This morning I looked in the mirror and thought, dammit,
this bra makes my boobs look small.
And then I thought, no it doesn’t, my boobs ARE small. This bra just doesn’t have the padded bit in it! And then I laughed at myself and rushed upstairs to write this post.
I spent much of my pre-bloody-good-life wishing that I was different than I was. I wished I had bigger boobs, smaller thighs, tanned-er skin, straighter hair, zero freckles and darker features.
And I did my damndest (is that really a word?) to change myself in the ways that I could
– fake tan, ironing hair onto an ironing board (pre-GHD days), slathering on eyeliner and mascara over the top of yesterday’s (extra volume, you see).
And it made no difference at all to how I felt about myself, I was just putting a coat over my insecurities rather than going to the source.
Learning what I’ve learnt in the past few years has served me up some radical life lessons, one of the most striking of which is this simple, yet completely life-changing concept from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle:
Leave it – Change it – Accept it.
When we are faced with any challenge, if we want to take control of our life we have three options:
LEAVE the situation, CHANGE the situation, or ACCEPT the situation as it is.
Everything else is madness.
So in the case of not looking the way I wanted to look – I had three options.
- Leave the situation (I couldn’t, because my body was the situation!)
- Change the situation (I tried but mostly couldn’t unless I wanted to get plastic surgery, which I didn’t)
- Accept the situation (This was my only sensible option, but instead I spent years dwelling on what I didn’t like about what I had).
This is what most humans do when faced with a problem. We don’t leave the situation, we don’t change it, and then we don’t accept it, we just complain about it and spend our lives annoyed that things are the way they are.
This really is madness.
This is your body. It is the way that it is. I have small boobs, I always have, I always will. So the only sensible option is to accept my boobs the way they are. This lifetime, my purpose is to be the way I am and experience life as the person that I am, small boobs and all. Maybe next life I’ll nip back into a new life as someone with double D boobs, but until then – THIS is what I’ve got to work with, I may as well accept what I have!
And so I have. My body is the way that it is, it is the only way it will ever be (except getting old and wrinkly – it’s only going to be downhill from here so may as well accept that too!), so the only sensible thing to do is to live my life as though this is the best body I could ever possibly have.
Because it is! It is the only body that I could ever possibly have!
Now of course you can still work towards being stronger or fitter or slimmer or heavier if you want to, but you still must accept what you have right now. Because dwelling on what you don’t have will not get you want you want, it will just make you unhappy.
Quote from my favourite small German man (I call him Ecky for short:)
“Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for you life, you much choose one of these three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences”.
