lovely

last week someone told me i was lovely.

about a year ago i wrote a blog about my body... about appreciating and respecting this body of mine that had just cycled over 2000km down the west coast of america. the moment i hit ‘publish’ on that blog post i began a familiar descent into doing exactly the opposite of what i had promised myself i would do. it was like the time i said i wasn’t going to eat fast food for the rest of the tour my band was on in america... only to lead the entire band into a chinese buffet some fifteen minutes later... my promises cannot be trusted it seems. as soon as i published my blog proclaiming to the world that i loved my body, i began to loathe my disproportionately large thighs, and figured that the best way to silence the screaming voices in my head was to engage in several sessions of lamington abuse... that will make it all better. i told the world i had figured this weight/body image thing out, only to find myself straight back in the dreaded cycle of yo-yoing weight and self-loathing.

then someone told me i was lovely.

in the wise words of one of my feminist icons – rizzo from Grease – ‘there are worse things i could do’. admittedly, she was talking about having sex with lots of boys and i’m talking about being intimately involved with more than my fair share of caramello koalas... but you get the picture (i hope). it could be worse. i could be really mean... or void of compassion... or a collingwood supporter. but my thing... my drug... my problem... is that every day i have to try and convince myself to like (dare i say love) my body. and it’s silly and i hate that i waste energy on it when there seems to be so many legitimately terrible things happening in the world around me. people are dying of starvation, living in abusive relationships, suffering under oppressive regimes, getting bombs dropped on their houses, and continuing to support collingwood. i know i’m silly and i dislike myself for it...

and yet, last week, someone still told me i was lovely.

i’m almost certain they weren’t referring to my body when they called me lovely, but i guess that’s the point isn’t it. the two aren’t connected... and yet in my brain i have allowed them to become so inextricably linked that i find it impossible to believe i could BE lovely when i feel as though i don’t LOOK lovely. i can believe it for other people, but most definitely not for myself. that’s messed up.

the fact remains: someone told me i was lovely.

i have thought about it, and felt uncomfortable about it, and told myself it couldn’t be true... but to settle there would mean that ‘the someone’ was a liar... and the thing is, they can’t possibly be a liar because they are quite lovely themselves.

mutafela: a lovely kid i'm going to be hanging out with in zambia next year