battle wounds.

i have been searching the internet, books, and magazines for a few months now on ideas to help me accept a flaw. you can find alot of inspiration on accepting yourself in pop culture but would you believe i did not find 1 ARTICLE on accepting this flaw? so here i go...trying to talk myself into accepting and being at piece with a part of myself that i see everyday, that i have beaten myself up about for a while and that i am very very ashamed of.



i have...stretch marks.



what i have found in my research is every "cure" in the book for these lovely lines. every home remedy...every lotion, herb, mineral, and treatment. but quite frankly, i am not in the financial position to spend hundreds of dollars on experimenting with things that may or may not remove the new artwork on my body.



do i like them? no. do i wish they would disappear? yes. do they make me self conscious? absolutely. am i sick of being mean to myself because of them? FOR SURE.



so this is an attempt to justify them and to make it ok. please excuse the cheesiness of this blog, but hey, looks like im the ONLY one to attempt this...one giant leap for womankind...



i spent a little less than the majority of my life trying to shrink my body down. i dont even want to calculate the hours that i have spent agonizing over every calorie that i put into my body and strictly punishing myself for exceeding what was acceptable. did i have flaws at my lowest weight?

yep.

i had the driest skin youve ever seen and no moisturizer worked...trust me, i tried them all.

i had scabs all over my mouth like some poor child from a 3rd world country. but i am pretty good at the art of makeup and covered up most of those things...so did i look good in pictures?

sure did.

looking back at those pictures(they are few and far between) do i remember what was happening when they were taken?

...no...

it is interesting to me that we have developed all of these "accepting your body" campaigns (i am reminded especially of tyra banks and her pathetic excuse of a show). have you ever looked at the girls in those campaigns? they are beautiful. the only thing different about them is that they might be a size 6 instead of a 00. have you EVER seen stretch marks on one of those girls? i havent...

i have cellulite. i have stretch marks. but i can eat a whole meal without throwing up afterwards. my mind is free to think about everyday things without being clouded with numbers and lists of the calories i have eaten in a day. i can sleep on my stomach and not wake up with bruises from my hipbones. i have a full head of very thick hair. and swimsuit season? i may not have the best body on the beach but i can jump and swim and play and not worry about drowning because i passed out or got too many leg cramps.

i have heard alot of mothers complain about stretch marks after giving birth. i say EMBRACE them...your body housed a CHILD for nine months...and your skin allowed your body to stretch in the way it needed to to protect your baby and allow it to grow. at the same time...*big sigh*...i made my body shrink in a way that was not natural for so many years . my body was never meant to be that size. my stretch marks didnt come from treatment or from my meal plan...i first noticed them after residential. ironically, it was then that i finally relearned to eat like a normal person. NOT like someone in recovery, following my meal plan. but to eat what i wanted when i was hungry. this is an incredibly liberating concept. feeding myself what i felt like eating when i needed to....and when i finally allowed this to happen, my recovery really took off. and if having a few lines on my body is the price i have to pay for that, then so be it.

so my stretch marks...yeah they're kind of ugly and yes i will probably try a new cream here and there over my lifetime...but hey, my mind had to grow ALOT to get me to this place, and i guess my body was just catching up. so i would like to thank my skin for allowing me to grow the way i needed to to recover.
i fought a war inside of my mind and body for 8 years.
i dont have stretch marks...i have battle wounds.