May: The Permission to be Imperfect

When we withhold love from ourselves, what else do we withhold?

I’m on my way to Florence, Italy and at the moment the skies are dreary with grey clouds. Last week I arrived in Rome to pursue 5 weeks of being a live-in nanny and English tutor. I’ve been super fortunate that the family I’m working for is extremely generous, kind, and an awesome fit. On weekends, I have free time so I decided to explore the surrounding cities nearest Rome. Learning to navigate public transportation has been a challenge, especially when all the directions are in Italian and I can’t understand anything. It’s been a humbling learning experience and I’ve actually met some really nice people amidst my confusion.

Yesterday I met a fellow solo traveler from an app called Nomad Her, (I’d highly recommend this platform for any wanderers looking to make friends!) Yesterday in a matter of 3 hours, 2 different guys asked me for my number. I was sincerely perplexed, you see because I felt anything but beautiful at the time. Naturally, I’m a very affectionate, playful, and friendly person. I think because of my warm, welcoming nature, I can come off as flirty with the opposite sex. Needless to say, I felt so insecure when I left the house because like tears effortlessly rolling down your face, my stomach fat spilled over my jeans (to give you a nice visual). I’ve always been super self-conscious of my body, particularly my waist. I don’t have a petite, hourglass figure, big boobs, or voluptuous hips. Even when I’ve lost 20 or so pounds, my waist fails to exist (as do my breasts). I’ve recognized this is because of the way my body is built and without plastic surgery, there’s very little I can do to change. It wasn’t until very recently I had the thought that maybe, just maybe, this isn’t something that “needs” to be fixed in the first place.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve HATED my body. I’ve never felt comfortable with who I was, mostly because of what I looked like. I can’t recall a time when I felt my insides matched my outsides. When I was younger, my belly pooched out and I would poke, squeeze, pull, and tug at it, trying to picture what I would look like if it weren’t there. I dreamt of cutting off my flesh and shrinking. When I took up more space than my peers, I imagined what it would be like if only I could disappear. I was bullied and my peers commented on what I looked like, never with anything nice to say. Before I even entered middle school, the war against myself began.

In the 7th grade, we had health class and that’s where I was introduced to eating disorders. I learned about anorexia and bulimia but instead of being scared which I’m sure the teacher intended, I became intrigued. Do you mean to tell me there are ways I can lose weight and become beautiful? I always thought the key to happiness was appearing seemingly perfect. So I began to experiment with self-induced vomiting at 13 years old. When my parents would give me 20$ to go out with friends to Applebees on a Friday night, I’d save up the remainder of my money to purchase weight loss pills. I’d buy exercise DVDs and dream of looking like the slim, fit women in the videos. “When I am thin like them, I will have friends,” I told myself

The popular girls would make fun of me and the only logical explanation I could think of was that I must be ugly. And fat. The cool girls were small. People thought they were pretty. So I must not be either, I must be a total loser. The way to fix that is to change myself from the depths of my soul. The boys I liked never noticed me, and if they did it was because their friends were making fun of me. My first boyfriend in the 9th grade told me I was too hideous to be seen with and he would only hang out with me in private since I was too embarrassing to be around.

I could tell you countless stories of people who didn’t accept me. The ways I was shamed, ostracized, and humiliated, blaming it on my face or my tree trunk legs. I was told my forehead was shiny, that if I got a nose job I’d look like a Kardashian, cans were thrown at me in the lunch room and I was “moo-ed” at when I walked down the hall. A boy I liked at 15 remarked how I wasn’t beautiful like my sister so I should just kill myself, at 18 one said I was so repulsive I should dig a hole and die in it. Naturally, I quickly learned to not accept myself either. I entered an eating disorder rehab at 17, trying to stop my “problem with food” as I called it. I was binging and purging almost every day, calling out of work to exercise, and running on the treadmill for hours daily until eventually, it broke. The guys I dated weren’t any better, making comments about how they couldn’t be nice to me because of my “deformed” face or “disgusting” body. I’d see all these couples, short, tall, overweight, underweight, attractive, unattractive (subjectively) and I’d ask myself what made them so special. Why were these girls chosen to be loved but I wasn’t?

If I could list all of the procedures, pills, and methods I’ve tried in attempts to achieve the “ideal” standard, I could receive an award. Looking back, if I could have all the money I’ve spent, (wasted, actually), on laser lipo, fat freezing, stretch mark correction, hip filler, and Ozempic (to name a few) I’d have more than enough for a down payment on a house. But, no matter how much weight I’d lose, how tan I got, the Botox, the long, expensive hair; no matter how much I’d starve myself or how pretty my annoying eyelash extensions were, I’d continually find people to endlessly reject me. At one point, I couldn’t make sense of it anymore. OK, here I am, 26 years old, blonde, the hottest I’ll ever be, and still, the man I’m chasing after is in love with someone else. I was ghosted, I was abandoned, I was ignored by the object of my affection. My gelato scooping lover (see April’s article) commented that my hair wasn’t long enough. When I bought longer, more expensive hair, then it was my clothes weren’t nice enough. When I purchased new clothes, now it became my body. No matter how much my external appearance morphed, I still couldn’t seem to receive the validation, acknowledgment, or attention I was longing for. If it wasn’t what I looked like, then it must mean I’m inherently flawed to my core…

Here I am, on a train to Firenze and I’m fatter than I’ve been in almost a year. I stopped taking medication which cost thousands of dollars every month. I quit poisoning myself in hopes the ending result would be contentment. Convinced I needed to be perfect in order to be lovable is probably the most exhausting (and untrue) belief I’ve ever held. But what if it's not that you're inherently flawed, it's that you're attracting critical people because you're hyper-critical of yourself? How can we expect someone to treat us with respect if we can't even be kind to ourselves?

I used to think my thunder thighs were a life sentence. My tiny tits, flat ass, and cellulite were a curse. In reality, it was the perfectionistic standards I upheld for myself that created my aching. I’ve been fat and loved, I’ve been skinny and lonely. I don’t think it was my acne or the pounds that made me miserable after all, I believe it was my refusal to unconditionally love myself. I sought approval from people who couldn’t even approve of themselves. Right now I'm switching my focus from looking good to feeling good. Not just feeling good about how I look but embracing who I am and feeling good about myself as a person. It’s still a work in progress and I need to practice self-reassurance continually, but today I’m giving myself a little more space to be me, to be free.

As I continue to age, my waist size will fluctuate, my hair will change, amongst many other things. Nothing is constant, everything is impermanent. People will come and people will go, but one thing we may guarantee is a promise to ourselves. In our rawest, most vulnerable form, at our best, and at our worst, we can swear to never leave ourselves. We could grant ourselves permission to be the flawed, true, human we were made to be. And with permission to be imperfect, perhaps we’ll uncover what we’ve really been wanting all along, the permission to finally live.