I'm Not the Curse - I'm the Cure: Why I'm Choosing Healing Even When It Scares Me

From a very young age, I was taught to have a dysfunctional relationship with my body. I was taught that sex was wrong, and to want to have it meant that you were a sinner doomed to hell. I was taught that although I was a skinny kid and wore a size zero through senior year, I’d grow up to have kids and get fat and I’d never be able to lose the weight. These same people took delight in their words coming true, but in the meantime, I felt ashamed. They were right and I had failed myself. It’s genetics. Diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol all run in my family. Basically, I’m doomed.

Or am I?

Just as I’ve spent much of my adult life fascinated with rags to riches stories, I was just as fascinated with the stories of centenarians, nonagenarians and others who have lived long and thriving lives. As amazed as I get about people like Oprah Winfrey and Lebron James going from rags to riches, I was just as amazed watching an interview of a then 78-year-old Ernie Hudson as he spoke about his fitness routine. For a person like me who was told at a young age that things would be downhill from my twenties forward, it seemed like a fantasy that people in their 70s could possibly be out running marathons and reversing time.

I’ve watched people slow down after 35, declaring themselves as too old. I’ve watch people move slower, become stiffer, and carry a pill caddy like a handbag. When I was 35 years old, I found myself in the hospital hooked up to machines. As this was happening, I took a call from work and the doctor watched as my blood pressure shot up even higher. It was then I was diagnosed with stress-induced high blood pressure.

It had begun. One of the big three that I was genetically predisposed to had reared its ugly head. In the meantime, I watched as family member after family member passed away – all but one under the age of 60. Was this my future?

One day, I was at a doctor’s appointment, waiting to get a refill for Lisinopril. By that time, I was under the assumption was now my lifelong companion. This was a new doctor I was seeing, as my previous doctor stopped taking my insurance. This doctor, instead of prescribing me more and more meds, prescribed a book: Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman. I could heal my body by reading??? Are you serious??? I went out and bought the book immediately.

I read that book as well as others, including The Blue Zones and the Secret Language of the Body. I started following health related content on social media and I started learning a lot. Most, if not all the big bad illnesses I had spent my life fearing were either preventable or manageable. I looked at the people around me who were getting sick and dying young and I realized that this didn’t have to be my reality. I got so excited when my body would respond to getting sleep, drinking water, and cutting back on sugar. I’d tell anyone who’d listen about the things I was learning, and I’d usually hear, “yeah, okay Monique.”

We live in a culture that teaches us to hustle, to hurry, to grab something quick because there’s never enough time and there are always things to do. Not long after my own health scare, I watched two people stress about work to the point where one had a brain aneurysm followed by a heart attack and the other simply didn’t wake up one morning. The work they were stressed about was simply reassigned and life went on. I’ve often been chastised for listening to my body and resting when she tells me to; for not being dedicated to what the world would prefer me to be dedicated to. I’ve seen where that dedication can lead.

We hear it when we turn on the radio or the television. Millennials who have turned off the news and turned on social media can now find the same commercials, asking us to talk to our doctors about some new medication for some disease we would have never heard of had the commercial not told us to. We won’t eat kale because we can’t stand the taste and won’t walk around the block because we don’t have time, but we’ll happily pump our body full of things that mask more than they cure. 

Basically, fear sells.

Choosing not to be a slave to genetics and systematic messaging is a revolutionary act of love. I’ve witnessed firsthand what unprocessed trauma, emotional suppression, and a disconnection from self can do to the body. Anxiety and depression can wreak havoc, but anxiety and depression are based on thoughts and emotions. I realized that I could just as easily affirm my power and heal my thoughts and emotions through therapy, coaching, and lots of repetition. I’m not 100% perfect all the time, and my body will let me know when I’ve gotten off course, and I listen to her as she speaks to me. I’ve chosen differently. I’ve chosen to learn from my pain, research, pray, meditate, journal, change my lifestyle and remember my why, and it’s going amazingly for me. 

I don’t want to just survive. I want to feel good, be free, and live fully. I don’t want to sleep my way through life. I don’t want to cope; I want to thrive. 

I’m thankful that I get to wake up every day and choose me.