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I have been overweight all my life. As a kid I preferred serious movie watching to after-school sports and considered PE class a nuisance to carefully chosen outfits. Instead of traditional summer camps I went to nerd camps where I took humanities courses on college campuses (when I was 13 the summer course I chose was Existentialism, wasn’t I a barrel of laughs) and the most physical activity I can remember from them was wading in the fountains–which tied back nicely into all the movie watching cause I got to pretend I was Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita. Oh, and I’ve always eaten too much!

In my last year of college I focused for the first time on losing weight, and I did. I lost a lot and looked great and loved the way I looked. But when I hit a really dark time and faced a sort of existential crisis (a real one this time, not a class), I absolutely turned to comforting myself with food, and gained back all the weight I had lost plus some more. So reading this new interview with Chrissy Metz, who’s out promoting her new indie film Stay Awake, my honest response is of feeling so envious of her state of mind. A few highlights:

How she resonated with her role in Stay Awake: Every time Metz sees a clip from the film, she gets emotional. “I know what addiction looks like. I have friends who have experienced it,” she says. “I have a food issue–I know how it plagues our minds and infiltrates our lives. I want people to know that they’re not alone and that it’s really important to talk about this stuff. Because once the fear goes away, maybe there could be some healing and empathy in that process.”

Our bodies, ourselves: “For me, because I’m more accepting of having an unconventional body or whatever they want to call it–the fact that we still even talk about it is hilarious–our bodies are vehicles,” she reasons. “And everybody has a different make and model. You learn to love, celebrate and hopefully, embrace it. Enjoy riding in that car, otherwise you’re just torturing yourself. Because that allows you to minimize the suffering or hopefully, completely alleviate it.”

On radical acceptance: “There’s just no reason to compare yourself to other people. Do I do it? Yes, of course, because I’m human. I spent a long time beating myself up and wishing I looked or sounded a certain way or had this or that. What’s the point? Is that a way to exist? I’ve just radically accepted it and learned to really love myself,” she said. “Also, I’m proud of the things that I’ve overcome and what I’ve become, because of that.”

Everyone has their stuff to deal with: “I have realized that we all have stuff that we’re contending with, that nobody is better or worse than anyone else… whatever it is that you might have experienced during childhood. All that stuff will follow you to adulthood if you don’t look at it and say, ‘Okay, that was my story, but I’m not taking that with me. Not going to carry this baggage anymore.’ That really helped to open my eyes to that.”

In the eye of the beholder: “If we could see the beauty within or see ourselves the way other people see us, it’s really magical. I’ve looked at someone and said, ‘oh my gosh, I love this about you!’ And they’re like, ‘I hate my teeth, I hate my smile!’ And I’m like ‘what?!’ If you could just give yourself a little grace and love and treat yourself the way you would treat others. That’s really, really important.”

[From Hello!]

There is so much goodness from Chrissy in this article, not all that surprising since she’s always been candid, humble and gracious since finding success on This Is Us. The last quote probably touched me the most–I catch myself so many times seeing joy and possibility for friends in my life, but not extending the same courtesy to myself. And I’m not a car person, but I found that metaphor to be kind of brilliant. “Enjoy riding in that car, otherwise you’re just torturing yourself,” hit me hard from the perspective of someone who’s still, honestly, torturing herself. But Chrissy’s right when she says “it’s really important to talk about this stuff,” because it does make people (me) feel less alone and more hopeful about finding a better, kinder relationship with oneself. I’m not there yet, but thinking of Chrissy will always remind me that it is possible to get there.

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