Body Image
This seems to be a recurring theme. Even in the process of writing this, I have had a few intimate conversations about body image. The conversations are usually around a five or ten pound weight difference. When I talk about body image, I am not talking about a healthy weight for a specific individual, I am talking about the ways in which women see themselves. The wrong and very harsh ways women see themselves.
Most of the women I work with have some sort of body dysmorphia. They look at themselves and see all that is wrong with them. They pick apart every flaw as if it is a piece of lettuce stuck in your teeth or a booger hanging out of your nose. Women seem to pick it apart as if it were easy to change. And it is easy, the idea at least. If every women looked in the mirror and saw what other people saw, they would be surprised by how they look. But that is not what happens, no matter what I tell people.
Maybe telling people to do something that I am only just learning is difficult also. See, I am not innocent in this, I have not risen above it. I am not enlightened in body issues and images. I am not perfect in the way that I view myself. Here’s the thing, I have big legs. Yes they are strong, but they also have cellulite. I have cellulite in the front of my thighs and the backs of them. My calves are large and my lack of long ankles gives me what some would call “cankles.”
I don’t have to love them but honesty there isn’t really anything to not love about them. My calves are big, so what. I have cellulite, so what. First of all, I can’t change the size of my calves, its genetics. Second, I wouldn’t give up beer or my candy enjoyments to lean out that area of my body. And my legs take me places, I walk and get work out. I have been playing tennis and golf and basketball. I run when I feel like it. These legs have become a non issue. I look at them when the lighting is sexy and see flawlessness. Than those harsh fluorescent lights in the studio come on and I’ll catch a glimpse of that cellulite in the mirror. But it is who I am and it is a very small part of who I am, a very small part.
I always thought as we got older we would care less about how we looked. And the older I get the more I realize that the dysmorphia exists in all the little crevices of individualization. As we get older we seem to beat ourselves up more. We seem to look back at all our failures and all our could haves. We pull out a pair of pants or a picture from 20 years early and wish we still wore that size or had that body. But when we had it we still thought we needed to wear a smaller size or loose weight. Even when we were in our now ideal body we never appreciated it.
What we miss in all of this is all our successes. We miss all the things that others see in us. We miss the things that people love about us, we miss that being who we are is what makes us stand out. And more importantly we miss what our bodies have done for us and our evolution as one. Some of us are mothers, some of us have climbed mountains, or accomplished careers. Some of us had to put our bodies on hold while we did other things. And that is alright, some of us have suffered illnesses and loss. My point is, this is life. Your body is what you make of it. It doesn’t have to be a love, but to learn to look at yourself and what you see as flaws and just accept them is probably the biggest gift you could give yourself.