Finding my way back to beautiful

I’ve forgotten what feeling beautiful feels like. I know I did at some point, probably last in my late twenties…maybe even as far as my early thirties. Now, at the beginning of my fifties I’ve lost sight of it. I want to find my way back to feeling beautiful but not some surface level beautiful. Instead a deep knowing, away from the stories, the advertising, the shame and the guilt. I’m not confident of getting there but I’m willing to try.

So day one. And this already feels like a Bridget Jones diary entry in my head. I’m approx 15 stone and at 5 foot 3 inches in medical terms that makes me obese. I look at myself in the mirror and hate (yes strong word but the one that comes to mind first) how my belly sticks out and hangs over the top of my knickers. In trousers I am convinced I look like Humpty Dumpty and whenever this thought enters my mind it’s followed by ‘I used to have such a flat stomach’.

Yes I did. In my twenties and most of my thirties too, even carrying a child to term didn’t leave me with a big belly. No that would be the joy of menopause, meno belly. God I hate that they’ve a term for it. It means I accept it because ‘they’ say it’s something we are prone to. Us middle aged women that they don’t want to see but yet clump us into a big pen together because, well, out of sight out of mind.

So back to the main point, day one. I have started attending the gym, sporadically, and following the advice (again) that I should lift weight and do less cardio.

I was about to continue by telling you about my typical diet but it’s struck me already that this thing of being beautiful, in my head at least, all comes down to my physical body. That’s something I know needs to shift.

I’m aware enough to realise that I’ll never feel beautiful just because I reach some kind of ‘perfect weight’. I see that this is already part of my conditioning. Beautiful = how I look.

It isn’t just that, is it even that at all? I guess I’ll work that one out as I go but I know, for me, a big bit of not ‘being beautiful’ is down to the things I’ve done that make me feel ‘unbeautiful’.

You see I felt incredibly beautiful in my twenties. I mean, I’m sure there were doubts there and off days, I certainly remember crying one day because everything I owned made me look wrong/fat/ugly…. Because of course it was never just one day. However I did feel beautiful a lot. Walking back from the bathroom in a busy restaurant, sashaying my way back to my table, knowing eyes were on me. Writing that makes me a little uncomfortable as it feels so conceited and wrapped up in the male gaze, something else to unwrap later.

At around age 23 I posed in my own bedroom, camera propped up on the side on a self timer, semi nude and gave my then boyfriend the pictures. Photos, I might add, that needed processing at Boots! They weren’t vulgar. I still see a beautiful and oddly still innocent girl in those images. And again my mind starts to boggle at all the hidden feelings and manipulation, that I still see first a beautiful girl, and not one using her body to further lock in the attention, the love, the desire of a male. Is that even wrong, right? I have so much to examine in this journey (blah, journey, eye roll). The things that felt right when I was younger but seem so sad now, and the things I still know to be the thoughts of others. The opinions about myself I hold when I look in a mirror that are still that twenty year old girl looking on and not the more knowing 50 year old I am today. The gut punch nasty thoughts I have about other women. Admittedly these intrusive thoughts are few & far between now, but still, the jealousy, the judgement I can feel when looking upon another woman enrages me as I know those opinions whilst occupying space in my head are far from created by me.

I feel some exhaustion already. This is why it/they win. It’s easier to stay as we are. To hate our bodies and let them continue to profit from our disillusion. To still strive to have the male gaze upon us and bathe in the mediocre scrap of sunshine it throws our way. It is easier to become invisible … in so many painful ways, as we walk down the street, as we look at the pages in a magazine, as we become ‘just’ a wife, a mother and nothing more. I watched my own mother do that, I watch her still do that.

Not me. I will not settle. I will not live the next decades, of which I hope there are many, waiting to be told by someone else that I am beautiful. That I do or don’t fit the high standards that were never the one’s I wanted anyway. I do not imagine this will be easy, the brainwashing goes deep and I have to face up to some of the ugly truths about myself. I also know I won’t be alone, which makes me both empowered and sad, but sharing this will hopefully give me the courage to continue…and maybe the bravery you need to join me at the start line.