life, and her insights into drinking’s cultural currency are especially sharp. Of alcohol’s transformative power, for example, she writes: “Champagne with oysters transported me to Paris….I drank whiskey to express my saltier side.””

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Lauren Stahl created SPARKite to help people like you and me hold ourselves accountable to the goals we wish to meet (but to do so, we might need some additional support). Lauren and I sat down for a little chat the other day. View the video here:

In addition, we will be hosting a conference call on Wednesday, February 26 (Yes! Tonight!) at 8PM EST. Dial in details are below. Here you can ask me your questions about food, nutrition, intuitive eating etc.

Conference call with Jenna Hollenstein MS RD
Wednesday, February 26th @ 8PM EST
Dial-in Number:
Conference Code: 329250

 

 

 

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The following is what is becoming my annual post about seasonal affective disorder, written from my new platform at Eat to Love. Previous posts on the topic can be found here, here, and here. I’ll be following up with a recipe for my favorite anti-depressant stew and some more thoughts on nutrition for depression.

 

Feeling S.A.D.? You’re Not Alone. Here Are 6 Things You Can Start Doing Today to Feel Better

The holidays are upon us, there’s an invigorating chill in the air, celebrations to enjoy, but you’re feeling anything but festive? Does your body feel heavy and leaden, your mind sluggish and unclear? When you wake up in the morning, do you look forward to the moment you can get back into bed? I know I do.

If this sounds familiar, you might have seasonal affective disorder. S.A.D. is a type of depression that hits about the same time each year. The exact cause of S.A.D. is not 100% clear but it is likely a combination of seasonal changes in your circadian rhythm and your body’s levels of melatonin and serotonin. Women, people who suffer from depression, and those who have a family history of S.A.D. and/or depression are at the greatest risk for S.A.D.

I have struggled with S.A.D. since I was a child, yet every November I’m surprised by it. I feel like the tin man on my yoga mat, my eyes sit at half-mast, and if I open an email from the Humane Society, I am reduced to a sobbing puddle for 20 minutes. After the initial shock and indignation wears off (it usually takes me about 3 days to say “It’s happening again…”), I put on my big girl panties and deal with it. The following is a list of the things I have found most helpful in managing S.A.D. [Continue reading]

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P1000078On December 28th of 2012, I was laid off from my job as a medical writer at a biotechnology company. I was with that company much longer than anticipated since the job, at the time I got it, was an escape hatch from the disastrous job I started right after I quit drinking. I planned to be at the biotech company only a year at most while I collected myself and began to understand what life was like sober. One year became four years and, during that time, I had what looked like a promising career with a handful of successes and a solid salary. But I knew there was something else waiting for me.

As the 28th of December approached, I was facing a world of uncertainty when “the perfect job” landed in my inbox. But after a whirlwind interview process, I didn’t get it. I remember getting the call. It was nighttime in Sicily. I walked out of my boyfriend’s parents’ house into the backyard to find a little bit more cellular reception and looked out across the Mediterranean as I heard the words “we decided to go with the other finalist.” But as I walked back into the house and told everyone my news with just a shake of my head, I knew that this was the right thing.

Working one job or another since I was 12 years old, I now had an opportunity to explore my own wants and needs without an obligation to an employer. Between the safety net of severance and savings and, more importantly, a supportive family and partner, I decided not to do what I thought I “should.” Instead I left myself open to the possibilities. And in the last year, those possibilities have included:

  • Traveling back to Sicily and Paris and exotic Upstate New York
  • Taking continuing education classes, attending conferences, and completing a free “How to start a small business” course in New York City
  • Networking, opening up to people, making new friends, and reinvigorating old friendships
  • Visiting friends and family near and far
  • Formalizing my commitment to Buddhism
  • Translating/interpreting a children’s book from Italian to English
  • Taking care of myself physically and mentally, attending ballet barre and yoga classes, going for acupuncture and therapy
  • Volunteering with the New York City Coalition Against Hunger
  • Cooking, sleeping, watching trashy TV, and cuddling with my boyfriend and our fur children, Rufus and Darwin
  • Writing a book based on the Drinking to Distraction blog [Stay Tuned!]

And deciding to start my own nutrition counseling business. Some of you already know that my education and early job experience was in nutrition and that I have long wanted to get back to that field. Given the time and space I was fortunate enough to have during the last year, I came to see starting my own business as a risk worth taking. And about two weeks ago, I launched my mindful nutrition business, Eat to Love, which integrates meditation, therapeutic approaches to addiction, and Intuitive Eating.

Besides taking an inventory of what the hell I’ve been doing for the last 11 months, I’m writing this post to acknowledge that none of the things I have done in the last year would have been possible if I had not quit drinking nearly six years ago. That was the first step out of my own cocoon, my coming out of hiding. A process that was furthered by beginning to meditate, by beginning to write about my experience here, by not trying to keep making all the “right” moves in my life or to please everyone else. Starting this business is taking the next step.

Gradually I will begin to spend more time on this new venture, which opens up new possibilities for the Drinking to Distraction blog. I always viewed the blog as a shared space where readers could post their own stories about drinking, mindfulness, meditation, and coming out of the cocoon. Now, more directly I invite you to submit your story, to experience the therapeutic release of writing your own narrative, and to help others by letting them know they are not alone.

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It is difficult to describe how much I love “Orange Is the New Black,” the new Netflix original series based on Piper Kerman’s memoir about her time in a women’s prison. I binge-watched the 13-episode series over the course of several days, such that when I was forced to leave my apartment, I had the vague feeling that I needed to watch my back and carry a shiv made from a Gillette Venus.

In the series, Piper Chapman (played by Taylor Schilling), a WASP-y Smith College alumna who 10 years earlier sewed her rebellious oats by dating international drug cartel employee Alex (played by Laura Prepon), is serving a 15-month sentence for having one time transported a suitcase full of drug money. New to prison, Piper, who recently became engaged to conventional Larry (Jason Biggs) and was working with her best friend on a line of high-end bath products to be sold at Barneys, feels understandably like a fish out of water, a debutante in the ghetto. Initially, she can only see the differences between her fellow inmates and herself, but soon their similarities begin to emerge.

What drew me into the series were the no-holds-barred belly laughs – picture Piper avoiding shower-floor foot fungus by crafting slippers out of maxipads because she can’t yet purchase flip flops from the commissary. But what hooked me were the flashbacks depicting the stories of Piper’s fellow inmates. Between the lovably crass punch lines (a used tampon sandwich, for example, or the ‘tit punch’), the series highlights the story behind each character, her humanity and suffering. Like the character of Janae Watson, who had a promising track career but whose ability to outrun the boys meant that none of them ever caught up to her; when a guy finally did show her some interest, he turned out to be a criminal, and she landed in prison after the two of them robbed a store and only she was caught (waiting for him to catch up).

The juxtaposition of my assumptions and stereotypes about women in prison (or anyone from whom I might feel “different”) and the very familiar emotions and traumas each character experiences set me back on my heels. In the series (as in real life), though it can be easier to put a person in a little box with a label on it, something usually happens – a revealing word, a moment of vulnerability – to signal that there is a vastness, a range of emotions and experiences, that I don’t know about. These glimpses into the individual back-stories reminded me of this Cleveland Clinic video that poses the question:

If you could stand in someone’s shoes, hear what they hear, see what they see, feel what they feel, would you treat them differently?

Many of us have the tendency to see ourselves as the protagonist, the hero or heroine, in our own story, while everyone else plays a range of supporting roles. Stepping back even a little allows us to see how flawed this approach is, to see our interconnectedness, our interdependence, or as Thich Nhat Han says, our inter-being. Since we can’t know for sure the back-story of every stranger we encounter, what if we were to imagine him or her as having experienced similar joys, losses, and traumas as ourselves; and from that place, perhaps extend him or her a little more kindness.

In Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change, Pema Chodron writes:

It’s said that when we make this commitment [to care for all beings everywhere], it sows a seed deep in our unconscious, deep in our mind and heart, that never goes away. This seed is a catalyst that jump-starts our inherent capacity for love and compassion, for empathy, for seeing the sameness of us all. So we make the commitment, we sow the seed, and then do our best to never harden our heart or close our mind to anyone.

 

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I have almost always had a complicated relationship with my sister. Whether this is due to sibling rivalry, our closeness in age (she is 18 months my junior), or because we are the same sex, I am not sure. What I do know is that our relationship often feels tense and restrained. There is no doubt that we love each other fiercely, but when it comes to showing one another that love, we fall short. To the outside observer, we may appear a couple of compatible 30-somethings, but each of us feels the divide between us, like an invisible brick wall.

We have tried to explain away this separation – we’re just too different, we don’t look at things the same way. Much like I’ve tried to live as if my job doesn’t need to be personally rewarding and based on passion, I’ve tried to live as if I don’t need to have a close relationship with my sister. But this has never been satisfying for me. And, I suspect, for her. As much as we try to make it appear otherwise, we both yearn for a more fulfilling sisterly bond.

When the tension peaks between us, it’s usually because of something supremely silly. The source of our latest conflict was a jeans jacket. She liked mine, I ordered it for her in what I deduced was the right size, and she ended up returning it for a different size. Not a big deal, right? But when she told me she was returning it, I felt as though she was rejecting me and my love! I took offense and told her it was “annoying.” In response, she “stepped back” from the situation, and didn’t respond to my text messages or emails. This went on for a couple of weeks until I wrote her a long email explaining that underneath my snippy response were hurt feelings. What’s more, I told her that I felt rejected, unseen, and unappreciated.

The day after I sent the email, I was at my parents’ house on Long Island, getting ready for a baby shower for my cousin’s wife. While changing clothes in my childhood bedroom, I noticed a picture sitting on my chest of drawers for the one-thousandth time: A 3×3 inch square photo of my sister and me smiling at the camera. She is about 3 years old and I’m about 5. We are standing near the front door of our grandparents’ house in upstate New York; we are in our bathing suits, probably getting ready to go swimming in the old watering hole. My sister has on some kind of cape, and I’m tying it in a bow at her neck. The picture is in a small plastic frame that my sister decorated with our names and the words “Sisters are forever.” She gave it to me as a gift years ago; I don’t remember the occasion but she probably does. In the picture, we both look so carefree and happy (and are approximately the current age of her two daughters). There isn’t a trace of our current conflict on either of our faces. Looking at it again, I realized how we were wasting time being so unkind to one another. That in addition to feeling love for one another, we needed to practice showing it.

When my sister read my email, it hit her like a ton of bricks. There is no one that I know who tries harder to be a good person, friend, neighbor, wife, and mother. No one who thinks of others more, or spends more time caring for others instead of herself. The suggestion that she had hurt me flew in the face of everything she tries to be and do. When she called me to talk, it was with guns blazing because she felt as if she needed to defend herself.

At first our conversation was adversarial. She was fixated on the fact that there wasn’t anything else she could have done about the jeans jacket to make me not feel rejected. I insisted her “stepping back” made matters worse. She reminded me how different we are, that we have different lives and different priorities, and that we’ve had this type of conversation before and yet here we were again. I suggested that we could try to put the past behind us and focus on what we wanted from our relationship now.

And then something shifted. The bottom fell out of whatever short-term satisfaction we got from pointing out how we had been hurt or wronged more than the other. Suddenly we were able to hear one another. I asked her “Would you like our relationship to be different?” She responded “Yes.” I asked her “How would that look and feel?” She responded “I would call you to talk about my day or to discuss something I’m going through.”

I asked her if she ever felt the same things I wrote about in my email – hurt, unappreciated, unseen. She said she did. We talked about how we love one another differently than we love anyone else in the world and how, given this fact and the knowledge of our respective sensitivities, wishes, and needs, we are in a unique position to give one another exactly what we yearn for – to recognize one another, to cherish one another, to make the other feel special and loved.

Since our conversation, my relationship with my sister has changed; the confusion and hardness we felt before has softened. The brick wall has come down a bit and with it the barriers to reach out to one another via phone, email, or text. We seem to reveal ourselves more fearlessly, show one another our vulnerabilities and to invite the other in. It feels as if we are appreciating each other more, and in doing so, we are appreciating the moment more, giving it the respect and gratitude it’s due. By dropping our stories about how we have been wronged, we are able to touch that soft spot we both have in spades. And (at the risk of sounding like Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy) to recognize that we deserve to love and to be loved in return.

sisters are forever

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