Falling off the Wagon

Ahh this fat acceptance malarkey is a bit of a process isn't it?

I have fallen off the wagon of fat acceptance. I've been a bit mean to myself over the past few days. You see, I have noticed that I have gained some weight. Ok, I don't know for sure that I've actually gained weight as I don't have scales and refuse to find some to check, but my clothes are a wee bit tighter and I'm feeling sluggish and heavy. So I'm assuming I've gained some weight.

I know why I am having these changes - I'm on holiday. I'm not living my usual breakneck paced lifestyle of rushing around for work and my social life. I'm also out of my routine. So I'm a spending a lot more time relaxing. It's great, I needed it. But I have kind of relaxed enough and am now feeling sluggish and blah.

Of course, the minute I go to put on a pair of pants that were a firm fit before, and now don't fit me, what do I do? All the fat acceptance and gaining strong self esteem slides out the window and I get on hating myself. Yep, I have been berating myself for about two days now. Today I realised that THAT'S ENOUGH.

I was getting ready to go out last night, to see Elvis Costello in concert (my favourite male singer ever) and I had a new dress that I loved, new shoes, and I've just coloured my hair a very bright, intense red. Normally I would be getting ready and feeling all great, but all I could do was criticise bits of myself. For the first time in a long time I even shied away from photographing my new sandals and posting them to Twitter because all I could see when I looked at my feet was how fat they were. Usually I LOVE showing off my shoes.

Thing is, what does it achieve to be hating on myself? I KNOW that it achieves nothing, rationally speaking, but somehow crappy self esteem seems to smack rationality down pretty quickly.

I tried to get over it by taking some photos of my outfit, but found myself taking dozens of pics because I hated every single one that I took. I really thought I'd got over that, but it's silly because the truth is, everyone has days where they feel crappy and are critical of themselves - it's no point being even more critical over that too.

This morning I woke up feeling crud, but kind of turned a corner later in the day as I was getting ready to go out again, and started to feel a bit of a lift.

I have to admit the real lift came when I went to get on a bus into town (I took myself off to a movie) to find that the cute bus driver that I usually only see on the trip home after work had made a completely random shift swap, and there he was on a bus I would never normally take! Not to mention that we've progressed our usual brief flirty hello and goodbye for a 40 minute conversation for the whole bus trip. I believe there may even be an exchange of contact details next time. That's gotta make a girl feel better about herself, hmmm?

Anyway, what I'm trying to say with this post is that all of us will have times that we fall off the self esteem/fat acceptance wagon, that it's a learning process and we have to remember to be kind to ourselves. To do the things that make us feel good, and read lots of positive material (oh the wonder of the fatosphere!) and with time, it does come back.

And in celebration of me finding my mojo again, here is one of the pictures of me in my new dress from last night. Most of the pics are pretty good, now that I'm looking at them through mojo-rich eyes again!

Altered Reality

The old black dog of depression has been plaguing me over the past day or so. I'm sure a lot of you know what it's like, you go from normal to just not being able to see the good in anything very quickly, and you don't feel yourself. Things all feel really bad, and a big sadness just overwhelms you.

I know it will pass, it's just sucky while it's here, you know?

What I did notice is that I'm REALLY hard on myself when I'm depressed. REALLY critical about my body, which I am not when I am in a "normal" mood. Instead of being able to see the positives about myself, and remembering that I am more than just my body, I get really critical and caught up in myself as "parts" rather than as a person.

Does this make sense to anyone?

The difference these days though is that I catch myself doing it. Once upon a time it would have been a total spiral into self loathing and further depression, but after years of professional counselling and working on my self esteem and self image, I can see when I get in that headspace now.

It was looking in a plate glass window at my reflection that I busted myself this time. I was walking back to work at lunch time, feeling crap, when I spotted myself in the window of a bank, and my thought was so full of self loathing, I shocked myself. For a moment there, I really hated what I saw and felt shame about myself. Which is something I NEVER feel outside of the realms of depression any more.

I'm glad I can recognise it now when I find myself thinking that way, because then I can work towards removing my head from that space. But it still sucks when it happens, because it's really painful to think of myself in that way.

How do you deal with the negative self-talk? Are you able to recognise it when it happens?