Happy Friday to everyone except for the devil, who has been encouraging me over the past couple months to dig a hole and fill it to the brim with all the reasons I should feel like trash about myself.
It's been a while since I felt positive things toward myself - my body, my thought processes, my personality. It's been a lot of "too much" and "not enough" and "you'll never" or "you can't" and it's been making me tired. So yesterday, having decided to get extra ready appearance-wise to feel put together and find some motivation to get what I needed to done (which did NOT work by the way lol), and in an effort to convince myself that I can sometimes measure up to a standard of aesthetically pleasing I did an impromptu vanity shoot in front of my closet doors in my bedroom.
I quickly found myself deleting and cropping what I found unflattering and flinching at the width and of my arms, amazed and embarrassed at how big my thighs are and the way my body looks different - larger - than it did a year or two or five ago. (The picture above sent me spinning.) I get an ego trip off pictures that don't actually look like me or leave out some information and then feel shame when I see the ones that tell all or devastation when I look in the mirror and my body doesn't hide the way I have tried to teach it to. My brain immediately grabs hold to distortions that have been growing lately -
If I still had dating apps, no one would swipe.
My future husband is going to have reservations about my body and my character once he sees that I haven't always been this big.
And then all too automatically one word descriptions about my body that I've identified with since I was 4 years old follow
Unattractive.
Incapable.
Unworthy.
Gross.
And then comes hypocrite. Fake. Liar. I preach self compassion and body positivity for everyone else but leave none of it for me.
I don't really have much more to say than this sucks. And I'm uncomfortably human. And that I can be better. There's no real light at the end of the tunnel to offer like I typically find myself trying to, just something real and raw, hopefully something that will help those who also struggle to not feel so alone, and a really, really loud SCREW YOU, SATAN.
