What happens when we imagine loving the people, and the parts of ourselves, that we do not believe are ‘worthy’ of love?
Thighs that don’t have an effortless gap in the middle
(replace ‘effortless’ with spending hours in the gym, hours in the kitchen, in supermarkets, hunched over recipe books deciding what is ‘okay’ to eat. What contains the least amount of calories, fat, sugar. What is ‘good’, ‘healthy.’)
Cheeks that are too ‘puffy’, with a jawline that is only really there if I clench my teeth together hard enough, angle my face a certain way, I’m not blessed with the effortless beauty of other women.
Voice that’s too deep, or too high, I don’t know. Just ‘wrong.’ A mash up of accents, Northern but from no distinct place. Just ‘stuck’ in the middle somewhere.
Brain that’s too messy, too much.
Too much hassle.
Face that’s not pretty enough.
So much energy is wasted on hating all the parts of myself that I deem ‘unacceptable.’
I worry that I will wake up one day, soon, with nothing left of me, just a mass of hatred having consumed me for all the ways that I am ‘wrong.’
‘Not enough.’
‘Too much.’
What?
I can’t make any sense of it. I just know that it hurts. That, some days, when I look in the mirror, I really don’t like what I see. At all. And, I have an urge to hit self destruct.
On those days, for which there are more than I care to admit, I have to remind myself, really remind myself, that things weren’t better then. That, I might have weighed less, taken up less space in the world but, it wasn’t just my weight that was reduced to fit into a reduced space, it was my whole life.
Relationships ruined,
happiness gone,
me; broken.
And, for what?
For a peace of mind I never got because, happiness cannot be achieved by getting down to a certain number that you deem to be ‘acceptable’ on the scales.
Not just a cliched quote, it really is true when they say that ‘happiness is an inside job.’
Only when you accept that you were never the problem, will you find happiness.
So, again, what happens when we imagine loving the people, and the parts of ourselves, that we do not believe are ‘worthy’ of love?
We realise that we were never the problem. We realise that, not having a thigh gap, not having a ‘sharp’ jawline, not having a ‘nice’ English accent, struggling with our mental health sometimes, feeling ‘wrong’, none of it means that we are a ‘monster.’ We are not. We never were…
The real monster is those voices that plague our head with their incessant spiel, a traditional abuser, convincing us (the victim) that we are the perpetrator, that we are the ‘monster’, so as to allow the abuse to continue.
But, no. It was never us. We were never the problem. Society was the monster, is the monster, convincing us all that we are wrong…
Don’t listen to the lies.
It was never you,
I promise.
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