One Size

Maybe doesn't fit all

What if

What if there are no one size fits all

Answers

To how to be

Healthy

Happy

How to

Build society

I want to talk about legs for a minute. Mine in particular. They were never quite long enough for the way pants are made. I could never, as a child find jeans that fit right in the waist that also fit right in the legs Between the ages of 11 and 13 the phrase, “Figure skating is life, the rest is just details applied to me, and my legs.” For the final year of my life as a figure skater, I lived away from home half the week to train, living with a Mormon family. I got Oksana Baul’s lessons when she found herself - er, not able to get up on time for them. I had already developed really strong quadraceps in the previous year or so. I didn’t like them. Other people at my home rink admired them. To me they looked like turbo engines rather than the graceful elongated legs I longed to tout as I glided on ice or walked around in my rubber skate guards, boots laced up and ready to go for the next hour of training. I wanted at all costs to avoid criticism from Galina, my coach, so when I heard her tell a girl who looked perfectly healthy that she had to lose ten pounds before she could compete, I want on the preemptive war against any possible extra body fat. I quickly developed body dysmorphic disorder. Galina rewarded me for it. As I ate less food and more aspartame yogurt, she said, “You look like PRINCESS, (Insert slavic accent.) As I’ve written about previously, it took an older skater from back home, where I still skated sometimes to save me from the precipice of something more serious: She told me I used to have a perfect body, “But now you just look lanky.”

I have been reflecting on what self-acceptance means. Imagine if I had said, inside my own heart, if not aloud to Galina, “I am such a Princess, that I do not need to please you.”

Imagine if, when my father criticized me incessantly for the most mundane and unintentional things, as well as misunderstood, and thus mischaracterized my entire being on the most important of things, I had simply seen with compassion that he was reacting from the lenses of how his interpretation of my behavior hurt him due to his previous wounds and insecurities?

I would not expect that of myself as a little kid, aware as I was in some ways beyond my years - but what if I could go back and give that little Wisdom Diva that extra bit that she didn’t have back then - that missing bit that for so many years I’ve known intellectually, but that is beginning to come into view within my emotional body in a new way?

May you know the gift of self-acceptance.