Hey all! I hope you all had a marvelous Thanksgiving filled with good food and good company. I, myself, ate my way into a dressing induced coma that last for about an hour or so. Mmm, Thanksgiving. All the laughs and good times that I shared and experienced on Thanksgiving made me start to self reflect.
I've been neglecting the blog; let's just call it what it is and be done with it.
I have been neglecting the blog. Between keeping up with school, trying to fix things with my partner after a particularly bad rough patch, and my Depression and Anxiety rearing its ugly head at the most inconvenient times I have been -in short- completely, utterly, and ridiculously unmotivated and uninspired to write anything for you guys. It sucks, but it happens. Life happens. Life is full of as many trials and tribulations, fails and fallings, and other such nasties as it is the joyous, wonderful, breathtaking moments that make us love the Land of the Living.
Life knocks you down a lot. It happens to everyone and when it does, the best course of action is to just brush yourself off, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and get back up. Though, you may have to get back up several times before you actually stay up, and staying up sometimes can be really hard; it is even harder, I think, when you suffer from Mental Illness. However, at some point, no matter how difficult; you do have to get up.
So here I am, world. I am dusting myself off, pulling myself up by my stylish bootstraps, and thrusting myself back out into the public eye knowing full well that I may, and more than likely will get knocked down all over again.
So, in the spirit of the holidays -a time where we are often flooded with just as much joy as we are sorrow- I've decided to share with you all something that has been bugging me while mixing it together with something that I am thankful for.
I have saggy tits. Tianna (yeah, yeah, I know, you hate when I call them that, but it's my truth, you know?). My partner particularly hates when I say this, if you couldn't tell, But, whatever I call it, I look down at my breasts a lot of the time and I'm unhappy with what I see. Sometimes, more often than not -especially as of late- I feel like they look like sad, squished pancakes. I have cried over my own boobs before: literally, and I mean that in every sense of the word.
I have cried over my boobs. On my journey of self love and body acceptance, my boobs seem to be this gigantic, fleshy, wiggly hurdle that I just can't bear to jump through. I used to not feel like this all the time, but you know how the mind works. I started comparing myself to other women a lot. I know it is foolish, I know that it is pretty much everything that the Body Posi movement stands against but that doesn't mean that some days it isn't the hardest thing in the world.
That is why, this Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for my partner. Despite all the love and self confidence that I have gained over the years, I am still very much so, at the beginning of my body acceptance path, I have such a long way to go and the thing about my partner is that she keeps me grounded in that regard. She recently went through her own stint of booby hate and is slowly coming out of it, making leaps and bounds compared to my run-of-the-mill, day at a time progress with loving my own fun bags.
We just talked about this topic last night while I sat on her bed, staring down at my chest in dismay, describing the space between my breasts as a "gaping, cavernous gap." She told me that I needed to stop looking down on them, for one thing, literally and figuratively. Most of the time that I look at my chest, and most of the time that I hate it, I'm looking straight down at them and all I can notice is all the things I wish I could change. She recommended looking at them in the mirror, facing my breasts from a frontal view to really see them for all that they are worth. I tried that this morning and even though I'm still generally unhappy about the whole thing, I'm a little happier than when I went to bed last night.
Along with her list of suggestions, she also recommended that I start to lotion or oil them more to increase physical contact and gain a familiarity of my own body. I haven't done that yet, in all honesty, I think I'm too afraid. I've spent so much time lately hating this one specific piece of myself that touching them that much seems daunting and terrifying. What if I do all that and I'm still unhappy? What if I do all of that and still can't bear to look at this one piece of me?
I don't want to be like that. I honestly don't, I wish that I had never started to feel the way that I do to begin with, but you know, comparing will screw you over every time. You see, the thing that I love and am thankful for about my girlfriend is that she knows how insecure I can get. Despite the confidence that I have, despite the fact that my Pete is in my possession -though not firmly in my pocket where it belongs- my Depression and Anxiety can make me neurotic as hell. Yes, despite my loving, caring disposition, despite my determination and ambition toward my body positive goals; in a secret dungeon of my soul is a table which holds enough vials of neuroticism, anger, and insecurities to morph me into the stereotypical "crazy girlfriend" and every so often, an asshole cat jumps up on that table and decides to knock one of those vials over until the contents spew forth from my mouth.
My girlfriend puts up with it. Doesn't mean she always likes it, doesn't mean she always handles it as best as she could but she handles it. It means the world to me. Even though she won't say it, I know that it is probably something that she doesn't particularly like about me. But still, day after day, year after year, she somehow find a way to put up with it. She's a pretty girl, she has options, she could leave me with no problem. But she doesn't. Despite all that we have been though, and for the sheer unwanting of putting my business out there lets just say we have been through a lot, but, she is still here with me. She's still here at 5am when I'm crying over my boobs and looking down on them with hate, she's still here telling me to love them and by extension love myself more. She's still here to love me, or love parts of me when I don't particularly love them myself. and well....
who wouldn't be thankful for that.
