Acceptance

There’s this thing I do when I see a picture of myself. A sort of assessment or critique. It usually starts with the wrinkles around my eyes, or the place in my neck where a double chin appears if I turn my head just so. But it quickly expands to my body. To how big my arms and thighs look, how wide my butt appears, how overly muscular my legs seem. I analyze the way my pants fit, and mentally compare the shape of my body in this photo to the shape of my body in previous, older, better, more flattering photos. 

I wasted a solid 20-30 minutes on this analysis over the last two days after a friend sent me a photo from a hike we took. Over the past month, I’ve wasted several hours on it. Over the past year, well, I’d hate to know how much cumulative thought time I have dedicated to self-shaming my body. I hate to even admit I do this, except I have a feeling I’m not alone. 

I want to tell you that I’m almost seven months postpartum from a birth that destroyed my body. I want to tell you how much progress I’ve made, how much better my body looks than it did two months ago, or four months ago. I want to tell you that I’m in my mid-thirties now, and that the time I once dedicated to roasting vegetables and prepping mason jar salads and overnight oats for the week now goes to shuttling kids to and from school and nursing a baby. I want to tell you how I plan to start running again once Reid starts sleeping through the night. I want to excuse the shape my body has taken. Explain it. Deem it unsatisfactory, but temporary. 

Except. What if it isn’t temporary? 

Am I worth less if it isn’t? 

About a year ago, I was given an incredible writing opportunity. The opportunity, really. One I had been dreaming about and fantasizing about for, well, years. One I had written off (har har), shoved aside, and put into that special place in my brain I reserve for the dreams I’m too afraid to say. And then, one day, it just … happened. 

Except. The way it came about wasn’t really the way I’d envisioned. And instead of feeling affirmed by this opportunity, I’ve wasted many, many hours analyzing the invitation. Second-guessing my qualifications. My worth. Instead of accepting and celebrating this opportunity, using it to grow and challenge myself, I have turned it–and writing, really–into another area of my life where outward appearance somehow determines my worth. 

It’s not that I want to dislike myself. It’s not that I want to waste hours and hours of this one precious life thinking about the ways in which my body, my mind, my very being are somehow less. In fact, I actively want the opposite of those things. 

I just don’t know how to stop. I don’t know how to accept what is. 

Last weekend, I got the chance to spend two uninterrupted (unless you count Reid’s near-constant presence) days in the company of fellow writers. Writers who are also mothers. In our time together we had a sort of collective epiphany about the relationship between forgiveness and control, and how the two cannot exist simultaneously. And as I sit here, pondering the way I feel about myself as a mother and a writer, I wonder if there is a similar, antithetical relationship between acceptance and control. Because really, aren’t acceptance and forgiveness two sides of the same coin?

The pants I’ve been squeezing myself into for the past 4-5 months may never fit again. I wonder what would happen if I just … ordered myself some new ones?