Self-Love and Body Curves

It started young, hating my body. Typically, I could be found with my nose in a book rather than kicking a ball on a soccer field. In fact, often I was the last one picked for a sports team at school.

There was one place I felt elegant and beautiful. At ballet class when I was dancing. It began around the age of 10 or 11. I, a rather slender and compact but not skinny pre-teen who came up short on height, stood at the barre with my feet in first position behind a row of other pre-teen girls. Our instructor for that evening class walked up and down the line calling out the sequence of pliés and relevés.

She glances at me as the music stops and makes one comment, You probably will not be tall but I certainly hope you do not get curvy!

Curvy!

Another word for chubby, womanly, and fat.

In the years to come, as my body filled out, those words stuck with me. In my soul as well as my memory.

A few years later, I landed a lead role in the upcoming ballet production. Ecstatic to be noticed, I worked really hard at my part, dancing even harder to make sure I left a good impression.

Then it happened again.

It happened one afternoon during a rehearsal where the young man I was partnered with, for the dance, blurted out, It would be great if you could lose some of that water weight, as he lifted me into a traveling arabesque and across the room.

From my side-eye glance, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, as we sailed across the room. I did not see the graceful lines of the ballerina everyone else watched dance. I saw the chubby girl reflected back to me.

Where my twenty-something self would have had a few choice words as a reply to his comment, my teenage self took those words to heart. She digested them instead of real food.

Curvy.

Water weight.

My self-image began chasing the proverbial rainbow to always be thinner. Thinner equaled healthier, sexier, more desirable. Think fashion model standards set by Twiggy, Brooke Shields, and Christie Brinkley. This is what people deemed beautiful.

In addition to the influence of mainstream media, my bar was set by the New York City Ballet and the waiflike look of the Balanchine ballerina, with her long legs and literally bone-thin frame. My body would never look like that. My height reached its peak in the eighth grade at 5"4".

My body image as a dancer plummeted, along with my self-esteem. Perfection was not attainable.

Was self-love?

The aspects of body image

Body-image seems to be broken into four categories; how you see yourself, how you feel about the way you look, thoughts and beliefs about your body, and things you do in relation to the way you look.

As a teenager, I saw myself as chubby purely based on a few ill-placed and insensitive comments from my peers. Looking back at photographs from this time I see this young girl through a different lens. She is lean, short, and athletic. Not chubby at all. I feel her pain through those pictures and remember how critical she was of what she saw in the mirror.

Her body which was strong and lithe, and could dance for several hours straight, became an ugly image to her. It would never be perfect. No fad diet solely made up of cucumbers or drinks of lemon and apple cider could change her genetics or her height. Nor could a starvation diet.

As a teenager, I dealt myself a fair share of self-loathing. It stuck around for a few years.

It took me 50 years to love myself

If I wait until I become perfect before I love myself, I will waste my whole life. I am already perfect right here and right now. I am perfect exactly as I am. — Louise L. Hay

Perfection is a fleeting notion much like chasing rainbows, one never reaches the pot of gold or perfection. And much like the quote suggests, loving myself in the here and now is truly what matters.

It only took me 50 years to begin loving myself.

Much of my self imposed dislike wove itself into my body image and what I was told would be a “better” and more “perfect” body.

Now that menopause has hit, my body has changed once again and with it my self-image. This time for the better.

It is not the body of my 20s or 30s, nor the body of my dreams. But it is the body that carried and birthed my children. It is the body that nursed them and held them close when they were scared. It is rounder, softer, and well-lived in.

But I am also strong and healthy, able-bodied and can do the activities I enjoy like sailing, hiking, and long evening walks. This is important to me and I do not take it for granted. Not everyone’s body is as amiable. Nor as healthy. I have seen many friends become crippled with various debilitating diseases, unable to rely on their bodies the way they did in younger years.

This time of life has given me a gift. The gift of being more comfortable in my skin and in my body. Curves and all.

I don’t know how it came about, this new security and confidence. I am just glad it did. Perhaps I became weary of carrying around those old concepts of myself. They certainly no longer fit.

Whatever the reason, I decided to embrace that this is me, in the here and now. Middle-aged, menopausal, and healthy. Sometimes when I look in the mirror at my body now, I see that pre-teen girl peeking out around my curves. What would I say to her?

I would tell her I am no longer chasing proverbial rainbows or perfection. I am learning to love my body, just the way it is.

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MaryRose believes in Meraki, which is what happens when you leave a piece of yourself, your soul, creativity, or love, in your work. When you love doing something, anything, so much that you put something of yourself into it. Or follow me on my website MaryRoseDentonWriter.

With much gratitude,

MaryRose