Day 4 - I feel pretty

The alternate title to this blog was going to be something like "how did I get so brainwashed?"

My husband thinks I'm beautiful. I think he's insane. My husband was never brainwashed (as I was as a child and young woman) to believe that overweight people are unattractive. No one ever told him this - he never watched tv growing up, and his parents never instilled this belief in him. Whereas, I was told everyday in lots of subtle and not so subtle ways that I was inferior and broken and lacking because I was fat.

So it has taken me years to trust that he's not lying to me when he says that I am beautiful. He has taught me how to love myself. I learned how to treat myself with respect by watching him do it. It's been a transformative relationship to say the least.

So this morning, when I looked in the mirror, I thought "huh, I look pretty", I was proud of myself. Sure there are some lumps and rolls and my hips are wide, but that's not inherently ugly. Despite what I've been told all of my life.

I feel like I am part of the problem - a woman willingly hating herself because I'm overweight. I think if we all just stood up and said "we're not going to feel bad about ourselves anymore" we could free ourselves from so many feelings and find our worth in some other way. Think if we all took the time and energy we spend on hating ourselves or trying to change ourselves and redirected it to something positive - we could literally change the world. Women are such powerful and compassionate creatures, but we stifle our own potential by believing the messages we're told that we're not good enough, skinny enough, pretty enough. What if we just ignored them and made our own messages and surrounded our young women with love and acceptance. I think it would be a wondrous thing.

So I'm starting with myself. I'm not listening any more to the messages that I'm not ok how I am.