Rules Of Engagement

Good morning, Cadre. Welcome to Rules of Engagement with Betsy Hodges. Here I am. I hope that you can find your way here. I had a little trouble setting up this live stream. We'll see if this worked. Welcome to my seasonal nails. Every week while I watch football, I put different stickers on my nails. These are just stickers that I get at Marshalls. You can buy them at the drugstore, too, though, and it's a delight to me. I love stickers in general, and it is delightful to have stickers for my fingers.

And my nails don't grow, and so there's no. I don't do manicures. So finding these stickers was, like, a really great thing for me. Super fun. Welcome. We are approaching the end of 2025, and it's been a year. It's been quite a year. And the topic this week is connection and belonging and celebration, which a lot of people are celebrating. Hanukkah right now. Tonight will be the third. Almost none of it, and endless quantities of caffeine. I mean, I just who that child was struggling and. But that same child.

Did the steps needed to get me to where I am today. And I'm very grateful to her while I still hold her close to my heart. See, I got distracted. Why on earth did I bring up my young self like that? Celebrate the victory in hand, if not now, when? Right? So that young person got sober, started exercising and eating well, including vegetables and no more sugar, quit smoking, all this stuff. Healthy, right? But I had been a chubby kid at various points and a very overweight teenager at various points.

And that was the image I had of myself in my head. And. But starting when I got sober, I did all the things and I kept doing those things. I lost a bunch of weight and I kept it off. But more the point, I started eating while exercising, taking care of my physical self. And, you know, I lost an initial chunk of weight. And then at some point in my 30s, I thought, I want to lose. I want to. I want to lose 10 more pounds. Either because I gained some weight, I think, or just because I was ready to release more.

For me, every extra pound of fat that I carry that I've lost has encoded in it the emotions of taking that weight on, which is one reason it's been hard for me to lose weight. I had to figure that out because I need a ton of emotional support to lose any kind of weight, because I have to have the resources to feel whatever those feelings are that are trapped. This is for me, your mileage may Vary. So it was the late 2000s. I was probably as slim as I ever have been and may ever be again. And I kept.

I lost another £10. And I kept it off for maybe another 15 years, 10 years at least. And because they change how I live, I don't diet. I just change how I live and how I eat. And so if circumstances change and how I live and how I work and work out change, then sometimes I will gain weight. And so then I have to. If I decide to lose weight, I have to consciously change how I eat and how I live and work out. I change all those habits. I do not diet. I can't do it. I cannot diet and stay sane for any length of time.

All of this is to say, I sat back one day, this might. I might have been 40, this might have been 2009, because I had just run. I ran a one woman marathon on my 40th birthday. And I remember I just sat back and I thought, if I'm not proud of my physical body right now, when am I going to be? Like, if I'm not proud of my physical self, not just my appearance, but my capacity, my health, all of everything I did to stitched together the relationship with my physical self that had been torn asunder by the early abuse in my life and then the later addictions and things that I layered on top of it, understandably, but not usefully.

Well, it was useful. It just wasn't as useful as some other things like resource and therapy would have been. But I didn't have access to those. So I did the thing I could figure out. That's it. If I'm not going to be proud of myself right now, then when? Then when? Right? I could have been proud of myself the second I decided to move forward. I could have been proud of myself all along the way. And I was. I was. It's not that I wasn't giving myself credit, but there was this overturning, you know, this sort of tumbling of my understanding of my physical self.

If I'm not proud of myself right now, when am I going to be? And so I bought, I think from Sundance, a little silver disc. It's in the other room. Necklace that says proud now, silver disc. And then it's got a little pearl that sits on top of the disc that says proud noun, and it's on a brown cord. I buy jewelry to commemorate things that I want to remember. They're like tattoos, but I can take them off and replace them when I need to remember something else daily. Every Day, you know, like, I have my.

I don't want to, you know, I have my pronoia and allow rings. I have my wedding ring and engagement ring. You know, I have my aura ring that just gives data, celebrate the victory in hand. If I wasn't going to be proud now, when was I? And I wore that necklace for a long time. And it just helped to remind me and center me in. I get to be pleased with exactly who I am right now and everything I've done to get here. And that goes along with guideline number 39 that I have, which says I came by this honestly.

Whatever struggle I'm having and whatever success I have, I came by it honestly. Now that that guideline, you came by it honestly is to help me remember that places where I struggle, I came by them honestly. You know, they're the results of unhealed early hurts. Usually, you know, something negative happened to me as a kid. I drew some conclusions from it. Nobody contradicted those conclusions. And I've just been carrying them with ever since, you know, and you draw a lot of, you know, incorrect conclusions as a kid who faces any sort of trauma or abuse or whatever and isn't given the resources to heal from them.

And I grabbed what resource I had at 19 and held on for dear life and have been doing so for the last 36 years. And that is a victory that I celebrate. I don't. I celebrate that pretty regularly, actually. But it doesn't stop me from deciding to choose even the bigger life. Right? Ruling Gator number 16. Choose the bigger life. I also choose the bigger life. Even bigger than the one I have now. Even better than the one I have now. Every day I do my best to choose that, but celebrate the victory in hand.

Celebrate who you are, who you figured out to be this year, if you had a year. For a lot of us, the world feels like there's just smog all the time, right? The. The national and international political situation, both big P political what's happening at the federal governmental level, and the small P political of the way the country is increasingly being atomized and divided from each other. To me, and I think to a bunch of other people, that feels like smog. Just. It's always present. It makes things greater.

It makes it harder to see further into the distance, into the future. It makes it harder to see each other. It's not good to keep breathing it in all the time, and yet it's very difficult to avoid. And it's just always there. But you can still function. You can still operate, you can still do your daily stuff and people are, and we are, but we're doing it in this cloud of smog. That's what I liken it to. So whatever you figured out how to navigate the world this year, especially give yourself a little love because wherever you fall on the political spectrum, I, I don't know anybody left, right or center who is immune from this smog.

And I know people left and right and center. Whatever you figured out. Celebrate. A great way to celebrate is to connect with other people. A great way to give yourself the relaxation and space to celebrate is to connect and to recognize the spaces where you do belong, where you do have common causes with others and where that's enriched your life. But not to the extent that you need to other. To the extent that you need to make other people bad in order to fully sense the belonging in your in group.

But belonging, allow yourself some time to rest in that because it's from there that it that you can truly celebrate what you've done and what a great year you have had. I'm going to take my own advice on that one. And I'll end with ruling engagement number 29. Yes. And with whatever the world hands you for me. I say with whatever my higher power hands me. But your mileage may vary. Play. Yes. And you know that improv, you know an improv where you're improving and somebody says, well, I'm just a, you know, I'm just a duck chef at the local diner.

And somebody says, yes. And I am the customer who's upset with the duck chef or whatever it is that people are doing their improv. Yes. And whatever the world handed you this year, for good or for bad, take it. Yes. And all right. This is how it is. This is how the year was. And here's who I choose to be in a relationship to it. Here's how I choose to move forward with it. Here's what I choose to take with me. To take what you like and leave the rest. Yes. And with whatever the world gives you. Yes.

All right. This is exactly how things are. Here's who I choose to be in relationship to it. Here's how I'm going to move forward given the conditions in which I find myself. Yes. And with what the world gives you you. And then celebrate yourself for figuring that out. So that's what I got for you. I'm not sure I'm going to see you for the rest of the year. Cadre. Stay tuned. Stay tuned because I have some stuff coming up. Next weekend, the week after, but I'm guessing at least one more time before the end of the year.

But I hope you have a great end of 20. I look forward to seeing what we all can do together in 2026. And I look forward to the capacious, capacious worlds we can create with each other and for ourselves. So I will see you on the app. Until then, have a great end of year.