Over the past year or so I’ve been pretty good with being kind to myself. I finally feel like I have begun to accept myself and my body for what it is without wielding a sense of self-hatred or dislike of what I see in the mirror. I seem to constantly be the person that reminds others not to chastise themselves for eating ‘too much’ or ‘putting on too much weight’. I try my best to not speak about physical appearance to friends and family and not comment on anything relating to fluctuations around weight gain or loss; either negative or purportedly positive. All in all I’m at a good place when it comes to accepting myself as I am now. However this all seemed to go completely out of the window when I added in the equation of the opposite sex and this persons perception of me. It made me wonder how all the hard work I had done up to this point seemingly dissipated in the blink of an eye.
To explain this further, I have to go into the details of this encounter. See I recently met up with someone who I hadn’t seen for a while, about a year now. The last time I’d encountered this person I was in the depths of my delusion and lost within a debilitating illness. I was the skinniest I had ever been and drunk on the unhealthy compliments that were consistently coming my way. My brain was consumed by the inner critic which my bulimia had hijacked that told me that nothing else mattered except my thinness; that I was only worthy as a human being in this state.
Cut to myself a year later, I am in recovery. I am healthy of mind and body and more importantly I’m happy. But I’m not that same person visually. I look different, I know so because people have told me so directly to my face. They have asked me what kind of food I’ve been eating of late because I seem to be indulging more than before. They have identified that I am bulkier than before and ask me unashamedly what’s happened and why I’d lost my ‘discipline’.
As I prepared to once again see this person these thoughts were the only thing that consumed my mind. I considered not going, ghosting because maybe it was better that he remembered me as I was before. I couldn’t stop thinking that there was no way he would be attracted to me now because those 5kgs determined my worth. They were linked to my attractiveness, they were all I had to offer. My mind swirled with self doubt and that nagging inner voice who told me I was no longer enough seemed to be screaming in my head and drowning out any other chatter.
In the end I managed to still go, to meet up with this person. But the self doubt seemed to have embedded itself in the rhetoric of who I was and what I had to offer at that time. Afterwards when the natural course of our interactions tended to dip I wondered if it was because he realised that he wasn’t getting what he thought. As if I was worth nothing more than my appearance. As if I was nothing as a human being without the tag of being skinny. It took speaking this out loud to a friend for me to realise how distorted my thinking had become in such a short amount of time.
I slowly came to realise that all of the work I have done around loving myself for who I am almost came unstuck because of my perceptions of another person’s thinking. I have no idea of whether or not he assumed any of these things. But if he did, surely that would say more about him than it would about me. I am worth so much more than what reads beneath my feet on the scales. My self confidence is based around self acceptance, it rests within who I know I am as a person, the way that I love freely and practice kindness to all. It is rooted within my passion for life, for my work, for my writing. There are so many things that make up who I am as individual. I know deep within my soul that I am enough, that I am worthy. But for one short instant I doubted myself so innately that I lost sight of everything else.
What I know is that life is a journey of constant learning. Just when I thought that I had overcome all of my demons and embraced true body confidence a stumbling block emerged which shifted me completely off balance. But this is the beauty of life; understanding that we are never done with our journeys, that there is always some way of building our resilience and ensuring continuous self-growth.
I write so much about body positivity and I genuinely mean all the words I pen and the proclamations I voice. But I, just like everyone else sometimes doubt and doubt quite deeply. In these moments I am lucky enough to be surrounded by those who can see through the darkness I have unwittingly projected for myself. They ground me and bring me back to the truth. That one’s worth is to be inherently found within themselves. That searching for validation amongst others is hollow and untrue. They remind me that I do love myself and believe myself worthy. I just get distracted in the external chatter sometimes.
Sx
I blog for Change. 