Hindsight is 20/20 when it comes to loving yourself 100/100
Considering the cruelty of the passage - and waste - of time when it comes to self-criticism
We’re always told to love ourselves. Do not worry about what other people think. Love your curves, your ‘imperfections’. Is it ever that easy?
Recently, Will and I went back through our camera rolls together. Thousands of pictures stretching back from smiling pictures of Polly, established baby bumps, early marriage days, to days on the beach and days hungover in bed. While a lovely exercise in seeing how much we’ve done and how far we’ve come as a couple, I couldn’t help but feel extremely sad at the same time.
Hundreds of photos of myself - selfies, posed with friends, candid pictures taken by Will - all previously discarded and dismissed. I never thought I looked good enough. For who? Certainly not myself.
I’ve been through arguably the biggest change that can ever happen to a body and now, so too has my mind changed. Now I can see how at ease I was - how happy - laughing with my group of friends or tucked under Will’s arm. A serene expression I couldn’t see before because I was focusing on a ‘weird’ bit of armpit ‘fat’, probably.
A strange mix of food aversions, pregnancy anxiety, postpartum stress and of course, breastfeeding has somehow left my body a stone lighter than I’ve ever been. I’m the weight I always wanted to be - the number I strived to get through with countless morsels of dry chicken for lunch and gross vodka sodas when all I really wanted was a pizza and a heavy red. And of course, with a critical eye for any and all photos of myself.
Now, far from looking the way I hoped for in my mind’s eye - the ‘ideal’ me - I simply look tired and a bit too thin. It breaks my heart a bit to think of all the time wasted, worrying about how my stomach looked or thinking ‘I’ll be happy when’.
Since Polly was born, I’ve taken hundreds, if not thousands of pictures of myself with her. Will, family and friends have also taken loads. Me, no makeup and no filters, photos I’d beg to be deleted, back then. Not anymore!
Scarlett Moffatt hit the nail on the head a while back with this post.
It’s time to start looking at myself with a kinder eye.
Here’s one of my favourite photographs of myself. I’ve got no makeup on, I’m covered in sick, my tit is out and my hair is something else but…Polly had slept through for the first time in her little moses basket. It was Christmas. We were with family. I was rested and we were all well. It’s a real, bloody good picture.
I’m trying my hardest to work on loving myself in a different way. Forgetting about how good my body looks, or how it COULD look, but thinking about what it has done. What it’s doing, by feeding Polly. And of course, focusing on the circumstances in which a photograph has been taken.
I may not have seen a swipe of Charlotte Tilbury across my chops very frequently in the last few months…but the joy is written all over my face, is it not?
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