Happy Birthday to Me!

All right, fine. If you're keeping track, it's still more than two months until my birthday.

But James already got my present for me, even though I still have to wait a few weeks for it.

Something hit me the other day: I cannot remember the last time I went to bed feeling cruddy and thinking, "Well, I ate like a garbage person today. I'll do better tomorrow."

If you've never done this, then I don't know how to explain the feelings of shame, failure fatigue, and physical illness that accompany that little bit of self-demoralizing.

There have been many times in my life when I've tried, with varying levels of success, to appreciate my body in its natural form (i.e. when not being manipulated by food restriction and exercise for the sole purpose of body-taming), with varying success.

I remember when I was training for the LVMPD entry test, I was able to run 5 miles and felt like a total bad ass. When I was weighed as part of the physical, I was surprised to see 195. That was up significantly from my lowest weight, due to a years-long eating disorder, when I spent some time at about 148 pounds.

Incidentally, the GNC scale still told me I was 7 pounds overweight here, so while I felt pretty okay about how I looked, the numbers taunted me.

However, a few years later, I was nearly 50 pounds heavier and significantly more healthy. And I didn't feel much self-consciousness about how I looked.

Still, what I didn't realize was that Diet Culture was pervasive in my thought processes and self-esteem.

I had so many "rules" about how I ate, even while giving myself permission, kind of, to eat as I pleased. I still saw foods as "naughty" indulgences or "healthy" choices. If I did too much of the former, I felt really bad.

Even after James and I got married and I was looking in the rear-view mirror of those miserable forced workouts (even while loving riding my bike challenging places, walking all over, dancing, etc.), I would still often look back on my day with a sense of backward-facing dread, and feel ill at the thought of the "bad" food I'd put in my body.

Or I'd remember that I'd forgotten I'd had a snack and then still eaten as much as dinner as I would have if I'd not eaten a snack. And I'd be frustrated with myself.

So, that's a long way of saying: I don't do that anymore. At some point in this work I'm doing to listen to my body, to move as I please, and to eat as I will without any of this becoming an energy-draining focus from my very full life, I've managed to throw off the go-to guilt that has gone hand-in-hand with food choices for as long as I can remember.

I no longer linger over glances at myself in mirrors or storefront windows as I walk past. I don't feel self-conscious about what other people looking at me might think. I buy and wear clothes that I enjoy, that allow me to move, and that I don't have to think about, regardless of the "rules" of what might or might not be "flattering."

There is, however, one area in which I still struggle: Pictures.

I LOVE pictures. I often hand my camera to James (and cringe, because, frankly, for as brilliant as that man is, he cannot take a dang photograph... and now that I think about it, it might have to do with how overstimulated he gets in loud/busy situations in that he cannot filter out superfluous information, and that's exactly what his pictures look like) or someone else and ask them to get a picture of me doing whatever we're doing, because I tend to be the recorder of memories.

However, my tendency still is to be hyper-critical of snaps of me, because... I guess I'm seeing myself from someone else's angle, and I'm not used to it, so it reveals things about me I don't see in the mirror, even though my son has fully mirrored closet doors, and we're in his floor about 10 hours a day, so I've likely glanced at myself at almost every possible angle in the past year and a half.

I'll give you an example from a couple of years ago. My friend Jana, of Jana Gross Photography, had brought her girls to our apartment to swim. She snapped this candid shot of Mal and me.

This picture is pure joy. But at first blush, my reaction to it was, "Holy crap, that arm! Those bulges! Ugh!" I had to look away from myself because I couldn't take it (it was a couple of months after this that I did my last-ditch effort to drop a few pounds, and after calorie-restricting for two months, decided I'd rather try to be happy than thinner). In the past, I'd delete pictures of myself that I did not like but knew, absolutely, that some day I would adore this picture and the moment in time that it captures with such buoyant energy.

(Incidentally, this kind of "documentary photography" is Jana's milieu, so if you need pictures that are absolutely YOU and not the same poses that are trending with every other photographer on earth, you should absolutely book her.)

And now we get to James's birthday present for me! He purchased admission to Virgie Tovar's Babecamp, It's a four-week online course to learn how to have a peaceful relationship with your body, first by examining how we got to where we are now, and then by working on tools for self-love.

If this sounds horribly self-indulgent to you, especially given that there is so much real trouble on earth, then let me assure you that dissatisfaction with my body has been an incredibly time-. energy-, money-, and talent-consuming function of my life for as long as I can remember. Ridding myself of its last vestiges frees me up to be fully present for the people and causes that mean most to me.

As an ancient example: When D was smaller, we had an absolute bedtime of 7:00 PM (which is funny; Mal just finally conked out at 11 tonight). D could read or play in bed, but had to stay there. There were countless times D would call down the hall with a random question, clearly just wanting to chat, desiring company. And I'd yell back to "go to sleep!" Because I "needed" to work out. Not because I enjoyed it. Not because the exercise brought me peace and life. Because I did not want to be as fat as I'd been in the past.

Time and time again, I chose attempting to alter the natural size of my body over building a relationship with my older child.

I'm not ever going to do that again.

Babecamp will end about a month before we go on our family vacation. I look forward to taking, and being in, a ton of pictures. Without obsessing over myself in any of them.

And many more.