Post provided by Rebekah Westrup at http://kyliesmiles.blogspot.com
I don’t know when I started hating my body. But it was sometime this summer when I spoke the words out loud to my roommate.
“I hate my body right now,” I said to her as we drove home from the gym. I couched it in terms of the present, but the reality is that negative body image is something I’ve fought hard against for a long time.
Since I started college in 2007, I’ve gone from a size 18 to an 8. Today’s waist size measures in at a 12. The ironic thing is that the initial weight loss my freshman and sophomore years wasn’t even conscious, it was just the lifestyle change that came with college.
This new round of body hatred has sprung, in part, from my health problems on my mission. One hip surgery I had on my mission and one shortly after I came home, combined with steroids and other medications resulted in my old sedentary lifestyle coming back to haunt my present. I have hated the inactivity, but more than that, I’ve hated how my clothes fit, and the way I look in pictures. We hear all these stories about Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate sex symbol, being a size 12 at the height of her fame. But those stories don’t seem to help much when I’m buying my pants in the plus size section at Forever 21.
Before you can tell me about how unhealthy this attitude is, don’t worry. I already know. And I’ve tried painstaking ways to fix it long before this challenge started. How does one make peace with one’s body?
A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a poem for class, and two lines blinked out from the page at me like distant stars winking to get your attention in the night sky: “Body serenely built, for a life that afterwards wrecks itself.” And later in the poem: “If only I could hold you in the mirror, absent and mute to all other companions.” I was absolutely struck in that moment with a lightning bolt of knowledge. October was domestic violence awareness month, and I’d been caught up in volunteering for BYU’s WSR’s domestic violence awareness campaign; which was all very well and good. But how could I fight for other women’s bodies, when I was fighting so hard against my own? Like the poem and our doctrine preaches, my body is a sacred thing. But I’ve let it wreck itself as I've forgotten the miracle of it's movement and development. I’ve let companions of self-doubt and loathing join me in the mirror. Making peace with our bodies means letting these things go.
It means forgetting how big my hips are and remembering that they are a miracle instead. It means remembering I almost lost the right one after my first surgery. It means that I need to remember that every painful step I take this week is much less painful than the steps I took last week, or the week before. Slowly but surely, my body is healing itself after painful surgeries. And for that reason, I can't let this miraculous body of mine go to waste. I have to use it.
Instead of hating my hips and the fact that they’re not the androgynous size I would like them to be, I’ve tried to love them, accentuate them, remember where they came from. These hips are my grandmother’s hips. Her hips were strong hips, hips that survived WWII, four children, and a career as a nurse. They did so many things. And my hands, they are not ugly and skeletal as my own judgment likes to suggest sometimes. They are my great-grandmother’s hands, as my own relatives have said countless times. "You have Granny's hands," they've told me. And they are the hands of a woman who rose from the hopeless life of the depressed dust-bowl in Texas. She had hands that led the blind, cooked food for her family, and always did what was right. Her hands DID things, proving that my hands have the power to do things as well. And my nose! I don’t know where my nose comes from. But it’s not a skinny Halloween-ish witch’s nose. It’s my nose. It’s the nose of a woman who follows her passions, even if it gets her into trouble. It's a nose that works; that gets to smell cookies, and fall, and cement after it rains.
To make peace with our bodies, we must look in the mirror, and forget what we don’t have and instead remember that what we see came at great sacrifice and with a heritage more divine than we can comprehend. That the movements and shapes it takes are an astoundingly beautiful creation. To make peace with our bodies, I think we have to learn the stories of the women that came before us, the things that they did, the way their bodies moved. Because when we see the miraculous in them, we'll see the miraculous in ourselves in the mirror; and we will be at peace.
Tomorrow's Challenge: Making Peace with God
TOMORROW is also our closing celebration!!!! We're doing Bollywood at 6:00pm in the garden court in the WILK. Come pick up your shirt and celebrate "making peace . . ." with us!!!
We want to hear about your experiences as well! Tweet or Instagram with the hashtag #RecapturingBeauty about your journey over the next 10 days! You can follow @wsrbyu on Instagram and @byuwsr on Twitter.
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