The Root Beer Float

My son mentioned once, casually, that he wanted a root beer float.

Not urgently. Not as a request exactly — just one of those offhand things kids say, the small wants that slip out without expectation behind them.

I couldn't get to the store fast enough.

I didn't negotiate with myself about it. I didn't wonder if he really needed it, or if it was the right time, or whether I should wait and see if he mentioned it again. I just...went. Because he wanted something small and delightful and I wanted to be the person who met that.

I've been sitting with that moment ever since.

The eagerness we extend to others.

Most of us know this feeling. The immediate, warm responsiveness that rises up when someone we love wants something — even something small, even something that costs almost nothing. A favorite meal, a particular blanket, a song they mentioned once that you remembered and found later.

We move toward the people we love without deliberation. The want lands and we're already reaching.

And then our own body asks for something.

And we stall.

What happens when it's us.

Maybe it's hunger — real, clear, uncomplicated hunger — and we finish the task first, or the meeting, or the thing that feels more legitimate than stopping to eat.

Maybe it's rest. The body asking, plainly, to slow down. And we negotiate. We make a case for why this isn't the right time. We tell ourselves we'll get to it later, after, when we've earned it.

Maybe it's something smaller than that — a craving, a want, a small delight the body is reaching toward — and we pause long enough to question whether we should. Whether it's appropriate. Whether it fits some internal rubric we absorbed so long ago we've forgotten it came from somewhere.

We extend immediate warmth to the people we love.

We make ourselves argue for it.

For clinicians doing this work.

This is the part worth sitting with.

We talk to our clients about listening to their bodies. About responding to hunger and fullness and craving without the weight of judgment. About the radical act of treating their own needs as legitimate without requiring them to be earned first.

And then we drive home and ignore the thing our own body has been asking for since noon.

I'm not saying this as a critique. I'm saying it because I know it. Because the same cultural messaging that shaped our clients shaped us too.  The quiet assumption that our needs are negotiable, that caring for ourselves is something we get to do once everything else is handled, that the body's requests require justification before they deserve a response.

Are we actually modeling what we teach?

Not performing it. Not knowing it theoretically. Actually living it — that immediate, warm, no-deliberation responsiveness — toward ourselves?

What the root beer float is really about.

It wasn't about ice cream and soda. It was about the speed of the yes.

The way love moves toward a want without making the want justify itself first. The way care doesn't require a case to be made before it's extended.

What would it look like to move toward your own body's wants with even a fraction of that speed?

Not perfectly. Not all at once. Just...a little less negotiation. A little more yes.

Your body has been asking. It doesn't need to earn the answer.

If this is landing somewhere specific for you.

The diet trance is the quiet assumption that life will finally begin once your body is different. Most of us didn't choose it, we were taught it. Family comments, doctors' offices, social media, health advice that carried a lot of shame underneath it.

I have a free email series called Living Outside the Diet Trance that gently explores what becomes possible when we stop trying to fix our bodies...and start actually living in them.

If you're ready for that conversation, I'd love to have it with you.

[Sign up here — www.drjamieenglish.com/living-outside-the-diet-trance]

Dr. Jamie English is a licensed clinical social worker, supervisor, and educator. The DJ English blog explores the inner life of the clinician — the parts of this work we don't always talk about out loud.