My images of health and my body are so skewed and discombobulated as of late that when I get up and get ready every morning I both weep that I have my health (and that He Who Is In Personal Crisis' mother doesn't) and that I can no longer fit in so many of my clothes because I have gained far too many pounds in the last year. This tension in my emotions leaves me wondering when things will calm down, if I will ever love myself as I am, and whether I need to be healthier and, therefore, to work out. But I never come up with anything, because these feel like contradictory concepts. It is impossible to escape the mental maze that I'm in.
And so I am profoundly grateful for and humbled by this:
There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It’s the one place we can’t leave. We’re there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn’t, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn’t do that?
That’s the question you need to answer, Wanting. That’s what will bring your deepest desires into your life. Not: will my old, droopy male contemporaries accept and love the old, droopy me? But rather: what’s on the other side of the tiny gigantic revolution in which I move from loathing to loving my own skin? What fruits would that particular liberation bear?
...
Instead of trying to conceal the aspects of your body that make you feel uncomfortable, how about just coming out with it at the outset—before you get into the bedroom and try to slip unnoticed beneath the sheets while having a panic attack?
Today I'm sad, so a little big of encouragement feels like a lot right now (#107). Thanks, Sugar.
-Me