Enough

(this has been hanging around in Drafts for a while being tweaked / threatened with deletion ... I guess it's time it got up the courage to see daylight)

While doing a shop-dash one evening recently, I ran into someone I haven't seen in 3 years. Their first comment was "Wow, you're looking fantastic! You've lost so much weight". And I know I have - I've been told so by family members and friends, I can see it in the mirror. I can both feel and see bone and sinew on my arms and legs instead of merely padding. I can feel ribs, spine, shoulder blades and muscle. All my clothes are dropping off me - not one thing fits anymore.

Yet sometimes I don't feel like it's enough, like it will ever be enough, no matter how much thinner and firmer I get - and I do still have a ways to go.

I've had an interest in nude photography for ages, I love the form of the human body and the possibilities of what one can capture on film, so I tend to do a lot of scrolling through galleries like this and this (obviously NSFW) for inspiration - examining what others have done in the hope that perhaps one day I can achieve something spectacular from behind my lens (if I can find someone willing to strip of course!).

But there are days where I simply can't look at those female forms, where after scrolling through only a few I have to close the page and go away before I get horrifically sad - sometimes it's too late, and I already am. It hurts to look at them.

I'm past the use-by date for lithe, for young, for dewey-skinned. I will never be statuesque or long-legged, I'll never be fantastically voluptuous in all the right places. I'll never attain model-like beauty, nor be the one who turns heads in the street, the mind-boggling stunner who drives hormones through the roof - that's just a fact of life. I've reached the age where grey hair is overtaking the blonde, where gravity has control of anything not tied up permanently, where life has left it's indelible mark. Seeing perfection on a computer screen (no matter how photoshopped, no matter how young or well-lit) sometimes sends me into a spiral of discouragement.

It's worse on days where other worries weigh me down. Where I'm already fighting stress or fatigue. It becomes the one more straw that can make me feel completely defeated.

And yet Favourite Man tells me I'm beautiful - and hell, he's seen me at my worst, first thing in the morning, or covered in dirt and grime, or sick as a dog. Perhaps I do still have my redeeming factors, even if sometimes I simply can't see them. Or perhaps love truly is blind? :-)

I admit it - it's an ongoing battle for me to see my own lovliness in the face of these images, to acknowledge that perhaps I'm not haglike after all - even if I'm not Them. I've never considered myself as anything spectacular, and years of being dismissed as a second-class human (mere female in a male-dominated world...) have left their residue that I still find myself fighting now and then.

But I also know I'm getting there, bit by bit. Yes, I hit days where I compare myself to everything that pops up on the screen and come away lacking. There are days I just want to hide away and cry.

Yet there are other days where my confidence in who I am as a unique Woman, as ME (warts and all), kicks in and maybe, just maybe, that trumps a lack of outer perfection.

Beauty, after all, fades and sags eventually.