#LoveMe Challenge Day 16: Something You Like About Yourself (May Be NSFW)

While I have struggled with liking myself in a general sense a lot over the years, I have also grown a lot in that are and learned to like many things about myself (I don’t necessarily see ever liking everything about myself, given that I will never be a perfect human being).

Many of the things I learned to like about myself seem to be a silly premise for a post (I’m sure you’re all well aware of the fact that I have the nose of a Greek goddess, and don’t need me to elaborate any further lest your underwear turn to ash in the presence of such beauty).

So, I’m going to talk about body image. I have always been short, even compared to other women. I was chubby in elementary school, curvy (but much closer to a healthy weight, though I thought I was a whale), in middle school, and overweight in high school. Having a baby, plus multiple years on medications that caused weight gain, added another 50 pounds. I’m definitively obese. Thank God I always had big boobs to at least stay balanced ;).

Most of my life I was ashamed of my body. Even when I was intimate with my husband, who has seen me give birth, for crying out loud, I was embarrassed. He’s never been anything but aroused by my figure, as I spent most of my life never being anything but disgusted with that same figure. I often wondered how could we see the same body and feel so differently about it.

The turning point for me, when it comes to how comfortable I was in my own skin, came in the form of going to a BDSM play party with a friend “Alice”. She was much taller than me, but also dramatically heavier, and her extra weight wasn’t distributed in a way that was flattering. In summation, she was farther from the standard societal standard of physical beauty than I was. We had both been involved in the lifestyle and going to different events for a while.

The party that Alice and I attended was what is called a “public play party”, which means that it was in a rented hall, and any adults could attend. This particular party usually had about 100 people or so, from all ages, races, and walks of life. At a rented hall (at least in my area), certain laws regarding nudity were still applicable, so while people could (and regularly did) take their clothes on, genitals and female nipples had to remain covered at all times.

When we arrived at the event, Alice and I set down our gear. I had dressed up, as I usually did, and Alice had a cute blouse but her outfit wasn’t fetish oriented or anything. After we set down our things, Alice pulled off her shoes, socks, blouse, bra, and pants, leaving nothing but a barely existent thong and colored tape covering her nipples. She proceeded to walk over to some friends and start socializing, while I was still unpacking my things.

I couldn’t help but watch her strut through the place like she owned it. There was no shame, no lowering of the eyes that I found myself naturally doing whenever I even considered going down to bra and pants. No blushing. No shame. No embarrassment.

I stopped my unpacking process, and simply sat and watched, as she walked from person to person, group to group, with her head held high. I couldn’t stop thinking how ridiculous that it was that I was too embarrassed of my body to consider something like what she was doing, and she, even farther from the standard than I, had no problem letting it all hang out, so to speak.

The more I watched her, the more I realized how beautiful she was. The confidence radiating off of her was intoxicating even by itself. Her smile was completely authentic, and her laughter rang throughout the room as she socialized. Even her body was beautiful; the confidence she carried somehow transformed the way she looked, even while she was still well over 300 pounds.

I decided then that I was going to be more confident about myself and about my body image. That it was a conscious choice, not just a gift of genetics or a process that had to take me years and years. I made the conscious choice to love my body however it looks, whether I gain weight, lose weight, or stay right where I’m at and just let gravity and time do their thing. I was making the choice to love my body, to see in myself what my husband saw, and what I had seen in Alice.

I’m not going to lie to you and tell you it was easy, or a one day process. But making the choice was what changed everything, and that really was a one day thing. I decided I didn’t want to stay ashamed of my body forever. I didn’t want to have to hide myself away out of embarrassment. I wanted to love myself the way I knew I was capable of loving others.

In the beginning, it was little things, like intentionally being immodest (in appropriate venues and situations, of course), and faking the confidence that I didn’t yet have. And I realized something amazing. When I owned it, when I walked around like I owned the room, other people reacted to me as if I did. They didn’t see a short overweight girl, and after a while, neither did I. I saw a confident person whose body was only a small part of what made up who I was, and I saw my inner beauty begin to practically seep from my pores as I accepted my outer beauty, transforming the way it was perceived by both myself and others’ around me. And after a while, I realized I wasn’t faking confidence anymore; I genuinely faked it till I made it.

So, that’s something that I like about myself. I like my body, with all it’s flaws and stretch marks and scars. And I like myself too.

An Anonymous Outsider