2.24.21 // learning from my body

Learning from my body.
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Since I was a child I was taught to not trust my body.
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Born with a hand anomaly that resulted in countless surgeries and a latex allergy from overexposure, my body seemed like something I needed to fight.
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For years, my body was something for me to overcome.
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This message was solidified as I moved through my teenage years and my early-twenties told that we should diet our ways to the thinnest versions of ourselves. Control your diet, control your waist. An old roommate in college once told me to "watch your waist or no one else would." I don't fault her, as women of only 20 we were the target of diet campaigns, cultural pressure, and societal expectations on beauty standards.
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Spending my college years obsessively counting calories through my fitness pal, tracking everything I ate in a journal along with every workout I did. Exercising was never for fun, it was for fitness.
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Again, I had to overcome my body, to bend her to my will.
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How disconnected and disassociated I became from myself in this beautiful body I get to call home.
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And after years of battling her, I've had to wave the white flag. Thank god, she doesn't hold a grudge...
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But I'm not only having to call a truce to level with her, but I'm having to learn to love her, understand her, to listen to her signals, to speak her language.
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She tells me so much about what is going on in my world.
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For example, she tells me when I'm starting to feel a wave of anxiety. There is a tightness in my thighs that runs from the top of my legs to the tips of my toes, my breath evaporates as thin as a shadow. In these moments she is telling me to take a moment to process, to slow down and take a moment before reacting, to ground.
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Her language is still foreign to me but I'm learning and I'm patient.
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She is mine after all, and I have time to make up for all of those lost years, to cherish her, and to create a new relationship with her every day.