sometimes God will place things in your life exactly when you need them.
so after you read that, here's my "perfection" confession:
everyday i have negative thoughts about myself. EVERY DAY. sometimes i am able to overcome them and talk myself out of it. and sometimes i can't and they are just too overpowering and i can't not be disgusted at the thought of myself. and when i say "myself" i mean my physical image. no matter who tells me or how many times they tell me i'm attractive or beautiful i just can't believe it. it's not that i think they're lying--i just don't see how they see it. because when i look at myself, i see pale, fat, saggy, uneven, and disproportional.
i go to the gym and i sweat and i watch myself in the mirror and i think "none of this will ever pay off. you will never look like those girls" as i scan the room and watch the 105lb girls "exercise," knowing they probably had better bodies than me to begin with. i feel like i'm reaching towards an unattainable goal.
and photographs. let's not even talk about photographs. i cannot stand the way i look in most photos. i once logged on to facebook and untagged every picture of me that i thought i looked fat in. it was almost half of my pictures. and now that a wedding is upon me i cannot overcome the immense fear that i will hate my own wedding pictures--that my arms will look to fat or i'll have a double chin, or i'll be too pale, or my "backne" will be showing.
i secretly want to stab tall skinny girls. especially the ones that drink coke for breakfast or seem to always walk in with a mcdonalds bag. i tell myself "they will never know how lucky they are." once i was at a table full of "perfect" women talking about how much they work out and how "skinny" they used to be in college and how they were devastated at how much weight they gained when they were pregnant, or when they got their first cellulite dimple (cellulite and i go way back, i don't remember not having it). one of the women looked at me and said "i think you're a the perfect size." i was somewhat flattered and puzzled at the sametime considering she was smaller than me, but i said "thank you, i work hard for it." and she looked at me in disbelief and said "do you?" and in an instant i knew what she really meant. she really meant that i was an "average size" and that she thought average people that aren't skinny people can't possibly work out, or they'd be skinny like her, because she runs 4 miles every day to maintain her 24" waist.
another time a friend of mine from college invited me to a beach house for a weekend with her friends, few of whom i'd ever met. i had recently enrolled in kung fu and lost 15lbs and i was really proud of how i looked and was excited to show off my new beach body. i got to the beach and all of those girls were skinnier than me and i could tell they knew it. and because it was a beach weekend i brought oreo balls and pigs in a blanket for us to munch on. apparently i didn't get the memo that vacations weren't for giving up diets anymore. let me state for the record that until then i had never left ANY function with leftover oreo balls or pigs in a blanket. i left with more than half. they brought salad and chicken kabobs. and when i told the pilates instructor that i did kung fu while we were talking about fitness (let me also state here that kung fu is intense and i'd challenge a pilates pro to survive one kung fu class any day) they pretended like they didn't hear me. since i didn't look like them i guess that indicated my work-out program was less intense and effective.
you may be thinking "how can you possibly know what those girls were thinking? isn't that a little presumptious?" well no. its not. because i'm a girl and i know what girls think. we were raised to be critics. critics of each other and critics of ourselves.
to all those girls--i feel sorry for you. because i know deep down you feel just like me. or else you wouldn't be a pilates instructor or try and sneakily mention your workout routine in some random story you told so that everyone knows that you're "fit" and "into healthy stuff." and you wouldn't spend hours in a tanning bed, or hundreds of dollars on make up and hair dye, or wear make up and jewelry to the gym (because everone knows rhinestones go with spandex and sweat). not only do i feel sorry for you, but i can relate. no matter where it started or how, we all are dissatisfied with what we look like at some point in time. some of us are just better at hiding it than others.
and other times, i know one thing. if no one else--not even me--finds me beautiful, God does, because he created me and I am HIS. when i know this, it is much easier to see that other people think i'm beautiful, too. then i can remember the good things people have said about me. like how my fiance picked me to marry out of all the other supermodel looking women out there. or easter sundays when my dad used to say he had the most beautiful daughters in the world. or when you accidentally hear someone talking about how good you look, or when someone insists that you've lost weight. or when someone says they wish they had your pretty hair, long eyelashes, or hourglass figure.
if i can look at a woman who i know feels bad about herself and say "i don't know why she's so down on herself--i think she's gorgeous", then why can't we believe that about our own self? it's time to turn that around.
the time i spend in tears, hating my body, and believing the lies i've been fed are just wasted hours. because in the end it doesn't matter--if in the end of your life the only thing you've accomplished is keeping your body fat to under 15%, then you've probably missed out on a lot. including oreo balls and pigs in a blanket.
live a little and love a little. including yourself.
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