I wanted to continue on part of this discussion about loving the season we are in.  We are where we are and we have to be ok with it because we can’t change what happened to bring us here.  We have to be comfortable with who we are in order to love where we are.  This is about more than self-acceptance, this is about enjoying who we are and what we do.  We are in a time where we think acceptance is about being brash and in each other’s faces and making other people deal with it.  That’s not acceptance, that’s pushing the limit to see what we can get away with.  We aren’t children and that game needs to end.  Real acceptance is openness and kindness and welcoming others as they are, where they are.  But we can only do that if we give ourselves the same grace and learn to stand firm without animosity, just a willingness to let the other crap flow around us while we stay where we are.  Or we allow ourselves to flow and move on.  We stop fighting to make things how we think they should be and we embrace the entirety of who we are and we see the fun in it.  I spent a lot of years hating myself for things I knew I could never change and that resulted in crappy self-image, crappy habits/self-care, and a lot of control issues related to other people.  It led to a lot of physical and mental issues related to anxiety, and in the healing process and learning to accept where I’m at, I started to look at where it all really came from—and how it impacted all those in my family. 

Through no fault of their own, my grandmother and mother raised their girls to feel shame and guilt about their bodies.  They didn’t know any different because that’s how they were raised.  Since we couldn’t control what we were naturally given, we were supposed to cover it up, to hide it like it didn’t exist.  That naturally led to anxiety about who we were, denying who we were, and trying to fit in and be someone we thought we were supposed to be.  It led to a lot of confusion because I had no clue how to manage myself—I didn’t know how to follow my instincts, what I really liked—what was really me.  I was told for so long how NOT to be that I never focused on how I wanted to be.  I didn’t know I could.  I didn’t know how it separated me from myself and from other people and my joy, my true nature. And there were physical issues too– My entire family has gut issues ranging from IBS to Crohn’s to food intake issues.  We also got a healthy dose of mental health issues including fear, anxiety, unexpressed emotions, issues with trusting our intuition and trusting others and good old fashioned depression, lacking self-confidence, and self- rejection.  These things were not a recipe for finding pride in ourselves, in how we looked or in what we wanted to do in life (what we believed we could do).  We were meant to be quiet and out of the way, and if we needed to be seen, we needed to be totally modest.

I decided that addressing the shame and guilt in how I looked and for my body needed to be addressed because this was clearly a generational trauma type thing.  How could I love and accept where I’m at if I hated where I came from and who I was every step of the way?  How could I heal my body from the emotional and physical crap I’d considered normal if I wasn’t looking at how they correlated and where it came from?  I knew these things were impacting my mind, body, and soul and I had been too afraid to look at them and I felt guilty “blaming” my mom and grandma because I know they did their best with what they knew.  But my need to heal, especially as I’m aware of my own biological clock, outweighed the need to protect what can’t be undone or hidden.  So I did a bit of a deeper dive into some of the spiritual meanings behind stomach issues because that called out to me first and it was something my entire family deals with.  A general Google search returned that stomach issues often related to fear, anxiety, unexpressed emotions, trust issues, and not trusting intuition.  So perhaps healing the physical problems means healing those emotional wounds from denying who we were this whole time.  We can’t accept ourselves if we deny ourselves, and I have an entire family case history to prove what emotional issues does to the body and a lifetime of experience of my own.  I don’t pretend that I can look at myself in the mirror and magically love what I see now, but I can figure out what is really there instead of what I was told to see—and there is nothing to be ashamed of.  It’s ok to be proud of how I look and not hide from it.  There is nothing to hide—this is my life, this is who I am, this is what I’ve been through.  It’s only out of that shadow and loving/accepting the place I’m in that  I can see where I’m going.