then I must be a walking hang up. For years, I have been the poster child for hang ups when it comes to my body and this week I had my annual post-Winter wardrobe meltdown. With the warmer weather comes the packing away of the bulky layers and the unpacking of the summer essentials that put every lily white dimple on display. It's an unavoidable opportunity to face the music and get very honest look at what the curries and Ouma's rusks did to your waistline between May and September. You can dodge the scale but you can't dodge last summer's wardrobe staple.
Like most women I have a few items of clothing that haven't fitted me since I was closer to 20 than 30. Every Spring I pull the offensive pair of jeans and the designer cargo pants out from the bottom of the pile, brace myself, breathe in and try to wiggle my way into one or (if I'm feeling particularly brave) both. Neither pair every zips up with ease and I'm always left making bizarre promises to myself like "I'll never eat a carb again" or "this is the summer that I become a vegetarian"
This year, I performed the ritual once again and was horrified (but not surprised) to get a familiar result – too much jiggle no matter how enthusiastically I wiggled. For a few seconds I felt my inner teenager prepare to launch into a scathing attack on my self-image but then something strange and empowering happened... I shut her up. Yip, I told the little pre-pubescent stick insect to zip her shimmer and shine Labello coated lips and I grabbed the two pairs of two sizes too small trousers and chucked them on the floor – the beginnings of my Spring Clean give to the church pile.
The pile grew and grew as I extended my cleansing to t-shirts and skirts and even very pretty shoes that I never wear because I like to feel my toes when I walk. I felt strangely liberated. For the first time in years I was looking at clothing just as pieces of fabric and not as yardsticks for my many, many dieting failures. The reason? For the first time (ever) I was truly looking at my body as a tool and not as an object.
There was a little voice in the back of my mind that was getting louder, more confident, more willing to speak up, and it was reminding me that this is the body that ran a half marathon, this is the body that does a gazillion laps around the park with Ellie in the afternoons, this is the body that ran around Joburg putting together a dinner for 65 people and stringing 24 Chinese lanterns from the ceiling as décor. It may not be perfect, but it works... and the least I can do is put it in clothing that doesn't cut off the circulation when I sit down to sushi and chardonnay with the girls.
Oh, and I also have a theory that my hip bones are wider than they were at 21... if there's medical advice to back this up please let me know. If there's not, I'd prefer to keep living in at least a little bit of denial.
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