When I bought the dress pictured above, I was worried about how it looked on me because it exposed all the things I wanted to keep hidden. The joy of being able to fit into a large was momentarily stunted due to all the other things I wished my body would be. More importantly it was for my birthday and I didn’t want to be reminded of my weight while celebrating. Instead of feeling blessed for being a year older and getting my diabetes under control after just a few years of being diagnosed, I gravitated to all the ways my body has let me down. Which really was just focusing on how I let myself down.
Learning to love yourself is incredibly hard, especially when you are determined to focus on every way your body falls short of desirability. When you get older as a woman, your age is used as a benchmark for what stage of life you should be in, as well as health status: fertile, young, pre-menopausal, mature, menopausal, old. And because of that, after a certain age you start to think of birthdays as deadlines. Which then has you examine what could be preventing you from meeting those deadlines, ultimately concluding that it’s something about yourself, something that you need to change so that you can have the life that is expected of you.
However, speaking as someone who is over 35 and who is single and childless, there is an acute point of exhaustion achieved after constantly thinking of where you should be instead of appreciating where you are. You may even have to think about what it might look like to not meet any deadlines that are dependent solely on your reproductive system. Which if you’re lucky, you might even find yourself shifting to thinking more about what you want out of life and not what your body is on a time clock for. And now from being on the other side of that exhaustion I can tell you letting all of that go is beyond freeing and actually opens up your world to finding things you love about yourself and has you surround your goals around what you want without any influence from society and public expectations. Expectations of which, are nothing new and have greatly influenced women’s decision making for hundreds if not thousands of years. Furthering the notion, that these expectations lead us to judge ourselves unfairly just so we can attempt to meet deadlines that are not 100 percent up to us.
All of this is not to say anyone over 35 should abandon all hope of having a family or being married, but instead allow some room for yourself to think outside of those parameters and focus on what you want for just you. Birthdays should be a celebration of where you are and not a checkpoint for how many eggs your ovaries has left. I’m hoping that at this age by letting go of what is expected of my body I learn to love it and appreciate how far it has gotten me. Despite the constant ridicule and carelessness I have subjected it to, it still shows up for me.
My body has been through every step of my self love journey with me, and it shows in every curve, stretch mark, and body dimple. Going forward I hope that I can remember to praise my body’s resilience and to continue to say yes to the dress because it deserves to be showcased.
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