Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to the Weekly Log. So, I had an experience, an opportunity, a miracle, a blessing recently to be able to take my 12-year-old kiddo Maya to the Super Bowl, and we are huge 49ers fans. Just for context, I was born and raised in San Francisco and my dad introduced me to football. I was raised on football, and it's not like we went to Niners games, actually never went to a Niners game in my whole life. But we watched and I was growing up and coming of age in the golden era of Joe Montana and Jerry Rice and Steve Young, Ronnie Lott, and just incredible players. Hall of Fame players. The 49ers were winning the Super Bowl as I was coming of age…five Super Bowls, five wins they never lost in the Super Bowl, and they were going to the playoffs every year. They were in the NFC Championship game a lot of years. Most years we had other good teams in our conference. The Cowboys were good back then. Green Bay Packers were good, but the Niners were really dominant and they won the Super Bowl. When they got to the Super Bowl, they won, and they won. Let's see. They were in the Super Bowl when I was young, six or seven years old, and then again when I was 10 or 11 years old, and then again twice back to back wins when I was 14 and 15 years old. And then again when I was 20 years old. Oh, it's just a great, great experience to come of age dancing in the streets to these Super Bowl wins. I remember the mayhem in the streets and all the partying and the fun and the thrill of it.
Getting two tickets to go to the Super Bowl was such a miracle and a blessing, and I had no doubt who I would bring because Maya and I have been watching these games so passionately. We've been watching with my dad who recently moved to Rochester, New York to be closer to all of us, my dad, and his beloved wife, but my dad's 83, he's not traveling, so I wasn't going to bring him. David is a Steelers fan and thinks going to the Super Bowl is ridiculous because it's better to watch the game from home, which is fair. Maya just was so eager to go. Now I have two other kiddos, Robbie, and Zoe, and they were like, “Hey!” And I was like, “I've been inviting you to watch football with me all season. You don't like football; you don't watch football.” They were like, “Oh yeah, that's fair. That's fair.” So, Maya got this incredible trip, the only 49ers game I've ever been to, and we went off to the Super Bowl.
I have three Bright Line Eating® related lessons to share with you from this experience. It was a once in a lifetime experience. We had so much fun. The first lesson has to do with - it's sort of a meta lesson, planning and preparation. How did I prepare for this, right? We were flying into Las Vegas early Saturday morning. Our flight left 5:00 AM on Saturday morning. We spent Saturday there, spent Saturday night in a hotel, and then the game was on Sunday. In my carry-on suitcase, we did not check luggage, in my carry-on suitcase, the type, the hard-sided roller bag, a little carry-on, I packed seven meals, My Teddy Bear, Wraucetur, my five-year journal, toiletries, a pair of underwear, and an extra 49ers hoodie just in case. That's what I packed. I was packing and David was laughing at me and I'm like, isn't this what everyone packs in their overnight carry-on, seven meals and a teddy bear? Isn't that typical?
Anyway, I did pack almost all my food. I went out to a restaurant on the Vegas strip with Maya to a steakhouse, always an easy meal to get a Bright meal at a steakhouse. I ordered fish and vegetables and salads, super easy. We went out to eat on Saturday night. And other than that, I had my meals packed. I had breakfast and lunch packed for Monday, breakfast lunch and dinner packed, sorry for Saturday breakfast, lunch and dinner packed for Saturday, and then breakfast and lunch packed for Monday. We took a redeye home, and we were going to be landing around noon, but I just wanted to get that meal eaten so I could get Maya home and we could unpack and so forth. Planning and preparation are always wise. Maya eats all kinds of food I don't eat, so we didn't have to pack food for Maya. Maya got food there and there was some food. Maya was really excited to eat there. Apparently, there's this world famous NMF place make delectables, whatever. Maya had learned about them on YouTube, I guess, and never thought that she'd get to eat there, but she was like, can we go there? So, we went there and as I was in line, I was using my mantras. That's not my food. That's poison to me. That's poison to me. I got to enjoy my kids' excitement and at the same time keep a strict boundary mentally between myself and that food. Then I took Maya to this fast-food place that they only have on the west coast that they don't have near us that Maya loves. As Maya was eating there, I stepped out for a bit, and I made a support phone call. I just asked Maya, “Can I duck out and make a call?” She was like, “Sure!” We'd been spending eight hours already together nonstop. So, that was fine. I just ducked out into the sunshine in Vegas and just called a friend and just debriefed a bit. It's not like I'm impervious to the food after hours of exposure to it, it does build up. I needed a little bit of support.
There was one aspect of planning and preparation that required a bit of surrender, which the game itself at the stadium, I knew they were not going to have food that I could eat there. And sure enough, they did not. There was no food or beverage allowed into the stadium at all. And we arrived three or four hours early to the stadium. And let's see, so that meant the stadium opened at 1130. That meant that we were on our way there at around 11, and we didn't get out of there until eight or 8:30 PM. What that meant was that I used the mantra that I teach my Boot Campers, “Hunger is not an emergency.” I had lunch at 11, parked where we drove to the stadium in our rental car parked there. I got out my packed lunch, I ate it there, and then we walked into the stadium. So, I had lunch at 11 and I had dinner at 9:00 or 8:30, or something like that. After we got out of the stadium back in the car, I had my dinner in the car. You know what? It was fine. It was fine. I mean, I get all these people writing in saying, can I do intermittent fasting on Bright Line Eating? Can I fast? Fasting is healthy, the body is equipped to fast. I've done a 10-day water fast before, and the reality is my body knows how to go long stretches without food. It was fine. And because I've been eating this way for about 20 years now, my blood sugar is nice and stable, but mentally it was tough thinking about that meal. I don't like to eat dinner past six o'clock, let alone 8:30 or 9:00. I eat my dinner around 4:00 or 5:00 PM every night. So, the thought of not being able to eat until after that meal, there was a part of me that got freaked out about that for a second, and then I just breathed. I was like, there's no other way. I'm going to have lunch before and dinner after. I will survive. It will be fine. Sure enough, it was the last thing on my mind, the last thing on my mind. That's the first lesson is just the basics of planning and preparation and support. They never get old, right? They never get old. Even when you've been doing this 20 years, it never gets old to plan for a trip, pack your food, get support where you need it, and surrender as necessary. Less is more. When in doubt, leave it out. It's fine. It's fine, it's fine.
The second lesson has to do with, I would say the one aspect of recovery that I am worst at that I never think of that I don't teach you about much, that I don't prioritize, that I don't even prefer. At this point, you're probably like, what is she talking about? I'm not even going to tell you what it is upfront, I'm just going to illustrate it with a story. I would not have built this into the trip, and I did not personally build it into the trip. It was all Maya and it started on the flight out there. We flew from Rochester to JFK and then to Vegas. In the JFK airport standing around waiting to board the flight to Vegas, sure enough, we started to see some 49ers jerseys and some Kansas City jerseys. Then there was this little boy decked out, head to foot in New York Jets attire, green Jets attire. Then there was this dude with a Ravens baseball cap on and one other, what was the other one that we saw there? Oh, maybe a Buffalo Bills fan, actually. So, Maya tallied it up. Maya was like, “Look, mom, there's a Jets fan, there's a Ravens fan, there's a Bills fan. And we got the Niners, and we got the Kansas City Chiefs.” Then Maya wanted me to make a note of it because then when we landed in Vegas, we saw Steelers fan, we saw this guy and Steelers full on Steelers, get up there and then a Dolphins fan, and Maya's like, “Okay, you got to make a note of this.” When we landed in Vegas, I opened up an Evernote and I made a list of all these teams, and then we started scouting. Then we made a bet, not...gentlemen's bet, whatever, for how many teams would we see represented on this trip in terms of fans in full on jerseys. Maya said 24. I said 27. In case you're not aware, there's 32 teams in the NFL, 32 teams, and we'd already seen eight of them, nine of them. We go to the Vegas strip and suddenly we're walking up and down the Vegas strip, and it's just a game to spot fans. We finally saw a Cowboys fan, and we went over to this guy who was smoking a cigarette under an awning and we're like, Cowboys fans. And he was like, oh, yeah. He looked at our Niners jerseys and he is like, oh. We said, “Yeah, yeah, no, we're not Cowboys fans, but you are. And we're trying to find fans of all the teams.” We put the Cowboys on the list, we showed him the list. We're like, “Look, you're the 13th team that we found. Thanks for representing your team.”
All day we went around the Vegas strip meeting people and high fiving them and going up the, oh my gosh, it's a Colts fan. It took us so long to find the Indianapolis Colts. I think they were like the fifth to the end or something. We met them and they were grinning. We met so many nice people that way, and people who were so delighted to be acknowledged for their fandom of their not Super Bowl playing team. And we got to the stadium and we passed number 24, and then we passed number 27, and then we had four teams left. The Carolina Panthers, the Tennessee Titans. Oh, I forget, but I know the Tennessee Titans was last because we found a Tennessee Titans fan with binoculars on the other side of the stadium. We weren't even sure it was a Titans jersey. We had to Google it up because it just was not clear what jersey it was, but we knew it was blue and we knew it was something. And sure enough, we Googled it, the number 22, the font, and it was exactly right on. And we found our 32nd team! The recovery principle that this illustrates that I'm no good at or typically not strong in is play. We created this game, Maya created this game out of nowhere, and it was a through line for our whole trip, and it was so fun, and it got us talking with people and interacting. To be honest, just if Maya had said in advance, “Mom, can we make a game where we're looking for jerseys?” my heart would've sunk. I would've been like, I would've rolled my eyes inside my head. I would've been like, really? And it ended up being one of the most fun, most rewarding parts of the whole trip. I know that there's coaches on the Bright Line Eating team, I'm thinking of Joanne Campbell Rice in particular, that really advocate for play as something to be mindful of, something to incorporate into our lives, something to not forget and relegate to our childhood past. I'm always delighted when I invite it in, and it's still never my go-to to remember to do that. Thank you, Maya, for that such fun game, that joyful, joyful experience.
We got to the stadium early. We were there, like I said, four hours early. There was Patrick Mahomes about 45 minutes later sitting on the opposite bench in his shorts and Henleys and hoodie, just chilling, absorbing the stadium. Then Brock Pretty came out with Nick Bosa and Christian McCaffrey, and they were throwing around a ball and they were doing stretches. For hours, we got to watch these guys. We had binoculars, both of us, two pairs of binoculars. We were watching them. It felt very intimate to get to observe their routine, to see them absorbing the magnitude of the experience. Then the game started. To be honest, I didn't expect the Niners to win this game. I didn't think that. I just didn't think that Kansas City would let themselves lose. I couldn't picture it. I couldn't picture Patrick Mahomes losing this game, though, not the way they'd been playing in the playoffs. I did my best to prepare Maya that we were just going to go there to have fun, and that the Niners might not win the game, but the Niners leapt ahead to a 10 to nothing lead after no score at all for the first quarter. It was a very, very slow game. Then it was very tight. We were seeing these stats that you weren't seeing on tv, but on the jumbotrons, they kept showing ongoing stats, and the Niners were ahead by time of possession, by passing yards, by rushing yards. We were ahead, ahead, ahead, the whole game in all stats. Then it went into overtime, and then they lost abruptly, heartbreakingly. They lost in the last seconds of overtime. It felt like being hit by a Mack truck. I was prepared to lose. But I guess in the same way that when someone you love dies, you expect them to die because they're terminally ill, they're going to die. But when they actually do die, it's a different feeling altogether. There's a finality and an abruptness of it that just hits differently. It's hard to describe how floored we were and how disappointing and how shocking it was. Then the recovery lesson started because we'd just gotten this once in a lifetime trip to go to the Super Bowl, and our team lost in overtime a heartbreaking loss. Over the next few hours, I got to be with Maya as we metabolized this disappointment.
I noticed her thinking, trying to latch onto something easy, to just frame the experience like Brock Purdy, it's Brock Purdy's fault. He didn't have his best game and he didn't have his best game. Part of the reason was that the Kansas City defense showed up really big, right? That was as much of their win as his loss, right? They stopped him. They really did a good job covering those receivers. We talked that through, that Brock Purdy had a solid game. He didn't have his best game, but he had a solid game against a formidable defense. And I saw Maya try to make it about the coin toss at the end and how the Niners shouldn't have taken first possession after the coin toss. I get what they were trying to do there. They were trying to…anyway, on and on the different approaches Maya took to trying to wrap it up with an easy bow. The reality was that the game defied that. It was a complex, nuanced mix of things that just ended up in, we didn't come out on top this time. The blessing as a mom to get to bring the nuance back into it, I just kept bringing it back to, it's so hard, kiddo. I know. This is so disappointing. This is not what we wanted happen. Just being with my daughter as we felt the enormity of the experience together.
I think that when someone's been Bright for a very, very long time, and then they have a break, or more than a break, maybe a big binge, there's this mental thing that happens of trying to metabolize the experience. What does this mean? What just happened? Several hours after the game ended, there was a moment that will stand in my memory as the key moment of the whole experience. It was hours later. I said to Maya, “The biggest job that we have now is still ahead of us about this whole experience.” Maya perked up and she said, “What was it? What do you mean?” And I said, “It's our job now to protect and defend and create our memory of the experience. Because the reality is that we had the most incredible trip ever. We had the experience of a lifetime, and we get to decide that the Niners losing at the end does not take that away from us. It's our memory to protect and defend and create. We are the guardians of our mind. We decide how we shape and form this experience for our safekeeping for the decades to come.”
When I told Maya that we get to decide that we've had the best trip of our whole lives, she lit up like a bright shining bulb and was so happy and delighted to hear me say that. I deep down was thinking for hours, how could this be happening for us, not to us? How could this actually be the better outcome as a mom of a kiddo? Yes, it's painful to watch my kiddo absorb that disappointment. Yes, it was painful for me too. How could this have been the better thing, the better outcome, if the Niners had won? It would've been so easy, right? Just, oh my gosh, just grand slam out of the park, slam dunk, incredible. Wrap it up with a bow, perfect experience, right? Would that have been its own kind of fabulous? Absolutely. Right. Would there have been much, if any, growth or lesson or learning or teaching opportunity from it after that? Probably not. Other than just shared joy, which has value, don't get me wrong, absolutely has value. But what got to happen in the hours after that loss together, teaching my kiddo how to square your shoulders to pain, to deep emotion, pain, it was really hard for us. You might not be a sports fan. You might be like, oh, come on, Susan. But I'm telling you, it hurt to be there. Watching our team lose like that, especially after we'd watched them for those hours all season long, and then watching them in person warm up, it felt personal, it was gutting.
I got to show my kiddo how you manage that kind of emotion responsibly. It's the essence of being unstoppable™. I don't know, honestly, if you gave me the choice right now to rewrite history and make the Niners have won, I don't know would I say no. I'll take the growth experience. I don't know, right? It's not my choice to make, but I know that I would think twice. I know that it would not be an easy choice. It's not clear that I would prefer that they win in that scenario, having been through the loss and experienced what came out of it.
I just hope for you for any break that you ever have in your Bright Lines, for any setback that you have in life, you remember the Bright Line Eating value of unstoppability, and you just call the lesson, just milk it for all it can give you. Because the reality is that we don't learn the material unless we're tested. We don't grow unless there's hardship. Gold never becomes pure unless it's really, really stuck in a very hot fire. Diamonds look pretty nasty, like little lumps of coal until they're seared with really, really powerful lasers. Nothing good comes easily, nothing that's really worth having. I took my kiddo to the Super Bowl, and we watched our team lose, and it was an incredible, never forget it, once in a lifetime experience. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
