This was a quote from someone- maybe even not about bodies…
Accepting anything would be defeat.
With body acceptance, is that how it feels? Some of us are so competitive, acceptance feels like the enemy. It’s like the kid who is cleaning her room when mom yells up to her “make sure to clean your room today!” and she immediately stops putting things away. I’m not going to accept YOUR directions to tell me what I know needs to be done! For this kid, a clean room wouldn’t be a win, self-determination would have been the win. All is lost when mom suggests it. Accepting that a clean room was mom’s idea feels like defeat.
Is this how it can be with our bodies? This thing we walk around in, that we didn’t pick out ourselves… How is THIS body to represent me, when I would have chosen something quite different to represent myself physically today? I had a different idea about how I would present myself to the world. This body is not it.
How the world sees us has such an impact on how we see ourselves. How I want to show up to others is important. If we didn’t care about how we affect other people, we might behave much more poorly. Social awareness sometimes keeps us in check. And yet, how much control do we actually have over how we affect others? How we are seen by others?
American poet, painter, and social activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti said this to his diary on July 11, 1999:
And now I reach the top, where an iron door to the flat top of the tower is locked & barred. . . . I sit on the highest step, but there is no shade, no refuge from the burning sun. . . . I rise to the railing and wave my white panama at the distant people, friends and poets, Italians & Americans. I wave & wave, but there is no sign that anyone sees me. (No, said someone later, we didn't see you.) What does it mean, then, if we climb the heights and no one observes it? What does it mean when a song is sung but nobody there to hear it, a poem spoken and no one to hear it, a painting done but no one to see it, truth spoken but no one to apprehend it—and after we are all gone, the sea will continue its roaring? A Beethoven symphony crashing on the shore in a storm and no one to hear the end of time.... Plato said the ideals and concepts such as Truth or Beauty still exist even if no one is there to think them; still the silence of a Chinese vase or an Egyptian frieze exists, their figures still alive in the void.
~Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Sometimes, working so hard to accomplish and achieve, we aren’t even seen at all. Can you imagine scaling a mountain, so thrilled to reach the top, but no one knows you did?
What does it mean, then, if we climb the heights and no one observes it?
Journal on these questions, or talk through them with someone you trust:
-When is a time when you did something you were proud of, but either it wasn’t seen, or it was seen and you didn’t get the recognition you expected?
What feelings arose when that happened?
When you feel these sorts of feelings, what does it make you want to do?
Think of another time when you had to accept something you didn’t believe you deserved. Does this bring up different feelings that when you weren’t acknowledged or recognized? How is it different, if it is?
How does what you’ve written affect your perspective on yourself? Your body? The choices you make in relationships?
Acceptance of life circumstances and body acceptance are in the same pot. Our ability to accept what is gives us the ability to move forward positively. Whether or not life isn’t fair. Accepting something different from what we’d have chosen can feel like defeat, but feelings aren’t facts. It is possible to continue onward and upward even when we don’t get what we want.
