My relationship with my body has not always been beautiful.
All my life I knew myself as a chubby girl, I became a chubby teenager and then it stopped. It didn't stop because my body wanted it to. It stopped because my head betrayed me and I ended up letting myself be carried away by endless insecurities and prejudices that led me into a spiral of diets, medications and miracle solutions that never worked.
I ended up taking what was the easiest path for me, to stop eating. The end of my adolescence and the beginning of my adult life began with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa . It was years of struggle, years of suffering, years of wanting to quit but my head wouldn't let me, years of therapy and a hospitalization in between.
In 2006, my life changed. I met someone who valued me and showed me how much more I was than just a body. Someone who did for me what I couldn't do for myself. I needed that push to realize that my life was worth much more than any external opinion. I realized that I needed to like myself before I could like someone else.
The road was long, but it was done.
As the years went by, I started to not care about anyone else's opinion and to give them the value they really had. None. I realized that my confidence grew as I accepted myself. Over time, I learned to like myself and today, at 37, I like myself much more than I did when I was 20. Today, I realize all the weaknesses I had, I understand why I had to go through them, but above all, I know that I had to go through this process to become the person I am today. Could it be easier? Of course it could. Would it have the same effect? Possibly not.
Just as there are beautiful days, there are also sad days. This “mood” passes through us and that’s okay. Some days we feel more beautiful…others less so. Some days we are confident…others less so. But realizing that at the end of the day, what matters is being happy with ourselves, accepting that we are not perfect . If I think I should do something for myself aesthetically, “let’s do it”. But always remember that we are doing it for ourselves. That we are doing it to somehow feel better and cultivate our self-love. Nothing else matters.
The subject here is us. Always us!
Condensed milk dessert with coconut,
Joana
