Anna Rae Gwarjanski Portfolio |
Seven years ago today, I made a transformative decision, one that perhaps changed the trajectory of my entire life. Backing up a little: On January 1, 2011, I made a resolution -- that would be the year I recovered from bulimia. And on January 20, I relapsed. I remember that date specifically, A) because I wrote it down in my diary, and B) because I vividly recall the shame and self-loathing I felt that I couldn’t even make it three weeks without relapsing. I remember berating and mentally beating myself up, feeling so discouraged. But then, the next day, for probably the first time in my life at that point, I decided to forgive myself for not being perfect. Instead of resigning myself to the idea that I would have some sort of eating disorder my entire life, I decided to get back on the horse and keep fighting. July 2012. Another major relapse. I genuinely thought that one was going to kill me. But I discovered I wasn’t totally out of fight yet. I buckled down and kicked bulimia’s ass, once and for all. Ok, that last bit isn’t 100 percent true. While 99.9 percent of the time, I have a positive, healthy, respectful relationship with my body, every so often, bad thoughts come creeping in. For example, the photo above was the first bikini photo I’d seen of myself in a while where I was freaking proud of the way my body looked. I’ve been training for a half-marathon, working to improve my Olympic weightlifting technique, and actually trying to feed my muscles good food, and it’s paying off. I’m feeling really comfortable in my body. Yet, before I posted it, my first instinct was to pull up photoshop and pinch in my waist a little bit, smooth out my lower tummy. Eh, maybe even get crazy and make my boobs a little bigger. I hate that. I hate that I can’t erase the last .1 percent of insecurity. But I’m learning to accept that my recovery is not 100 percent perfect because I’m not 100 percent perfect. And THAT’S OK. Perfection is not the end game here. Self-love is what I’m aiming for, and the way to that is gentle self-acceptance. “Gentle” is not a word that I naturally embody. I’m large, I’m loud, I live hard, and when I’m into something, I’m all the way in. It was and is very hard for me to learn how to be more tender and patient, especially with myself. It took a lot of therapy for me to be able to pick out my soft inner voice among the choir of outside voices screaming at me about what I deserved or what I should feel guilty about, and it took even more therapy for me to learn to tune out those outside voices and actually listen to my inner voice. However, when I listened to that voice, it would whisper, “Hey, you. Yeah, you. Maybe you’re worth compassion. Maybe you’re worth kindness. Maybe the world won’t fall apart if you can’t see your ribs or feel your hip bones. Maybe your friends will still like you if you stay in and go to bed early tonight. Maybe you don't have to pretend to be happy all of the time. Maybe you don’t deserve all this pain. Maybe it doesn’t make you weak if you ask for help. Maybe it doesn’t matter what that boy thinks. Maybe messing up now and then doesn’t make you a bad person. Heck, even if you are a bad person, maybe you’re worth forgiveness.” Slowly, after a few years of listening to that voice, I began to believe her. When I started to believe her, it made me want to stop hurting myself. And, eventually, I wanted to stop hurting myself enough that I was even willing to fail at it -- what happened on January 21, 2011. The self-reflection that came with those failures led me to a deep sense of awe for my body. It’s mine. Despite what I’ve put it through, it’s strong as hell and resilient. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s the only one I’ve got. And, I’ve realized I’m willing to say fuck perfection if it means I get to be fully alive. It was a heck of a journey to come to that realization, but it was worth every single thorny step. Macklemore wrote a song called “Starting Over” that I just love. It’s about his drug addiction relapse and, as a role model for sobriety, how he came to terms with being open about it: “If I don't talk about it then I carry a date / 08-10-08, that now has been changed / And everyone that put me in some box as a saint / That I never was, just a false prophet that never came / And will they think that everything that I've written has all been fake / Or will I just take my slip to the grave? … But I'd rather live telling the truth and be judged for my mistakes / Than falsely held up, given props, loved and praised / I guess I gotta get this on the page.”
I talk about my depression and former struggle with bulimia A LOT, but sometimes I fall into the trap of rose-tinted writing: “A long long time ago I used to be in a really dark place but then I decided to get better and YAY it worked and now I am and everything’s coming up daisies!!!” It’s hard enough to figure out that you’re sick and you need to heal -- it’s even harder to learn that healing is not linear, especially when you think it is for other people. As a society, we don’t talk about our failures enough, so we often feel alone when we don’t get something right the first time. That’s why I wanted to talk about why January 21 is such an important date to me. To some people who read my blog, I’m a “success story.” But I want to be more open about what that story looks like because, as Macklemore sang in that song, “If I can be an example of getting sober, then I can be an example of starting over.” Anyway, I write all that to say, if you made a resolution this year -- specifically a resolution to recover from something -- you’re probably going to fail at it at least once. Frankly, you’re probably going to fail it at more than once. That’s not important. What’s important is that you get up when you fall down. Failing does not make you a failure; failing makes you human. And, perhaps more importantly, failing makes you stronger in the long run, so don't be afraid of it. These hard conversations about failure are just that -- hard. But I heard someone say once that the hard stuff is the heart stuff and the heart stuff is the holy stuff. If you break it down with that equation, failure is holy. And I firmly believe that anything pertaining to grace and holiness is certainly nothing to be ashamed of.
3 Comments
|
About the AuthorConfessions of a failed southern lady. I've got messy hair and a thirsty heart. Writer, photographer, career wanderer. Archives
May 2023
Categories |