What I’m listening to as I write this:
Hi everyone,
Happy Sunday.
As I sit here at my desk, typing this, listening to coulou’s above music, breathing in slowly and deeply, my room bathed in the warm light of sunset, I feel … tired, yet grateful. Tired after an intense workout (and ever-so-slightly tired by the weight of my thoughts), yet grateful for my body, for its lack of injuries and for my ability to move in many different ways, for my ability to breathe in deeply without pain, and just … for all it does for me.
There’s a lot I have to be thankful for.
This week, I started working on my project (that I’ll write more about soon), and a part of it is making videos of myself. As I was watching one video — a screenshot from it below — I felt (this is really hard to write) revulsion and grief. But, it wasn’t exactly me who felt it; I mean, it was, but it was more so 11- or 12-year-old me. It was weird; in that moment of looking at myself in the video, that younger part of me, and all that I had felt back then about myself, came out. Why that specific part of me? There was a moment, back when I was 11 or 12 and in 6th grade, where I looked at a photo of me with my friends and felt revulsion (at myself) and grief. I cried, and ripped up the photo. I had thought I looked like a monster.
You see, I had gone through puberty when I was in 5th grade and 11 years old, much sooner than other girls in my grade. I gained a lot of weight, started getting acne all over my face, and grew taller than most of the other students. I felt … so different, compared to everyone else. All of my friends were thinner than me, had smaller body frames, and had no acne. And so that moment in time when I saw a photo of myself with my friends and subsequently felt revulsion at how I looked like, cried, and ripped up the photo is seared into my mind.
So when she, my 6th-grade self, saw me in that video, she came out with a fury. Only her fury was grief. She looked at her/my body, thinking, Look at my stomach rolls, and felt disgust. My thighs are huge. It’s surprising, what feelings lie deep within us. I viscerally felt both nauseous and like I wanted to cry while watching the video of me — the same feelings 11- or 12-year-old me had felt looking at the photo of herself. What was so strange about it was that I also felt like I was a witness to those feelings; instead of feeling completely overcome by the nausea and grief, it felt like just a part of me was — while the other part of me was seeing myself feeling those things. Like I was feeling them while simultaneously having the awareness of experiencing them.
Having this experience showed me a lot of things. One, that I had these feelings buried deep within me. Sure, since my 6th-grade self’s experience I’ve had many, many moments of wanting to change something about my body, but never to the point of feeling revolted by it. Second, I learned just how deeply I’m affected by people’s opinions of me. I knew (and know) that I care too much about what people think of me in terms of what I do for work — how “successful”, “impressive,” or “prestigious” it is according to society — but I had thought that I wasn’t as deeply affected anymore by what people think of my body. I guess I sort of forgot about it, since it hasn’t been at the forefront of my mind recently. The funny thing is, even though my 6th-grade self thought my thighs are huge, I love my thighs. But it’s the thought of what other people might think of them (and just my body in general) that makes me hesitant to post those above photos of me. So that brings in another thing that this experience highlighted for me, as this is something I’ve known but hadn’t thought about recently: I have a tendency to care more about what others think of me and how they feel about me, than what I think of me and how I feel about me.
Yes, that last part is as exhausting as it sounds. It’s something I’ve been working on, both directly and indirectly.
To be honest, I wasn’t planning on writing about this experience at all; I had planned on writing about a different experience I had this week, but when I started writing this post, this is the story that came forward. I had felt embarrassed and ashamed to share those screenshots, and I had just felt really vulnerable posting about all of it. But I think that sharing this is a good thing for me to do, especially for my younger self. It’s funny, how hard we can be on ourselves; I don’t feel revolted by other people’s bodies, but I was of my own, and still can be more critical of myself than I am of other people.
After I took the videos, I took a few photos of myself (two of them below), since the sunset light was beautiful. I also was not going to post these, but I’m stepping outside my comfort zone! As I was taking the photos and judging them, trying to get a “good” angle and making sure my hair looked okay, my mind, as it is wont to do, “zoomed out” up into the sky, above Earth, and into space, and I had a visceral feeling of how small I was — taking these photos and trying to make myself look “good” in them — and how tiny I am on this planet, which is itself such a small thing in this vast and endless universe.
I hope you’re having a peaceful day, and I wish you much joy, love, peace, and contentment. And moments of pure awe at the world around us. Yes, even amidst the terror, the grief, and the pain.
Please enjoy below a photo of quite possibly one of the cutest, roundest, huggable-est, squeezeable-est, and heart-meltiest doggos, Mootoo.
Sending you all my love,
Christina
The above cafe trumpet meditation by coulou.
Working on my project.
Discovering Albert Bierstadt and his breathtaking paintings, particularly of the landscapes of the American West.
Two hummingbirds I saw flying together while on my walk a few days ago. Sadly, I was only able to get one of them on video.
Pan’s Labyrinth. One of my favorite movies.
This beautiful, and adorable watercolor painting (below) by Lily Seika Jones, as well as all of her other paintings.
Thank you so much for being here! Your presence means so much to me.
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