No Make-Up, No Filter

 

CW: body image, weight, food. 

I had a very strange dream last night. The details of the dream don’t matter, really, it’s the message it sent me that hit hard.

That message: If I’ve ever been accepting of my appearance (and how it’s affected by disabilities, by extension) I can’t remember it.

Not even back when I was in my late teens and looked, arguably, the best I ever did in my life. 

Me, at age seventeen. I thought I was so ugly then...

  

Not in my mid-twenties, when motherhood changed my body entirely.

Not in my late twenties, when I’d changed hair color but not my unhealthy relationship with food.

Not in my early thirties, the first time I gained weight due to medication (steroids), and not in my (now almost past) forties, when I gained more weight than I ever had in my life due to medications used to treat the bipolar and other mental illnesses I grapple with day to day.

I wished, after I woke today, I could feel for a moment the way I felt in the dream: whole, as a person, and accepting at last of how I am in this body I live in.

I’m like a well-loved teddy bear by this point, to be honest. I’ve got scars and defects that can’t be denied. They’re quite apparent when you look at me (though perhaps not all so clearly in the photo I’m about to post today… deep breath…)

Me, three months or so before my 50th birthday. No make-up, no filter.

 

You can’t get past the huge aphakia glasses that allow me some use of my sight (though I’m grateful for them every moment of every day). Muscle weakness from a stroke more than twenty years ago seems more apparent now, as does bone loss in my jaw and face I suffered after an infection that could have killed me a decade ago.

There’s more but I don’t want to make a laundry list of my defects now.

I want to remember that with those huge glasses, I can see well enough to enlarge the font and type this post. I can see the faces of the people I love with decent clarity. The glasses may distort my appearance but without them I’m legally blind and always will be. They are something to be loved, and grateful for.

I want to remember for all illness and disability have taken from me (the ability to drive and to be independent. The ability to make choices in life others simply take for granted, the ability to live without medications that alter not only my mental/physical health but interfere with my creativity…the list goes on…) that I’m still here, and I’m still me.

I want to remember today that the young girl I was (who always thought, to her peril, if she couldn’t be the prettiest girl in a room she could at least be the thinnest) was never happy with her appearance then, so why really is it surprising I should be unhappy with it now? What have I done in the meantime to stop being so hard on myself?

I need to stop being so hard on myself.

Instead of focusing on things I can't change, I’ll try to celebrate the things I’ve learned. A lesson, I like to think, with each strand of gray hair. 

I’ll be grateful for the fifteen surgeries/procedures I had between 2009 and 2011, six of which restored some of my sight and others that saved me, entirely.

I will be kind to my body and feed it as well as I can, as I fight off a host of age and disability related threats like pre-diabetes and high cholesterol. Arthritis and connective tissue disease may make typing impossible some days but today I'm here.

I’m hoping if you’re reading this and you’ve ever felt down about the reflection you see in the mirror, you’ll learn from all the time I’ve wasted worrying about it since my youth and put your own time to much better use. 

Please believe me when I say you’re more attractive than you know, more attractive than you’ll ever probably believe. Try to see yourself through the eyes of someone who is trying to learn the lesson once and for all, finally: our worth is not tied to how much we weigh, or how we smile, or how youthful we look.

It’s tied to who we are beneath, just existing, as we are. Cultivate kindness towards the person within and thoughts of the person without will seem less important over time.

At least, that’s what I’m still telling myself, as I walk away from the mirror, put the camera down, and go on with my day.

Sending love, love, love out into the sky...

~bru