One more step towards self-acceptance

In a previous post I published this photo below and I want to tell you something about it.

I wasn't going to publish it on the blog nor on Instagram, because I look bigger. It looks like I have a flat chest, a bigger belly, a non-existent waistline. I was concerned that people could think that I gained weight.

I wasn't going to publish it because photos stays there forever — like everything else you put on the internet — and I didn't want that photo to define this moment of my life.

This means that I was about to discard a photo of a perfect memory, of the moment when we arrived to this lake in the Hooker Valley after more than 3 hours of hiking with the kids… because I don't like myself.

Since when has a perceived waistline become more important than a real emotion?

So I gave myself a mental slap, and thought about my entire inner journey to accept my new body as a mom. I thought about all the effort to learn to consider exercise and nutrition as aids to my well-being, and not as tools to achieve a number on the scale. I thought about time I stared at myself in the mirror in the past years looking for something I liked — instead of something I hated — just to learn to love myself.

And I decided that no, it won't certainly be photos — precious memories — to make me take a step backwards in my path towards self-acceptance. I want to keep taking steps forward. Because many years from now, when I look at that photo again, I want to have made so much progress that I don't even notice the things I don't like about myself anymore, and I can just focus just on the memory of seeing my first iceberg in New Zealand with my children and crying of joy.

And no, I still don't like myself in that photo, but I'm deciding that it won't define me. I'm evolving, one step at the time.