Owning It

So the first thing I did on my 32 Before 32 list was to start this blog.  If you know me this might not seem like something new or a stretch for me.  I've been freelancing writing for about five years now.  I've also had different blogs in the past.  I had a blog when I first moved to NYC that was more for sharing fun experiences I was having exploring my new home with friends and family.  I also had a blog that I used a pseudonym for about my weight loss experience at the time and I had a very underground blog that was more of a catalogue of bad dates that I went on.  After a couple of years or several months I'd get bored with these projects and abandon them.  None of them felt like me or what I wanted to get out of a blog.

So I wanted to challenge myself to start a blog without really having a theme or specific purpose in mind.  The only rules I gave myself was that it had to be in my voice, had to be completely honest, and I needed to be open to where this may take me.

During the past couple of weeks I've been visiting my little sister.  She still lives in the house we grew up in and during this visit we've been going through a lot of photographs and unearthing items we haven't seen in years.  This simple task has been very bittersweet.  As we go through photos I've been making copies for an album for me to keep in my apartment in New York.  I noticed at first that while I was grabbing photos of family members, high school and college friends, etc I was picking very few photos that included me. The reason is simple I was an overweight kid and it wasn't until I moved to New York and really found a nutrition and fitness lifestyle that worked for me that I slimmed down to a weight that is health and easy for me to maintain.

I'm really happy with how healthy I look and feel, but there are still image issues that I struggle with.  I can fixate on things that I perceive to be flaws like not having a flat stomach, flabby upper arms, hair that I never does what I or hair products want it to do, etc.  When people complement me on my looks there is a part of me that doesn't believe them and thinks that I they are just being polite or at really low times I think they are really making fun of me.  When I go on dates there is a part of me that thinks I can't get too intimate because if I show a guy old photos of me he will dump me.

These inner demons of low self esteem and self doubt are something that I don't want to hold me back anymore.  I could take some lessons from that chubby girl I used to be.  She was ballsy, marched to her own drummer, and was fearless about just being herself.  Fortunately she is me so I just learn how have the same confidence with a different exterior.  I really do believe it is the inside of a person that counts so I need to apply the way I feel about other people to myself.