DISCLAIMER: Body image and how we feel about our bodies is unique and mostly not related to our actual weight. So please do NOT use this post to compare my body with yours!!! This is about my experience. My very personal experience with my unique body!
This photo with Brené Brown was taken in 2012, a bit more than a year into my recovery from anorexia.
I still remember that awful feeling in the pit of my stomach when I looked at it for the first time.
My arm is SOOOO BIG.
I thought.
It’s disproportionately FAT.
I thought.
Why does my arm have to be so freaking huge?
I thought.
I don’t think I’ll EVER accept the fat on my arms.
I thought.
People must be laughing at me and my arms.
I thought.
I hate this part of my body.
I thought.
I always will.
I thought.
Can’t show this photo to anyone.
I thought.
What a wasted memory.
I thought.
As it happens, I’ve hardly shown this photo to a single soul
– until today.
Today, when I looked at the photo, all I could think about was:
WTF is/was the big deal?
It’s an arm. A living, human arm.
Attached to a woman who is meeting a hero of hers.
Human being. Meeting another human being.
Both have arms.
One arm is covered. The other is not.
That’s it.
That’s ALL it is.
I’ve had similar “arm things” in the years after this photo was taken.
My arms were almost my issue. They’re too visible. They’re too out there. They’re toooooo much.
I tried to avoid being photographed at a certain angle, I tried to hide my arms, I covered them up.
All because I thought that not having the suuuuuper looooooong and leeeeeaaaaan arms of my dreams made me unworthy, not able to be loved.
And of course that’s bullshit.
Of course it’s insane.
But, as we know, a fear is a fear is a fear – whether the threat is real or imagined.
Today, my “arm thing” is mostly healed (though still not 100%!).
My eyes still go to my arms when I look at photos of myself and my instinct is still not to expose my arms when it’s not totally necessary.
And yet, I respond to my instinct with love and expose my arms anyway.
I respond to my fear with respect and guide myself out of it.
Not by ridiculing myself (although, sometimes you just HAVE to laugh at the craziness of it), but by acknowledging that deep down, I still believe that I’ll be a better human being if my arms were ultra thin –
knowing that they’ll never ever be thin enough.
It’s not about the arm. It really isn’t.
It’s about self-worth, self-respect and the inner knowing that I am whole in who I am, the way I am.
My arms don’t look the way I once decided they needed to look.
I think.
They’re not what my scared mind want them to be.
I think.
No matter what I do, they’ll never be the way my fears want them to be.
I think.
Why don’t I just leave them alone?
I ask.
Why don’t I just send love to them?
I wonder.
Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.
I say.
Every day.
I think.
Indeed.
I do.
And most of the time, I forgot about them, feeling neutral about them.
As I am busy living my life.
Creating memories that are about anything but getting upset over an imagined disproportionate arm in a photo that is never a reflection of real life.
If you have an “arm thing” or a “belly thing” or a “thigh thing” or whatever it may be, take a deep breath and instead of trying to lose that part of you, start loving on it, knowing that if you do, you’ll soon create the neutrality that spreads like wildfire through the neurology of your life.
Giving you the freedom you crave to capture memories without worrying about the way you may look.
So, do you have an “arm thing”? What are you doing to heal the way you look at it?
Want support on your way out of your “whatever thing”? Book your 30-minute Breakthrough Session and begin choosing yourself over and over and over again. No more body hatred. No more obsession with being thin. No more pain. You can turn it around. Starting now.
