You Can’t Love Yourself Until You Like Yourself

Over the past four months, I have been on a journey to self love. I am sort of considering this to be an extension/the next chapter of my eating disorder recovery, and let me tell you it has been anything but easy. I’ve engaged in some wonderful communities through social media and I have found such positivity, I have challenged myself to look at my body in ways I hadn’t previously, I have examined the thought processes I engage in and challenged them, and I have been working to see positivity in all things about me.

But recently I have had a thought. When you’re starting to date someone, you almost never truly love them right away, you like them first. Perhaps a journey to self love is not so different from the journey of engaging in a romantic relationship. I can pinpoint a few specific parts of myself that I love: I love my legs, my sense of humour, my ability to empathize with people, and my smile. But when I look back on my life, I didn’t wake up one day and immediately love these things. I remember when I discovered that I was funny. I had always like to joke around in school, I enjoyed it and I liked it. I was never the smartest kid in the class, but I knew I could tell jokes and be funny. I liked this about myself. I was in the second grade and there was a girl in my class named Gabrielle. We weren’t great friends by any means, but we did happen to be the two tallest people in our class. It was our school picture day and our class was being organized by height to take a class picture. We were waiting for our class’s turn to go up for the picture and Gabrielle and I were joking around, something I did regularly, and she told me she thought I was funny. She said this while laughing and with a smile on her face. I realized that my humour had the ability to make people happy, and I liked that. I realized that this was something positive about myself. I may not have been very smart, but this was something I was good at, and I realized then that I loved that. This whole scenario led to me loving my sense of humour.

When I look back on my life with regards to the things I love about myself, each of these loves has their own origin story. My legs, smile and ability to empathize with people each started out as something about myself that I liked, and then they each had their own defining moment and grew into something I loved about myself.

So I’ve been thinking about all of this lately. There is a lot of talk on social media these days about self love. There are amazing social media campaigns encouraging people to embrace the parts of their minds and bodies that have been deemed by society to be unworthy; and I think that’s great. But the thing that people don’t seem to talk about as much, is the fact achieving self love is not something easy.

We live in a world that is constantly telling us that so many parts of us aren’t worthy of love, and that is harmful and it is detrimental to our mental and physical health. But what if we looked at self love from a simpler lens, what if we changes the way we looked at it? What if we started out with liking things about ourselves? If you go out on a first date, and you like the person by the end of it then there is much more of a chance that you could one day grow to love this person. In my opinion, the relationship we have with ourselves is the exact same.

Let me give you an example. Throughout my life (this was heightened during and after my eating disorder), I have really hated my stomach. I remember being maybe 10 years old and thinking to myself that if my t-shirts were tight that I had to suck my stomach in all day because it was too big. This has followed me throughout my life and when I developed my eating disorder my stomach was the part of me I hated the most. I would search Youtube endlessly for videos of ab workouts and I would work out until I could not stand. Now that I am in recovery I have gained a fair bit of weight, and (lucky for me) most of it went to my stomach. Despite this new weight being a symbol of my recovery and a symbol of being healthier, I still could not embrace it. I couldn’t even fathom loving this part of myself that I viewed as disgusting. I decided recently that I did not want to live a life where I am constantly hating myself and constantly putting myself down. I thought that self love was something I could just jump head first into. I saw all of these beautiful women on social media of all different body types and they were embracing every part of their bodies- even their stomachs. I thought that I could be like that too. So I sat in the bath tub and I just stared at my stomach, waiting for that light to go off that would make me love this part of me. Spoiler alert: The light never went off. I felt so discouraged, I just didn’t understand why I couldn’t love myself. Then a little over a month ago, I was shopping and as is normal when clothes shopping, some items I tried on didn’t fit right or didn’t fit at all. The thing that surprised me, was that I was okay with this. If this had been even a couple months earlier, I would have immediately engaged in extremely negative thoughts about myself, but I just shrugged it off. It was that moment when I started to like my stomach.

I don’t love my stomach yet, but we’re still in the dating phase. We’re getting to know each other, and we like each other right now. Things are going well, and I think one day we’ll fall in love. I know that that day won’t happen right away, we’ll have to court each other for a while, wine and dine each other. But one day in the future, I will fall madly in love with my stomach, and I can’t wait for that day.

When Did “Fat” Become the Real F Word?

Why do we force words to live exclusively from one another?
Why can fat not mean beautiful?

I recently remembered something from when I was in the sixth grade. There was a girl in my class who was a bit bigger than most of the other students in our class. I remember hearing the way that the other students spoke about her, the mean jokes they would make behind her back, and the almost as cruel things they would say to her face. I remember noticing that she was being treated differently and in a negative way because of her size.

I decided then that I would never let myself look a way that would give other people an opportunity to treat me poorly. I wish I had taken this experience in a different way, as an example of people I never wanted to be like. I never would want to be treated like this classmate, but the lesson I learned was not to be kind to people, it was to never become fat enough to allow people be cruel to me.

I used to be so scared of the word fat because we live in a society that equates fat to ugly, or less than. I was scared of the idea of gaining weight because I thought that if I did then I would also become ugly or less than. We live in a society that puts limits on what words can be. I was more scared of being fat than I was of being a bad person, of being considered rude or mean, and I was scared of being fat more than I was worried about getting bad grades.

I was eleven when I learned that our world says that being fat is bad. I was eleven when I became afraid of gaining weight. I remember it like it was yesterday, and one day I hope to not be afraid. But for now, I will remember to be kind, and to stand up for those who are mistreated. I do not view gaining weight as the end all and be all of my life, and there are now many things I consider to worse things than ganging weight, but I am still somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of it. So until the day I am not afraid, I will choose to be kind and to reject cruelness.

If You’ve Never Tasted Peanut Butter

I really hate questions about “what I did today.” I understand that questions like this are a pretty standard part of life, but they make me uncomfortable.

Why, you ask? Well, because some days, I really do not do that much, and that can make people look at me differently. There are days when either my depression, anxiety, or body image (or any combination of the three) make it extremely difficult to do things. There are days where leaving the house is too much for me, and migrating from my bed to the couch is my greatest accomplishment. There are days when every sight of my body brings me to tears, so the thought of being naked even for the purpose of bathing is paralyzing. There are nights when I’ve slept for two hours because the thought just wouldn’t stop, so I spend the day following binge watching Netflix to keep my mind from wandering.

But I can’t just tell people these things. When they ask me “What did you do today?” it’s easier sometimes to come up with a lie than to deal with the looks of pity, confusion or disgust. I know they don’t mean any harm, but they just do not understand. If I were to be honest on those days and respond with something like “Well today my biggest accomplishment was moving to the couch from my bed,” I know that some people would look at me differently. That is the problem with stigma. People do not understand that things that may seem like “simple, everyday tasks” are quite the contrary.

I live with multiple chronic mental illnesses. I am still learning how to cope and how to deal with them in my day to day life. People try to do their best to understand, but it’s hard to understand something they haven’t experienced. If you’ve never tasted peanut butter, you can’t really imagine the taste. Sometimes the thought of explaining the taste of my mental illness is just too hard. So if I seem hesitant to tell you how I spent my day, take a beat, and ask yourself if you’re ready for any possible answer. Remember that my life taste different than your’s and unless you’ve tasted my problems, you may not ever fully understand them.

Surface Wounds

I sat in waiting
rooms full of
girls who looked
nothing like me. We
had the same problems,
but I did not look
sick like they did.
They saw it too,
the shrinks and the
doctors. They saw
me and could not
see why I was
there.

They did not put
the other girls
on the scales right
away, they were
too fragile. The
numbers made
me cry and they
broke my soul
but they made me
see it every week. I
could tell by the looks
they gave and by
the questions they
asked. They could not
see bones protruding
from my skin, or
hear me gasping for
breath like the other
girls. They did not
see the tears I shed
every morning when I
got dressed, or hear
the cruel words I spoke
to my body, and so they
did not believe I
was sick.

Until I met Anita. She
could see and understand
that shallow breaths
and protruding bones
did not an illness
make. She understood
that my wounds were not
as visible as the other
girls, but that my sickness
was just as real and
that understanding
saved my life.

A Termination Letter to my Eating Disorder

Dear ED,

It’s been a long run, but fortunately, I have decided that it is time we part ways. Certain events have led me to decide that you are no longer an asset to the organization that is my life. You have been with me for much longer than I initially realized; we first met when I was a young girl. But despite the length of our relationship – dysfunctional as it is – I stand firm in my decision to let you go. I am going to explain this in detail to you, in hopes that these specifics will avoid me letting someone else like you into my life.

An eight year old girl should not live her life sucking in her stomach. A ten year old girl should not think that the amount of love she receives is correlated to her size. A twelve year old girl who grew very tall very fast should not have learned to fear stretch marks the same way people fear violence. A thirteen year old girl in Florida should not go to the beach in shorts and a tank top because she was scared to show her skin. A nineteen year old girl should not be throwing up her meals. A nineteen year old girl should not be on the verge of passing out in her office because of how hungry she was. A girl on the eve of her twentieth birthday should not have been looking up the calories in food at the restaurant she was going to tomorrow. A twenty year old girl should not have an Internet history full of diets, workout plans and eating disorder communities. A twenty year old girl should not cry at the thought of trying on clothes in a fitting room at the mall. A twenty year old girl should not become paralyzed with fear at the idea of going swimming. A twenty one year old girl should not avoid seeing her friends and hide in her apartment because she thinks she is too fat to be seen in public. Yet these are all things that I was. These are all things that I did because of you.

I made a realization recently, and it was one that brought to light just how long you have been a part of me. I realized that I do not remember a time where I have not felt as big as I am now. The weight I have gained since we began drifting apart may be visibly new, but I have long felt that it was a part of me. Why? Well ED, this is where you come in. You brainwashed me into thinking seeing a false reflection when I looked in the mirror. You told me that losing weight that wasn’t there would make me happier, more liked, more deserving of love. But no matter how much weight I lost you always told me to lose more, or that it wasn’t;t enough. I realize now that the happiness, popularity and love that you promised me were nothing but false promises.

You stole something from me. You stole confidence that I never had the chance to develop. Before I ever had a chance to feel good about myself you were there telling me I had never been good enough and would never be good enough. You were there telling me that everyone around me was judging me, staring at the fat I did not have but you made me believe was there. You were there for birthdays, graduations, prom, school, happy moments, sad moments, embarrassing moments and moments I should have felt proud. You stole memories from me.

I never realized these things at the times they occurred because you made me think that I needed you. You were constantly reinforcing the notion that one day I would be worthy of thinness and all the joys that came with it. But what you did not tell me was that one day would never come. You never told me that you were the most abusive relationship I had ever been in. You never told me that you were a master manipulator. You never told me that you could tell a lie with the ease of an Academy Award winning actress. You never told me that I could have a life without you and now I finally see that I can.

I never thought I would see the day that I would be able to leave you behind. I never thought I would be able to tell you these things. I never thought that I would be able to walk away from you. I never thought that I would love myself enough to say, you’re fired.

I renounce you of any power you held over me. I free myself of any holds you had on my mind, body, and spirit. I am in control now, the way it should have been all along.

Goodbye, and good riddance,
Emma