Who the Hell Just Said That?!

An evening like any other. I came home from my lifting session at the gym, my hair in a simple ponytail and my already minimal eyeliner and mascara worn still thinner throughout the day. So typical, so uneventful, yet once again observing my thoughts was about to tip me over the edge of the next rabbit hole.  🐇💖😅

I don't remember why, but I caught my image in the bathroom mirror and lingered a bit... "Damn, I look good," I thought. Four words that appear vain to anyone who doesn't understand what it's been like to live in my skin for the past 34 years; watching it stretch, tear and scar from morbid obesity only to deflate like so many balloons, slack and loose like the ones Carnies use to make wiener dogs at a circus. I've rarely permitted myself this luxury and therefore felt grateful for this authentic feeling of admiration. But then.... "What a waste..." 

Wait, what?! Where the f#*% did that come from?! What's a waste?! 

I almost had to hold onto the sink as I was sucked into a vortex of confronting bullshit largely composed of societal conditioning; false beliefs that as a single women my 'prettiness' counts for sweet f#*%-all since there is no partner to enjoy it or take advantage of it. Yes, I realise how disgusting that sounds, even more so given its coming from within myself. Confronting indeed.

Why can't I appreciate my beauty for enjoyments' sake, and sense of healthy self esteem? Why should it be a bargaining chip with which to snag a relationship? I know many average-looking people in happy healthy relationships, and still more gorgeous people in turbulent relationships. Intuitively I feel aesthetics have nothing to do with it, it's what's inside that matters. Another notion I know but obviously don't believe because I can't ignore what I just heard within my own f#*% mind. What's inside me is a toxic lie that my outer appearance is wasted because I'm single. Any why? So my partner can dote on me and tell me how pretty I am? I already know that's BULLSHIT because heaps of people tell me how beautiful I am; I ignore them at best and roll my eyes at worst, which is certainly not a sign of healthy self esteem. Instead, it's a distinct non-verbal cue that I don't believe them. Inwardly I hide behind a proclamation that I don't need the approval or admiration of others, that I don't want their attention. Yet this thought ... "What a waste", remains underneath, a clear clue that there is healing work to be done.

With that in mind I committed my evening meditation to setting a deliberate and sincere intention of honouring my body, listening to it, connecting with it, learning from it, appreciating it come hell or high water! I'll be damned if I'm going to allow that false belief to persist. My beauty is not wasted because of my single social status. On the contrary, I might argue that I'm single because I'm hyper-sensitive about who I permit anywhere near me in an intimate way, and there is likely some semi-conscious element of truth in that notion. Either way, that healing work requires my attention....there's undoubtedly a lot of shit there to sift through, sort out and compost to promote new growth.

As a devout believer in the Universe, I recognised the need to learn from what my intuition puts in front of me... and this time it was literally a mirror. If I thought I had already been kicked into this particular 'Worth' rabbit-hole, then I was evidently still stubbornly clinging to the sides. It was time to trust, to lose the grip completely. I don't feel I can say it any better than I did in my daily morning journal reflection, barring minor edits for syntax, clarity and privacy:

Home at last! [I had been house and dog-sitting for 3 weeks] And holy shit is my body sore from lifting. I could do what I normally do... force it, analyse it, wonder why I'm in such a bad way and make myself go to the gym anyway.... but I no longer have any passion for such mental traps. I authentically want to know my body better and treat it better, so I'll do right by her and deal with the brain spiders of not working out some other way. Lord knows I've plenty to do. Read, write, Tarot. It's a gorgeous day outside too. F#*%, I can barely move... I'm not sure what I've done to my back...other than deadlifts, lat pulldowns and prone cobras over the last 2 days. Yeah, that might have done it. [Hmmm... didn't I just say I wasn't going to analyse it?? 😅]

While meditating yesterday I focused on breathing through my bloated discomfort and noticed my body relax a bit. I thought of how awesome my body actually is, the keeper of all the biological processes that I know so well as a trained scientist, and even more so for all the processes we still have yet to fully comprehend! Cellular signalling to activate and deactivate so many cycles, make ATP [energy], gobble up microbes and dead cells, fix DNA damage, keep my organs functioning and my body metabolising. On the surface it looks like breathing, thinking and heart-beating are the essentials, but there are so many other things at play. How can I not trust my body? It's been doing this magical shit since I came out of my mother. It's grown and changed with me, stayed present, conversed with other bodies (largely without my mind/awareness realising it). My body has always done what I've asked it to do, and so much more! Why then, is it so difficult to trust that I need a rest day? Ah, because my mind highjacks my body to keep busy with 'doing' so I'm not confronted with boredom, and so that I can eat without guilt. Sad but true.

I authentically want to be more intune and connected with my body, but there again I'm overthinking. Surely I'm already connected?! Every nerve in my brain goes to some area of my body to speak with it using little more than good ol' table salt! But I too often ignore what those nerves tell me. My muscles are sore and I feel tired, there are things at play my mind can't understand and it hasn't learned to speak my body's language, even after 34 years. Rest is the scariest word in my brain's vocabulary... Rest = lazy = fat; another false belief I've conditioned myself to believe. The old me would just write myself off as a massive piece of shit, push through and suffer the consequences or sit around feeling sorry for myself... not allowing myself to eat for a day. Misery. But I'm changing, I want to learn this language, so I need to master listening. It's f#*%-ing confronting and uncomfortable though!

It's not about being sedentary, or pushing myself to work out when I'm not feeling well enough; it's about healing, finding the balance. When I was a personal trainer some of my clients couldn't pinch their shoulder blades together at first, but over time they could. The body needed time to innervate and hook the wires up to the brain. Years of not using the muscles caused them to atrophy. This is the same. I know I can learn and heal my body in this way, heal the relationship between my logical, smart, conscious mind and my wise body. Damn, for all my intellectual and analytical scientific knowledge of the biological workings within my body, I actually know f#*%-all about it. Perhaps that was my way of bridging the gap, but it never got me closer. During graduate school I swung violently from over-eating to under-eating. I completely changed my body by losing half its excess weight; but I can't say, hand on heart, that I ever truly understood or listened to it.

Now I'm 34, need to wear an estrogen patch, and am losing my first adult tooth. Both knees have taken turns giving up on life, and I've been diagnosed with Crohn's disease... only to be undiagnosed six months later. What a glorious wonder aging is... And someday, if I don't get hit by a car whilst running or fall off the Mountain, my body will cease to function of its own accord. My beautiful wise body has an expiry date. Is that why I subconsciously hate it and want to bully it? Because I know it, not my wakeful mind, has the true control over how long we stay here on this Earth? 😳🐇

These musing later led me to conclude this following fun fact: Our bodies literally hold in everything that we are, it's all inside of us... the mental, emotional, physical and spiritual, as well as the conscious, subconscious and unconscious aspects of each. That's pretty f#*%-ing cool in my humble opinion! 💥💖

Writing about this shit is no walk in the park, which is likely why I get almost constant urges to get up and do precisely that [walk 😅]! It's so much easier to get up and do something active than sit and face all these confronting thoughts and feelings; sitting with the discomfort within and realising that I'm feeding myself mistruths that serve to undermine my sense of self worth without my conscious consent. An eerie form of self-victimisation, and I'm not the only one. Healing work is uncomfortable, yet I maintain that the ends will always justify the means. Hell, even if I turn out to be wrong, I won't have any regrets; this may not be comfortable, but it pales in comparison to the waking nightmare I was living in my 20s. A stressed out, starving and anxious explosion of volatile emotions, ironically both driven and impeded by fear. I forget that at times, but when I remember it's power for the course.

Original Publication Date 07 January 2019, Revised 02 April 2023