YOU ARE ENOUGH

Have you learned to love yourself, flaws and all yet? Fair warning, this post is going to be longer than what you’ve been getting used to seeing from me. It’s extremely important to your health, so I feel that it’s definitely worth the extra time. I have personally struggled with my weight for as long as I can remember. I can’t pinpoint a specific incidence that started it, but I know that I’ve been an emotional eater since 2-3 grade. Food has always brought me comfort. It’s what I turn to in order to smooth away life’s harshness or when I need to “treat” myself for doing something that I really didn’t want to do. I was overweight from 3 - 6 grade. I got heavier each year. I was the fat girl at school. Which lucky me, meant I got to be the one that was picked on. I don’t recall it ever being outright hostile. They didn’t scream fatty fatty two by four or anything like that. It was passive-aggressive. For example, my group of “friends” in middle school said I would be perfect to be the date for one of their cousins that was coming to town for a school function. I thought it was kind of interesting since I was the worst looking girl in our group, but what did I know, maybe he was a little overweight as well or maybe my personality was just the most compatible with his. As you can imagine, I was super excited getting ready for my “date” with my friends at their house. We were supposed to meet up with the guys at school and I was giddy with excitement and nervousness. As I am sure you have deduced by now, the date didn’t go how I had imagined. The poor middle school boy took one look at me “his date” and literally ran away screaming. Apparently, my friends had been building me up to him as some super hot girl the entire time. He didn’t quite know how to react to the reality of my beautiful 145 pound middle school self. 

Between the summers before 7th and 8th grade, I lost 30 pounds, got contacts, and put blonde highlights in my plain brown hair. The results were so dramatic that some of my teachers from the previous year didn’t even recognize who I was. Of course, now that I was “okay” looking I captured the interest of some guys at school. Thankfully, I was able to find some real friends during this time who would actually value me and appreciate hanging out with me. The thing is, I hadn’t changed at all where it really mattered. I still felt like the same fat friend that had been kept around to be the butt of the joke, to be the heavy weight in the tug of war games, and to hang out with when everyone was already busy. I had all of these insecurities eating me alive. I can think of several different times throughout high school where my response to a guy asking me out was flat out, “why”? Friends that had only known me as my skinny version thought that I was just digging for compliments when I would say that I was fat or ugly. The reality was that every time I looked in the mirror I still saw that fat girl. I learned to bury these insecurities way down deep because no one wanted to hear about them. 

I’ve struggled with being overweight off and on ever since. When I go through stressful periods in my life, I emotionally eat constantly and the weight just packs on. It never occurred to me that my healing journey that I started in 2018 was going to dredge up all these old wounds. I was even more surprised to see that they were still raw festering wounds. The thing about burying emotions/incidents because they are too painful to work through is that then the subconscious mind believes them to still be active ongoing problems. It will implement programs in place to protect us. Most of the time these unconscious programs do more harm than good. For instance, this whole weight problem gave me an extremely low self-esteem. This kept me from pursuing a job/career path that I was actually interested in because I didn’t feel like I would be good enough. It caused me to put up with a lot more ridiculousness job-wise than I should have. I didn’t feel like enough in general. I’m writing to you all today to tell you that I am enough. I am currently at my all time heaviest weight ever and I still love myself and know that everything will work out great because I believe in myself. If any of this resonates with any of you, please know that you are enough. You don’t have to have experienced the same exact scenario as me to relate to this, there are countless reasons why you may have absorbed that incorrect information about yourself. You are enough! You are loved and you are deserving of having your dreams come true. You will never be perfect, so don’t worry about striving for perfection because it doesn’t exist. The beauty is that we are all flawed and yet we can still create amazing things in this world despite and sometimes even because of those flaws. Please work on seeing yourself for the amazing person that you are and learn to love yourself. This is a priceless gift that I have learned through my healing journey and I wanted to share it with you all. I hope that it helps you on your own journey of self-discovery. 

Love always,
Yara Rose