On Self Love

This isn't something I usually touch on.

Perhaps I felt as though it were already receiving enough media attention, or perhaps I convinced myself my confidence is one hundred percent solid, that yes, I have flaws, but this isn't one of them. Perhaps I viewed myself as higher, as untouchable by the influences and regular abuses of the world against positive body image.

As it is, I am not. I am not above it. I am not above staring myself down in the mirror from time to time, searching out flaws like a bar code scanner that will not rest until it has accumulated a list of shortcomings so long it will take hours to forget. Hours to erase the value placed on my skin and bones due to its beauty or lack thereof.

As a dancer, I was never short of time spent eyeing myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors glued to an entire wall, sometimes multiple. Of course, these mirrors are in place for a reason, they are technical and necessary, and we could not improve without them. But staring at myself in these mirrors, day in and day out, distanced myself from my body in a way. I began to look at myself not as myself, a human being with flaws and inconsistencies, but as an object, as a masterpiece. As a painting, able to be brushed and sponged and washed into perfection. Altered so drastically from its naked shape that it would become unrecognizable, inhuman, machine-like. Legs must be stretched, waists must be tapered, rib cages must be narrowed, thighs must be lengthened. The list was infinitessimal, because once one shortcoming has been corrected, another would always come into view to replace it. And so it goes. There is a vulnerability in staring at your leotard-and-tights clad frame for hours on end, day in and day out.

This is what it was for me. For some people it is television, for some it is magazines. For some it is the opposite sex or even parents and guardians. For most, it is a wonderful conglomeration of all of the above. We internalize every word of every line of every article explaining why we are not enough and how we can fix it.

Except we can't fix it.

Because we are enough.

I will never forget the day I set out to consume a mere five hundred calories. I think I was fourteen. I will never forget the day someone told me to put my feet at hip width, and then together, and asked me if my thighs touched. So directly, as if I was ticking boxes on a medical chart. I will never forget the stomach-twisting anxiety over noticing an inch gained around my waist or my arms or my legs. I will never forget the times, at sixteen, when I placed my fingers in my throat and tried so hard to rid my body of the things it needed to exist.

We are taught to make our existence so tiny, smaller and smaller until the number on the scale reads a resounding and impossible zero, until our jeans are a double zero and until we are nothing more than the sum of our unsatisfactory parts.

But we are so much more than that.

I won't lie, I still stare at my body with disapproving eyes from time to time. I still am not confident enough to go completely bare faced (all though I have cut nearly everything from my usual long-winded routine). I am not above feeling sub-standard.

But that's the thing. It shouldn't be a battle. There shouldn't be a standard.

Today, one of my best friends posted an article on self-love. I encourage you to take some time, every day, to be thankful and appreciate your body and your entire being. I love my body for its ability to dance and to move. I am thankful for my senses and my completeness. I am thankful for my perfect heart and my healthy blood and my strong lungs. I appreciate my creativity and my thirst for knowledge and my open mind. I am thankful for my ability to write and read and create. And I try to remind myself of these things every time my eye catches a flaw in the mirror.

If you haven't heard it today, you are enough. You are loved, and you deserve to love yourself.

Think about what you love most about yourself, and share it in a comment if you feel so inclined. Maybe you'll inspire someone to think in the same way.

Love forever and always,
Coral