LISTEN UP LADIES - LOVE YOURSELF

I’m hoping that my lesson will help others, especially women out there who don’t have the body of a runway model but think they should. 

I grew up with very low self-esteem for many reasons, however the most prevalent reason why I had low self-esteem was because I was heavy, overweight.  I have been all my life. I was a chubby baby born in the 1950’s when a chubby baby was a healthy baby and was a source of pride for any mother who wanted to be a ‘good mother’. As I grew older I remained ‘chubby’ and by the time I got to school had noticed that I was heavier, bigger, than all my contemporaries. Adding to the issue of my weight was the fact that I was taller than all the girls and all but one of the boys. That glaring fact only added to my knowing I was different than everyone else and therefore ‘unacceptable’ to everyone else.

It was in school that I started to feel ashamed of my own body and began to feel isolated from all the other kids. I grew very, very, even painfully, shy as it felt as if I wasn’t accepted by many of the other kids. They never really teased me much, but it was much more about always being the last one to be chosen for any sports related or even group related activities. In a very small rural school being chosen last every single time when teams of any kind were chosen made a HUGE impression on me, a very negative impression about myself and my worth compared to everyone else. As my school career progressed I grew more and more shy and my self-esteem plummeted lower and lower. I had very few friends and all of those were the other ‘outcasts’ from our contemporaries. The poor kids, the not white kids, the not so slim kids; they were my only friends and even among them I was often not invited to birthday parties, group outings and such.  Thus, I’m afraid I grew up feeling about as important to the world as a lump of shit. 

The odd thing was that my mom was overweight, compared to the other moms, and I felt ashamed of her. I have very few regrets in life (what good do regrets do us anyhow?) but one of them is having felt ashamed of my own mother. I didn’t want her to come to my school for anything and when she did I wanted her to leave quickly before anyone could notice she wasn’t slender.

All my life, up into my fifties, I’ve felt like a big, fat, socially unacceptable slob who would never be accepted by anyone unless I lost a LOT of weight. Oddly enough I never dieted, but simply sat in my despair as a fat person in a slender world. Back then obesity was extremely rare to see, and most people had what would be considered healthy, slender bodies. So, I had no role models and felt surrounded by people who could never accept me until I looked like them and I never fooled myself into thinking I could ever lose weight, so I would look like them and therefore could be accepted by them.  A lot of the issues in my life with relationships with other people, especially men, was based on this one self-defeating belief that I was unacceptable and would never truly be loved by anyone because I was 'fat'. 

In my adult life if a man ever showed any interest in me I chased after him like he was my last chance. In school no males ever showed any interest in me at all. Sure, I had male ‘friends’ and more of them than female friends but none of those guys, that I was ever aware of, was the least bit interested in me as a girlfriend to date and to be seen with. There was one, my best friends’ younger brother, but he was younger than us and it felt like he was my brother too; so, I never took him seriously.  As for my relationships with other women as an adult I really didn’t have many beyond co-workers and casual acquaintances and for most other women I felt they were always judging me for being overweight. I never really felt accepted by them and often spending time with them was more an exercise in how demeaned I could feel than anything else. I understand now that it was what I ‘thought’ they thought of me and not really what they thought of me. I know now that I projected what I think they surely must’ve been thinking about me onto them because that was what I was thinking about myself.  It was a lie and now I know it was.

And FINALLY, I’m getting to the point of this blog today. I was looking through some old photos with my husband recently. They were photos of when we were first together, in my early twenties, when I still believed myself to be totally unattractive (fat), unacceptable, unwanted and therefore unlovable. I was taken aback by just how NOT ‘fat’ I was back then. In fact, I looked pretty damned good. Sure, I was larger than most of my peers back then but damn, I had a great shape and was actually quite attractive; an Amazon in fact.

It was then in that moment, when I saw myself in those old photos, that I realized just how much of my life I had wasted feeling bad about myself. I realized that all the things I was sure everyone around me was thinking about me was only in my own head. I realized that my inability to forge and maintain relationships with other people, men and women alike, wasn’t because of my appearance; it was because of what I thought that they thought about my appearance and my own shame at not being as slender as society dictated I should be. I’m not one for regrets as I stated earlier but I felt such sadness that I had gone so many years, decades, of my life feeling so badly about myself and really had no legitimate reason to.

It’s been a while since I’ve completely accepted myself as who I am in the moment and have stopped assuming that others are thinking demeaning things about me. Today, I don’t plant thoughts about me in other people’s heads but have learned to trust that if a person shows they are against me that it’s not me or my appearance but it’s them and I shouldn’t give it another thought. Not everyone is going to love me, but many will. I know that now.

That is what I wanted to share, that we most often put thoughts into other people’s heads about ourselves that just simply are NOT there and then we base relationships, even our own relationship with ourselves, on that fallacy for sometimes an entire lifetime. If this ‘lesson’ helps even one person begin to understand that we often are our own worst enemy and that what we look like on the outside isn’t who we ‘really’ are I’ll be happy I went through it all.

It took me a long, long, long time to learn to love and accept myself and I just want others understand that any moment of self-doubt, of low self-esteem, of feeling inferior to anyone else for ANY reason, of believing that one is unacceptable is a moment too long to waste being the judge, jury and executioner of our own soul. 

Don't let anyone define you and don't ever define yourself by what you think others think about you. Accept yourself just as you are in any given moment because that IS who you are and you are beautiful.

Love yourself first, so that you can love others.