I’ve had the pieces and parts of this post floating around in my mind for a while now. I just haven’t allowed myself the time to sit and really let myself settle in and explore it all in depth.
I have spent much of my life hating my body. I’m not even sure how or why it started, but I know I was already over-excersing and under eating as a first year teenager. I was not athletic, I have never considered myself an “athlete” and my exercise was driven purely as a punishment for what I ate.
Over the last year and a half I have been trying to slow down, to exercise less and eat more (or actually eat “better” is the more correct statement) and to just start loving myself better. It’s been long, it’s been hard, and while I have made some forward progress, I still have so far to go.
Many times as I’ve sat and thought about it all recently, I have found myself thinking that perhaps I’ve finally reached a point in my life where I am just too tired to keep hating myself on that intense level that drove me for so many years.
It takes a lot of work to hate yourself, to punish yourself, to drive yourself towards an unattainable perfection you know you’ll never reach, and yet refuse to let yourself let go of.
I am forty-eight years old. Things are changing within me. I’m on the runaway freight train of perimenopause. I have battled hormone and fertility issues my whole life, and now inside this body, that I’ve cursed and battled against for two and a half decades, is now in the process of officially shutting down and finishing up the thing that never really worked correctly to begin with. (I take that last statement back, I have the most amazing biological twenty-six year old son whom everything worked correctly for, and I wouldn't realize just how great of a gift he actually was for many many years)
I have always struggled to lose weight, to maintain weight, it’s always been a hot mess rollercoaster for me… but the older I’m getting it’s been even harder. I am fortunate to be surrounded by some amazing similar stated and minded women right now. And I have been doing a lot of reading and research and conversations about this time of life that I’m in. And oddly, like infertility, it’s something that isn’t really talked much about.
So where am I even going with all this, Sara? I’m not even exactly sure. I just know that self love is some incredibly hard shit to do. The flip in mindset and toxic thought patterns is a hard thing to break.
My body is so tired right now. My mind is tired, my soul is exhausted. (But it always is… always…) And I’m entirely the one to blame for all of it. I fed the demon mind games for all those years, telling myself all the misconceptions and untruths over and over again. I fought with a body that naturally couldn’t be or do the things I was wanting it to. I fought with a body who’s ideal weight is nothing close to the ideal weight my mind seems to be stuck believing in. I fought a body that just wasn’t able to create and sustain new life as I so desperately thought I needed and wanted.
And recently in all my tiredness and all my lost weariness, I am just trying to allow myself to be who I am, well - I’ve always allowed myself to be who I am in my personality, but this time I'm trying to allow myself to physically be who I am. The miles and miles of running just cannot physically be done any more. The strict protocol of restricted eating just cannot be done any more. The weight is creaping back on. The running and the pace has slowed to a point of basically not even happening. (Though both probably not as horrible in reality compared to my minds reality.)
But does it matter? Does any of it really matter? Obviously it does because I’m still fretting and stewing and writing about it… but I think right now I’m just lost in the unsettledness of it all. How do you love a body that you’ve hated for so long? How do you embrace a physical form you have tried to change your whole life and be ok with it, as is? How do you forgive the living mass that carries you daily and has robbed you of the life of the child you so disparately wanted?
Going back and re-reading this I’m stuck again with an age long wonder over why I can’t just enjoy the blessing of what God created me to be? Why do I have all this guilt over not fully loving myself the way I was created, in God’s image, as a child of God… a daughter of the King… Why is this just not enough for me?
I don’t wish this thinking on anyone. I would never want a friend or family member to ever say the words I’ve said or think the things I’ve thought about their bodies and their selves. And yet, for over thirty-five years I have found justification in saying and thinking them of myself, and not giving it a second thought.
I’m currently trying to rewrite this narrative in my head. And in some ways it’s really simple, and in others it’s so unbelievably hard. I’m pretty sure it’s the simple that is making it hard. It’s the voices in my head at constant war over what is good enough and what isn’t.
For the past year and a half I’ve been working on slowing down, changing my overworked mindset, surrounding myself with likeminded people who support and encourage in this similar stage I’m in. I stopped following the ultra trainers and the lean fit twenty somethings doing all the amazing things in their utterly amazing bodies. For the past nine months I have been intermittent fasting 16:8 and not tracking anything I eat. What a freedom to be free from the slavery over logging every little thing.
It’s quite a bit easier to love yourself through grace and gentle acceptance than to hate yourself through punishment and strict and rigid guidelines and rules. But there is this whisper in there still calling out the carbs and the calories and the guilt over the glass of occasional wine all the time.
And it’s that where it’s all so tricky.
“Healthy” isn’t only the state of your physical body. Your weight, your BMI, your muscle defination. Health is so much more, the state of peace and contentment in your heart and your mind and your soul. And somehow all those signals get so easily jumbled up and messy. We want to be healthy, inside and out, and we wrestle with what society and tv and social media all loudly shout at us vs what our mind and hearts are silently pleading within us. I’ve spent my lifetime chasing physical health, leaving my mental health in wreckage.
So here I am, a year and a half in of attempting to work on loving myself and loving and honoring and respecting my body better, and I’m nine months in to changing my eating to IF 16:8 and not tracking anything in my eight hour eating window. And it's been an absolute love hate relationship of change.
And it’s hard. It’s hard to do all the things well. It’s hard to allow yourself the grace to live within increased happiness. It’s hard to allow yourself to step back from the perfection profile tattooed within the mind, an image that is never anything close to what I see looking back at me in the mirror every morning.
As I said earlier, part of it has just been so easy. So easy to not track, not log, not exercise all the hours and run all the miles every single day. So easy to just eat the food and enjoy the conversations and memories and moments, rather than obsess over the food details. I don't even want to know how many pieces of pie and cake and ice cream I have not allowed myself to enjoy. Not that eating pie and cake and ice cream is the end all be all for self love, but there is definitely a long lost loving correlation there somewhere. I said no as form of punishment.
The other morning I looked at myself, after skipping yet another workout because I just could not get myself out of bed to do it… and as I looked in the mirror I wondered how I’d let myself get to this point (the extra weight, the loss of muscle, the added inches around my waist, the added cellulite on my legs) and I just took a slow breath in and sighed…
I must just be too tired to hate myself like that anymore. I’ve been married almost twenty years to the same person, who bless his heart doesn’t see my physical flaws. I’m established in my careers and learning how to be a good grandma and mother in law. I’m still a struggling mom to a hot mess teenager, but that just is what it is, that is my current season with him.
Apparently it was my endless drive of imperfection, the inner plea to fix and punish a broken body that got me up every morning, that got me through the workouts and the miles and the rigid diet requirements. Such a daily battlefield. Such endless exhaustion.
It’s not that it’s not currently still a battlefield and I’m not currently still exhausted - because it is and I am, but the battle is possibly raging just a little less within me, and the exhaustion is possibly coming more from outside stressors of work and teenagers and finances, and less of that personal perfectionism and I'm seeming to slowly allow to fall through my fingers, disappearing behind me in a quiet trail of lost sparkles.
I have a very very long way to go, but I’m restless, and I’m aware, and I’m continuing to figure out what self love for myself actually is. I’m trying to model to my granddaughter and niece and others watching that it’s about fighting for the love and not the perfection about ourselves.
Oddly, while the perfection level I hold (held?) within me, is (was?) only about myself. I have never thought or viewed others through that same skewed lens for some reason. In fact, so many times I am envious of all those who clearly are happier and so confident in their minds and bodies, because I know it, feel it, see it in them… while so tightly holding back on to the love reins on myself.
My love was so provisional. It had to be validated. It had to be explained. It had to be earned. God doesn’t require any of that with His love to us, so why is it so hard to grant myself that same grace?
This isn’t a start and finish piece. This is just another chapter in review along my long journey to faith, within the steps and beats of my own heart every day. It’s my season of working on self love, and it’s super easy and super hard all at the same time. It’s something I will never fully overcome or master, it will forever be my work in progress.
And for today, I’m ok with that. I’m simply too tired not to be.
