Embrace Me

No, that’s not a command. At least not to you.

It’s an admonition to myself.

It’s something each of us should say to ourselves, because we deserve to be embraced by the person who lives inside our own bodies, to be loved by who we ourselves are, just how we are. No matter how we are.

Look at these pictures of me:

I’ve written quite a lot about weight issues. I’ve had them most of my rememberable life, spending most of my life feeling fat. Sometimes I really was, and sometimes I wasn’t. I think we all have a time we look back on when we know our self esteem suffered yet we’d love to pop right back to that body we had before and we know we’d appreciate it now like we didn’t then.

I know that I really am fat now. I’m almost at my heaviest weight ever, just within a few pounds, and I’m not happy about it. I’m flat out aggravated with myself for once again thinking I’d have a summer when I’d not be self-conscious in a bathing suit but instead finding myself fatter than the summer before. I feel like a hypocrite because over the years I’ve posted blogs and statuses and participated in support groups and invited people to traverse their own journeys as I travel mine, losing weight and having people celebrate each pound as it came off, just to find myself back at square one, or even square negative 50 when I gain more weight back than I lost. I know what it is that must be done to lose weight, but so often lack the motivation yet again for one reason or another to do it, so I’ve yo-yoed back up the ol’ scale.

But what I’m really dealing with is this: Does this change me as a person? Does being fat rather than being thin (which I’ve never really been) make me less valuable as a person?

I don’t know about you, but I worry sometimes what people think of me. More specifically, I actually worry that people are going to see me and see how much weight I’ve gained and think that I don’t matter as much or that I’m less of a person (ironically, being literally more of a person) than when I looked better. I worry that they are going to scoff inside their minds or feel repulsed, and wonder what in the world happened in my life to make me get so fat. Heck, maybe some people do think some of these things, but I think these worries and fears are mostly coming from a place of self-doubt. Because a lot of the time, when I do see people, they don’t really look at me with revulsion. They don’t treat me any differently than they would if I were gorgeous. Well, at least they don’t treat me with the disdain I sometimes fear.

I was inspired to write about embracing myself partly because of a few pictures people have posted on social media of me. For many years, I have wanted to control the pictures that people see of me. I have an extremely attractive friend and years ago when we lived in Newport News I told her that she looks like a model in all her pictures, and she told me, “It’s all about the angles.” I’ve found it to be true that some angles are imperially more flattering than others. Some angles make people look better than they really look and some angles make people look worse than they really look. Inside my mind, I guess there have been times in my life when I don’t picture myself as heavy as I look when I see full-body pictures of myself, especially those that other people take when I don’t realize they are taking a picture. Those where I’m not hiding behind someone or something or holding the camera myself at a “good” angle. It’s been really easy to get depressed when I get the initial shock of seeing a candid photo of myself that I didn’t control, and my first instinct is to not let anyone see it.

But that’s me.

I’m not talking about my opinion. The person in those pictures is me.

It’s ME.

Should I not love me, or should I be utterly disgusted with myself or think that the entire world at large puked in their mouths a little bit when I appeared because I’m fat now? Should others stop loving me? Just because I’m fat? Really? Because that’s how a lot of us think or treat ourselves whether we admit it or not.

My kids love me. I know they do, and the way I look is the person they love and accept as their mother. I’ve just thought about that a lot lately. When I first saw Anna’s pictures of me, especially, I wanted to gasp inside, kind of wanted to cry, but then I realized that that person is who my kids love and they love me the way I am, and I should, too.

Now, let me clarify something, and this is one of the complicated parts of my thought process. This is not one of those “Fat and Loving It” posts where I just declare that I’m fat and I’m always going to be fat and that’s okay and if you don’t agree you can kiss my butt. I mean, I AM saying that you should love yourself even if you’re fat, but personally, I still know that I need to do something to get a grip on my weight and work toward becoming healthier. I weigh nearly 240 lbs. I am blessed that God has His hand on me and my stress test and echocardiogram results were normal and the doctor even said they were good, like my heart had good rhythm (thank God), but I had to have those tests because I had weird chest pains a few months ago. He did point out that my heart beat was a little fast, but I’m out of shape and being in a doctor’s office makes me anxious. I also have diabetes. I’ve got asthma and probably sleep apnea because I snore like a daggone chainsaw and I didn’t used to have that problem before I gained so much weight. I wake up sometimes with my body popping, or aching, especially if I’ve lain in one spot for too long. Sometimes when I roll over, my stomach is so big that it reminds me of physically holding it to move it over to switch sides when I was pregnant. Let me get REAL real here, and if you don’t like too much information, skip to the next paragraph. Sometimes I feel stiff and achy, especially in the mornings, to the point that it is uncomfortable just to wipe after using the bathroom. And there are parts of me that I haven’t seen without a mirror in YEARS because of my gut blocking my view.

But ANYWAY… Despite these things, I have got to learn that being heavy and having these medical or physical issues don’t lessen the value of me. I’ve let myself be held back from a lot of things in my life because of my self-esteem, or lack thereof. I’ve worried so much about what people will think of me, and a lot of that worry boils down to me feeling like people are going to judge me because of how I look. I often shut my eyes when I’m singing in church because I have worried what people think of how I look. I already have a double chin and I feel like it blows out like a pelican when I sing (it probably does) and that makes me so self-conscious that I’ve held back my voice when singing at times because people might think I am an ugly singer. I’ve hardly EVER danced, even when I had a teenage body. I was wayyyy to scared. I love dancing and have always wished to be a good dancer; I love to watch people dance and have often daydreamed about doing dances and looking supercool, but yet when people have tried to get me to dance, I literally feel epically panicked. Most of the time I’ve refused entirely. Don’t even talk to me about eating in front of people. I mean, I do it, but I wonder if people think about me eating and how fat I am, like they are watching me grow fatter by the second with each bite.

Okay, so now that I’ve given verbage to what could be a mental issue (don’t we all have issues of some sort?), let me say this. I’m in the final stretch of my 30s. Lord willing, I’ll be 40 in just a few months. But I’m not really dreading it. I’ve come to realize that I’ve spent entirely too much time worrying about things. I’m not saying I’m done with worry and that I’ll never worry again because it’s not that easy, although it would be nice if it could be flipped off like a switch. But I am trying to see my value as a person that doesn’t hinge on what I look like. I’m trying to make some changes in my mind even before I start back to earnestly making changes in my body. One baby step for me was dancing with my children in front of people at their school recently. I went to my daughter’s 1st grade celebration last week and toward the end, they invited parents to come and dance with their kids. The old (young) me would have totally passed in sheer mortification, but my children wanted me to groove with them, and although I may have looked like a giant bouncing ostrich, I got up and I danced with them despite people snapping pictures or taking videos. They had a ball and it was fun, and I really don’t think they even thought that “Fat Mom” is dancing. They just knew MOM was dancing with them and it was great fun. Another baby step is allowing pictures to be taken of me that are not selfies. (I invented selfies eons before they were called selfies. Okay, I doubt I did, but I took them when you had to send off film before you could see if they turned out.) Another step tied to that one is to love what I see when I see pictures other people take rather than to be depressed and let it ruin my day. I’ve been taking a second and third look at those pictures that sometimes initially make me want to cry, and I think of how my kids are going to want to remember me and this is what I look like at this time in my life, so why not just accept that fact and love myself like they love me anyway? I wish I could put into words how I feel about this. I used to never want to get into pictures because I hated seeing pictures of myself, but I read a blog once a few years ago that a heavier person wrote and how she had the epiphany that her kids would want her in pictures with them because that is who they knew and loved as their mother and they deserved to have her in the pictures for them to love and remember even after she is gone. (I’m paraphrasing, and I reckon this whole blog is piggybacking that notion, but it’s not just the pictures.. it’s doing things I didn’t before because I was afraid of what people thought of how I looked.) Another baby step for me is singing while looking at people and connecting like the third grade inspired me to do the time I sang for them after days or weeks of them begging. And singing for people more often when asked, even if it’s just for a few on cue, which has sometimes been hard for me to do. I’m trying to do more of these things I feared before, and even do them fat. Because I am starting to embrace me.

My children embrace me. My family and friends embrace me. My coworkers embrace me. I don’t know if I’ll ever be embraced romantically again, but that’s alright. My GOD embraces me.

I embrace me.

And stiff, popping, awkward heavy body and all, that feels pretty darn good.

 

 

The Bangs are Back…

Like most people, I’ve had various hair-dos over the years:

Baldness as a baby…

curls and/or pigtails as a young child..

. 

poofy bangs in the 80s..

.      and 90s… 

… and long grown out bangs and all in the early/mid 90s and beyond…

I eventually got it chopped and experimented with a variety of lengths…

But after I had kids, I settled for plain ol’ medium-length hair with no special style around the time. I usually pulled it back in a ponytail or clip since inquiring little hands wanted to tug or eat my locks regularly….

About 3 or 4 years ago, I really needed a change. I wanted to change my hair to match the change in my life’s circumstances. My kids were old enough to leave my hair alone most of the time, I didn’t have a significant other, increasing numbers or gray hairs were reminding me that I’m getting older, and I just wanted to do something for myself to spice it up, at least on the top of my head if nowhere else. So I got my hair dyed nearly black, and I got bangs:

I’ve kept bangs since then to one degree or another, even if I haven’t always kept the dark hair…

I have just felt better with bangs, for some reason. But as it goes if you don’t keep up with them, my bangs got into that awkward in-between stage. Where they were too long to really lay on my forehead right like proper bangs, but too short to really be those wispy side-swept bangs that always look so perfect in hair commercials, and actually never really worked for me anyway because of the thickness and texture of my hair. Still, I was in a dilemma. To cut, or not to cut. Should I keep bangs or let them grow out like I had before? Did I need a change in my life again?

Well, let me tell you what it honestly boils down to. I’m a grown woman who used to be a teenager with insecurities in high school. I did not really enjoy high school. (*GASP!!*) When I myself was a student, I was  not of the popular ilk, I hated cliques, and I always kind of felt “less than” because I wasn’t a cheerleader and I felt like I lived perpetually in the shadows of “the chosen ones,” because every single guy I had a crush on at my high school in those years liked someone else.  EVERY ONE. I never had a boyfriend in that time from my own school. There was a guy I met at revival at my church that was my first date, but I drove and I paid and we were late for the movie because I was confused about the time. I only saw him a couple of times, and besides that movie, those times were at my church. Guys were just not interested in me back then. But what does this have to do with me choosing at 38 years old whether to cut my bangs or not?

This:

I teach at the high school from which I graduated. It has given me a new love of the place, and I try to use my experiences to help steer the students I encounter now. I try to guide them into knowing their worth, into being kind to all others, into making good choices. I am a grown woman and the experience of life has endowed me with something of a tough skin, but still…. it’s high school.

And I am female.

So when my students informed me a few weeks ago that someone posted on this thing called the “after school app” that they like Ms. Herrell’s bangs, it took me a little aback. My bangs at the time were just entering the awkward stage, but I hadn’t thought of growing them back out yet. I just hadn’t made time to cut them because every time I’d thought about it was after I’d already done my makeup for the day and it was too late (because the little clippings would stick to my face and eyelashes and require wiping off, etc etc…. too much hassle when you’ve done everything else). The reason this app had come up in class was that it’s basically horrible and had caused trouble for another high school since a student there had made threats on it. From what I understood up until the point they told me with glee about the mention of my bangs on this app, it was more or less a gossipy thing where people went to slam others or stir the pot, so to speak.

I knew whomever made this post was surely being facetious, and I said so.

(By the way, this word, facetious… it titillated my students. They got a vocabulary lesson that day. On facetious, not titillated. I will probably refrain from using that one with 10th graders. But I digress…)

The students laughingly tried to say it was a compliment, that it was a nice thing to say. They liked my bangs. But this is high school. This app had just been taken down to prevent further downloads because of the ugliness it represented, and I just simply knew better.

And I let that affect my life. I let that enter my consciousness enough to rethink my bangs every time I looked in the mirror. I had already begun being a little self-conscious about them since they were in that imperfect stage, but that just put me over the edge and I seriously started to consider growing them out, so for the past couple of weeks, I’ve brushed and blown them to the side like so:

It isn’t the most horrible look, I reckon, but the thing is that every time I’ve done this, I’ve thought of that post and I knew inside that this was the reason I was growing my bangs out. I was letting some pee-anty little post get inside my self-esteem enough to think I had to change. I was letting high school get to me instead of letting me get to high school.

This morning, I blow dried my bangs straight down after my shower and I saw them completely covering my eyes. But it was right then that I could really see. I could see what was happening. I have been having some self-esteem issues already because I know I’ve gained back a lot of weight that I need to lose (again). I have things in my life that weren’t and aren’t perfect. I know my hair might not be perfect, but I’ll be dipped if I am going to let what kids might think of me dictate how I think of myself. So whether someone likes my bangs or not, I got those scissors out and I cut them. I cut them myself, and I know I didn’t cut them perfectly straight across, but you know what? That’s life. My life has been choppy at times, but I get through thanks to God. He can take my imperfect life and make it into something I love.

I love having bangs. It kind of makes me feel a little younger. It made me feel better about myself when I got them a few years ago, so why not do or have something that makes you feel good about you? I even like them when they are imperfect because it reminds me of the bigger picture, the one that matters, not just the selfie variety. I’m not saying I won’t ever grow these bangs out again because change is good, when it’s on your terms or when it is a change that the Lord works in your life. Cutting my bangs today was about a lot more than hair: it was about not letting the opinion of others rule my life. It was about liking myself just how I am, because God loves me despite myself, and I should, too. The bangs are back.