The illusion of thin
I still remember what it felt like to like my body because I had sculpted it a certain way. There is a certain high I would get where I felt like I was floating on a cloud. I felt both incredibly powerful and incredibly frail all in one. There was a power to my frailty. It was screaming so incredibly loudly 'I'm not ok' but the screams were somehow silent. And life continued on all around me.
When I think back to that time I can remember the rush of adrenaline through my veins. When I pause though, and pay attention to what else I was feeling fragments come back to me. The lethargy in between the adrenaline. The isolation. Foggy thoughts. Dizziness. The drill sergeant in my brain, always commanding. The immediate terror I would feel on waking - having to plan out my day.
Yes I loved my body in my eating disorder but it wasn't true love. It was a honeymoon period. It was conditional love. I could love my body IF...
The thing about conditions is there is no peace with conditions. There is no freedom. In order to even like my body I had to starve it and be unkind to it. I had to turn down social occasions and ignore both my hunger and my tiredness. The thing I eventually realized was that I could not hate my body into something I could love because that is not how love works.
The most beautiful freedom is when I wake up in the morning. I don't have to do a single thing to like my body. I don't have a single condition for liking it, I just do.
Sometimes I think about body love as love for a child. They don't have to do a single thing to be loved, they just have to be. There are no conditions.
When I let go of conditions for loving my body, I found freedom and I found peace and in finding those, I found me.
I learned that beauty isn't in my size, the shape of my stomach, or arms or thighs.
Beauty was in the world reflected back at me.
When I had light in my soul, people were drawn to me.
When I was hungry, lacking energy, lacking life...there was little beauty reflected in the world that I saw.
In order to live fully, I first had to be full.
If I wanted a bigger life, I needed a bigger body, because my frail body could never hold all the richness that came my way through recovering.
Beauty, I learned, was all around me but it first started within me.
