Hi Friend
Last week I asked you this:
Where in your body do you feel it first when something is wrong? Not what you think. Not what you say. Where does your body speak before your mind catches up? And have you ever stopped long enough to listen to what it is trying to tell you?
I want to be really honest with you about my answer.
This question is hard for me. Harder than most of the questions I have asked you. And I asked it precisely because of that.
I learned to numb my body a long time ago. Not consciously, not all at once. But years of hating the body I lived in taught me to disconnect from it. To resist pleasure. To make eating mechanical rather than joyful. I watch people eat with real pleasure and it is almost like watching them speak a foreign language. I rarely know when I am full. My body and I have had a complicated relationship for most of my life. I have been disconnected. But disconnection was how I survived.
It started early. Earlier than grade one.
But in grade one, I was in a classroom of boys and girls, and there was one big boy and me, the one big girl. The boys held a competition. Who was the fattest, him or me. There were more boys in the class than girls. So guess who won.
I won.
Grade one. I was the fattest kid in the class.
Then when I was fourteen, I was crowned Snowflake Princess of our local winterfest. I gave the best speech. I sang the best song. But the name given to me by the local boys was not Snowflake Princess.
It was Snowbank Princess.
Those two moments created a belief system I carried into every room, every relationship, every mirror for the rest of my life.
For decades I scanned every room before I walked into it to see if I was the biggest one. If I could find somebody in the room who was bigger than me, my nervous system could calm down. But if I was the biggest one in the room, there would be this quiet panic. And I could barely speak. That is how I walked through the world. Calculating where my body ranked in the room. Not because of intelligence. Because of size. Every room I walked into.
Recently I was going through some old photographs, cleaning up. I came across a picture of my very best friend and me when we were about ten, on vacation. She is thin and bubbly. I am chubby. Fat. Bubbly still.
And shortly after that, I came across a picture of the two of us in Venezuela on vacation when we were seventeen. I remember that trip vividly. And I remember wishing I was the same size as her.
And then I saw those pictures.
A pound here or there. We were the same size.
But my lens was so tainted by being the biggest girl in the room that I couldn't see that the story had changed.
I cried for her.
There have been many pictures over the years where I have looked at them and thought, you've seen this before. But this time was different. This time I wanted to reach back and tell her you are beautiful, you are not the size of your body, that is not the definition of who you are. I wanted to reach back and say your lens is broken.
I don't know that she could have heard me. I don't know that this is something you can only see and hear in hindsight, once you can finally grasp it.
That was the lens. That was the story I saw my life through.
At fifty-seven, it is better. It is still not where I would like it to be. And I have done a lot of work.
And I feel like this is what it is about. The stories we picked up throughout the years that create the lens we see ourselves through. The dumb one. The messy one. The lazy one. The smart one. The smarty pants. The four eyes.
Even when I was speaking about my friend just now, I originally wanted to call her lanky. And I realized that was unfair to her. That is a lens. We have been shown a lens for so long that sometimes we forget we are even looking through it. If we looked at our lives through another lens, we would see something completely different.
It doesn't matter how much I diet and exercise. I have been all different sizes throughout my life. If the lens doesn't change, I can be whatever size I am on the outside, but the inside of me is seeing something completely different. The hatred for myself.
I am really inviting you to pause this week and see the lens you are seeing yourself through.
And I am going to work this week to change that shutter.
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Your question for next week
Here is your question to carry this week:
What is the oldest story you still tell about yourself? Where did it come from? And is it actually true?
Sit with it. Reply if something moves in you and I will answer it myself next week.
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If you want to start hearing her again, the Unearth Your Yes questions are waiting for you at www.karenamy.com/free-resources
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The life we don't examine stays the life we didn't choose.
In love, light and laughter — Karen