Shhhh …… Shame, Shame, Shame, on ME! No SHAME ON YOU!!!

If you stare long enough at anything you’ll find something wrong. ~ Mothanmeetz Daeyez

Wow you completed a triathlon .. congratulations but weren't you 1. __ or 2. ____ or 3. _____ with all those people looking? It amazes me how negative people can be. No one seems to know how to give a compliment and just leave it at that. Nor do people seem to understand that projecting their issues onto others is not a way to remedy their need to do  self-work. These selfish innuendos lead to energy spent in thoughts, meditation, actions, or perhaps medication on fixing something many times which isn’t broken.  

First it was my hair. Is that your real color? Why won't you color it? Ever thought about a wig? ETC. ETC. ETC. Women literally came up to me and asked a series of questions regarding my hair color. Most of these women were older than me. They themselves either were not happy with their hair color or just afraid to live their truth. I used to color my hair but .... I stopped - I wanted to find a more natural way to have color without damaging my texture or the grade of my hair. I did not like the options available so I stopped.

Prior to that it was why did you go natural? Once again, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. Even with me explaining that I have been natural for 17+ yrs  ….. Still more blah, blah, blah!!

At some point in our lives we just get tired of the endless pointless conversations. Especially about futile things such as image or at least the image others think you should have. I fought a battle of self-hatred for years. Many of them unbeknownst to me because I also lived in functional dysfunctional community with the IDEOLOGIES if you were to skinny eat something and if you were just really thick maybe you shouldn’t eat something. As harmless as the quips and quotes from my childhood and young adulthood were from loved ones they became an embedded critique I viewed myself through.

The battle to be able to look at myself in the mirror and not shudder at anything I thought needed to be adjusted before I could be seen publicly wearing this or that took a real toll on my life holistically. However the irony of this is I have never thought I was hard on the eyes and never needed the compliment of the opposite gender to feel good about myself. It was the words of my childhood/young adulthood on loop in my head rendering me shameful of my ever changing body.

Truthfully every single time I have set out to change my body for vain reasons I failed!!!! MISERABLY! Yup I got some great results but because they were rooted in a place of pain it didn’t last. Here is the kicker by the time I got over those vain prerequisites I was over forty and my body had developed a new attitude of existing ...... Menopause!!!! Menopause is so disrespectful!!! Graciousness is owed to GOD and a pre-menopausal lifestyle of not eating certain things of why I do not suffer as I have heard many other women share their stories.

I had finally become fully cognizant of process errors to gain control over my fluctuating weight. The physical ability to be able to do so was even more of a challenge. Now the real battle came to learn to really look in the mirror at my forty-plus body and not shudder. Not to enter into a matrix of moments relived or revisited where my body didn’t look like this. Where this didn’t bulge or wiggle or even the overarching fear of how can my king love these life lines in my body he didn’t help create!!!

Three years ago when I sought out to compete in a triathlon it wasn’t to be trend setter or garner a bunch social media hoopla. It would be a moment to grasp ahold of life fleeting and grapple with the evolution of what it would become. Even when I finally got into position to train hard once again I had to face my embedded voices about my body. Ultimately I actually stopped caring about it because I became more serious about surviving the swimming part of the triathlon than concerns about how I looked.

I am still a work in progress. Truthfully I can still look in the mirror and find plenty of spots that need IMMEDIATE ATTENTION but now instead of being paralyzed by it I embrace it. So here is my freedom and liberation moment from BODY-SHAMING and SELF-HATRED I pray it sets someone free. I am 5’10” and 45 years old and according to the BMI(Body Mass Index) Chart  I am grossly obese. However I was tested and cleared by a doctor to be able to compete in my first triathlon (my second is in September) and I refuse to live my life in box based upon charts that cannot determine if I am healthy or not. Nor will I live my life in the shadows of others whose ideal images include either starving or stuffing myself. So shhhhhhhh SHAME, SHAME, SHAME, on you if you’re still living in space not created for you or in vicissitudes of what others think.

These are pictures of me wearing two piece during my training at Lake Bennett and a one piece suit for my triathlon something just a few years ago I would have never put on. I challenge myself every week in my new level of existing to wear something I would never have done before and not let anything or anyone hinder my freedom in doing so not even myself.  I ask you to join my challenge and post a picture of you getting out your comfort zone. CLICK HERE TO ACCEPT THAT THE CHALLENGE!!!

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