For the past few weeks, I’ve had more time than ever to ponder over the relationship I have with my body.

 

A body which has endured a lot and fought a lot and which I unfairly considered for a longtime to be a „broken”  gift I got from life.

 

My body cannot handle foods that are elementary for most people, it isn’t as strong and resilient in circumstances that most people find to be absolutely normal and has always hindered me whenever I wanted to prove myself „Limitless”. You cannot be Limitless when you are always searching for the hidden cause of some pain and discomfort.

 

It was only yesterday, when I was rewatching the superficial yet entertaining „Eat, Pray, Love” movie, with Julia Roberts as the troubled wanderer Liz, that a line shook me up. There’s a scene when the medicine man Ketut from Bali tells Liz that the purpose of this whole process of reconnecting with herself is to get to „smile with your face, smile with your body, smile even with your liver”.

 

I have to admit this made me smile. With my face, not my liver, though. And I suddenly realized that I have been pushing my body to mend itself as soon as possible and to „make me happy”, without taking into consideration the fact that it had had a tough fight of its own.

 

Was my body happy? No. Had I given a damn? No.

 

For the past 30 years, my body has been abused and aggressed in a myriad of ways. Without realizing it, I fed it things it could not process, I pushed it to tolerate ingredients that were off limits, I made it collateral damage to my sleepless nights of workaholism and of my less-than-ideal and ever-changing diet.

 

My body is like a beaten woman or an abused child who need to find faith again. Faith in themselves, in life, in something.

 

I realized how foolish I had been, expecting my body to mend in a few months or a year, after three decades of working it harder than it was equipped to work in the first place. It was just like telling that poor beaten woman or child, „Hey, the circumstances have changed now, so I expect you to forget every bad thing that ever happened to you and start anew. And be happy and cheerful. Like… NOW. Okay?”

 

No, it’s not okay. I may have been giving my body the medicine and diet it had long craved for, but I wasn’t giving it other more precious things. Patience. Love. Respect. I was expecting it to reset itself and forget everything.

 

Like pressing a „Delete” button and installing new software. It doesn’t work like that.

 

I may not have won the genetic lottery with this body of mine, but I have had bestowed upon me the incredible luck of a body who went beyond its limits, above its in-built parameters, like a machine that outsteps its technical boundaries.

 

This „broken” body of mine has survived bad diagnostics, wrong diagnostics, excruciating pain, several threats of major unnecessary surgery, long years of testing and needles of all shapes and sizes piercing its skin.

 

And from this body I asked nothing short of perfection. No less than that.

 

I don’t know if my liver can ever SMILE, like really smile, after all it’s been through the past decades, but I will damn sure do my best to make it smile.

 

Not just by religiously following my medical protocols, but adding something more to the mix of pills I take daily. Something I never tried before, not really and not consistently. A high dosage of patience and love. From myself to myself.

 

It was about time.