Eye contact with all the Beautiful People!

Dear Buddah Belly,

Over the years, we have had a very interesting relationship. I have alternated between overfeeding you and starving you. I have hidden you behind multiple layers of shame and fabric. I protect you from the touch of others, but not out of any real danger. Unless of course, you count deep rooted insecurities as a real danger. Behind you (and a little bit above, if we’re being anatomically correct) is my heart, which, through mere association, is equally starved of healthy affection.

When I do give you attention, it’s usually in the form of high fat, high sugar, guilt laden foodstuff (it’s rarely legitimately real food) in order to placate you until the next “meal”. If you were a friend of mine, you would have defriended me on Facebook ages ago. It’s an abusive relationship, I know.

I’m ashamed of you. You’re big in a world that praises small. You’re round in a world that praises slim. You are soft in a world that praises the masculine. Or maybe it’s just me heaping on the praise?

People say well meaning things like, “In Africa, they love curvy women! Everyone’s starving, so curves are valued.” I’ll pick apart the assumptions in those words at a later date, but for now, suffice to say they’re so very wrong. I was born in Lagos, Nigeria. In Africa, when you’re 19, they praise your hips and your ass and your tits. Everything else is best minimised. Especially your independence. Lovely lady parts are fine though, cause that makes you look feminine.  Big things are admired by no one when they’re on the wrong part of your body, or in the wrong part of your head.

I worry that I am repulsing the perfect guy for me. I would like to say that the perfect guy wouldn’t care, but I am reasonable enough to understand how aesthetics play into attraction. I also realise that I’m defaulting to the heterosexual position yet again. I’m scared to develop too strong a vision of what my wife or girlfriend will be like. I don’t even like having sexual thoughts about women. Not because they don’t turn me on. They do. Oh, how they do.

The thought of a girl with a slightly rough voice, and a funky hairstyle, with an unnatural hair colour of course, and various tattoos and piercings and soft skin that smells like coco butter and is a little salty when I kiss the nape of her neck at the end of the day…

Where was I? Oh yeah, so I default to heterosexuality because my queer yearning are precious to me, and they are a sacred place in my heart, unmarred by insecurities despite everything I’ve heard and seen and been told. To look anywhere but within my heart for how I feel about it would destroy it, and a little bit of me, in the process.

So if I know this about a kind of love that I find sacred, why am I so hesitant to apply that knowledge to the rest of me? Does this mean I don’t really view myself as sacred despite all my talk about self-love? Doesn’t that make me a hypocrite and undermine everything I’ve ever said about anything? Where do these feelings of being trapped inside myself come from? As I write this, I am fighting back tears of anger and hurt and defeat and hope.

I am angry because the world around me started tearing me down the second I was born.They painted my nursery pink, and they made being a girl inextricable from being female and they inundated me with their expectations before I had the chance to say no, and that’s not fair.

I am especially angry because when I did find the voice and the courage to say no, they stripped me of everything. On the one hand, I had a blank slate upon which to begin building the life that would truly make me happy. On the other hand, the wind hurts worst when it whips past a vulnerable soul.

I am hurt that they would leave me.

I am hurt that I had to discover the goodness of humanity through rebuilding a broken heart.

I am hurt that coming out didn’t fix everything.

I am defeated because I am tired of fighting the world in order to be myself when I never asked to be who I once was in the  first place! It’s a struggle sometimes, to separate taking responsibility from taking the blame.

I am defeated, because my stomach hurts, because I’ve eaten too much again. It was easier to cook more than to cry. I am defeated because my stomach hurts from not having eaten all day, because hunger distracts you from everything.

I am defeated because my problems seem all consuming, while other girls my age just gave birth to their rapist’s child and no one thought to let her choose. I get to choose, and I feel like an asshole for forgetting.

I am defeated because everything, all of it, life, love, myself and knowing how to feed my body, feels entirely beyond me.

I am hopeful  because coming out didn’t fix everything, because the other people that I love always have been and always will be, just a part of who I am. I get to choose the rest.

I am hopeful because I am worthy of love, and I know this even though I sometimes have memory  lapses.

I am hopeful because my natural state is happy and nature abhors a vaccuum.

I am hopeful because today I neither overate nor under ate, but instead focused on feeling good.

I am hopeful because today, I allowed no one but me to dictate my  self worth.

I am hopeful because today, I looked  up into  the bathroom mirror after washing my face, and I noticed the eyes of a girl who got out of bed this  morning despite it all, and is taking good care of herself.

I am hopeful because I woke up on a couch, a friend’s couch, because I currently have no bed of my own. This was better than going to sleep outside Tim Horton’s in -5 degree weather just 10 months ago. It’s been less than a year and I’ve shown myself a perfect track record of raising after each and every fall.

Oh, how the times have changed. The mighty crumble and your spirit shakes but as your muscles twitch they grow stronger. It makes you bolder, if  only by force.

She said to me, “It doesn’t get better. You just get stronger.” She’s half right. You do get stronger, put down deeper roots, and your opinion matters to you more than anything else, especially in regards to how you feel when you catch your own reflection. And that is exactly what better is.

My stomach is still round. I’ll probably overeat again in the next two weeks, and go to bed hungry on purpose shortly thereafter. But those moments will grow further and further in between. How? I don’t know. I find that the more I trust myself, the less I worry about the minutiae.

Dear Buddha Belly. You are much a part of me as my tear-drop shaped breasts and my right eye that is slightly higher than my left eye, and my tattoos and my funny-looking toes. It never occurred to me that I am allowed to love you unconditionally, despite what anyone  says. But it also took me a long time to realise that sometimes, girls like boys and girls and everyone in between, all at the same time. And that’s OK. It’s funny to me, how our reasons and emotions sometimes fail to carry over, even when we hold them close.

It’s the love that matters in the end. The love, and the care and the dignity. You can love yourself and want to become better, all at the same time. What matters is if you go to bed happy at the end of the  day. What matters is accepting responsibility for your happiness without  blaming yourself for that which is outside of your control. Unconditional love doesn’t come with strings attached, you know? What matters is if your self-respect stays intact as you change. I am happy. Right here. Right now. All over.

And you, dear Buddha Belly, are a part of this happy person.

Much body love,

A.Y. Daring

Preface:

It took me two days, and many moments on the verge of tears, but I finally did it. I wrote a love letter to my  belly. I will be publishing it tomorrow, because I want one more day alone with my work. Also, the It Gets Better Project Book is coming out tomorrow, and I think it’d be perfect to use tomorrow to take a holistic look at what it means to embrace who you are.

This letter is one of the most honest and vulnerable things I’ve written in a really long time, both for myself and for this blog. I was worried about writing it. I’m even more worried about publishing it. The last time I wrote super honestly, about my first bruise ever, I went back and edited it an hour later to make it more comedic and less intimate. Why? I dunno- it’s kind of a pattern in my life at this point, and I stopped questioning it a while ago. I’m trying to make a career out of blogging, and I was worried that potential employers and advertisers would dislike the darker parts of my self-expression. It’s unprofessional to get so personal. Except, I want to make getting personal my profession. I read Judy Blume and Penelope Trunk and I look around my immediate world, and I realise that the most beautiful moments are the bravest ones.

I am concerned that I will be judged and that future lovers and friends and co-workers will run the other way if they see that I’m all messed up and my feelings about myself and the world are as jumbled up and weird as they are. For some strange reason though, that just makes me want to press on even more with my honesty. I am reminded of how I felt when Mark Tewksbury (Canadian Olympic gold athlete and the first openly gay man to do so for Canada) confessed in his memoir, to hiring a rent boy every night for several months. He punched him in the face in a fit of fear and anger after the boy said he wanted to end the arrangement one night. I cringed because I don’t like to witness others coming undone any more than I like to see myself falling apart either, but a wall fell in my heart as I peered into the messier side of humanity.

I am opening myself up to the criticism and dialogue that the internet allows, like I did in my impassioned letter to my local public transportation authority, because it’s exactly how I feel and I’d be contradicting myself if I didn’t follow through with my honest expressions. When you dig through layers of hurt and prejudice and shame and anger and sadness, and you come out able to express those things, you do the world a service to not keep that expression bottled up. In other words, when you find freedom, you’re supposed to share it so that others may too be free. Sharing the letter I’ve written with you is how I’m taking my own damn advice. As one of my friends said to me in a tweet the other day, “If it’s true, then you have nothing to be afraid of.” In that case, I have no fear whatsoever.

See you tomorrow.

Much body love,

A.Y. Daring

P.S. I didn’t forget Mindful Sunday. I spent it doing this, but I didn’t want to write about it before I’d finished it.