Some people inhabit their bodies. They are completely comfortable with the flesh that adorns them. They don’t want to change a thing. These people are truly free. They are free of the pressures that the world puts on us to look a certain way. I envy them.
As much as I try I am not a fan of my body. I know that like many other people while I am completely on board with accepting others as they are and seeing the beauty that they possess, I just don’t see that in me.
I think a lot of it stems from the fact that I have a picture in my head of what I look like. I think most of us do that, have an internal representation of ourselves. Mine just happens to be pretty damn far afield from what I actually look like. In my head I am my slim 22 year old self. Sure the hair has receded and gone gray and I might not be quite as agile as I once was, but I am close. When in actuality when I wear a shirt I don’t tuck it in like I once used to because the straight line of the shirt covers up how far I am from thin anymore.
The point of this really isn’t to bemoan the changes that time and a life lived has wrought on my ,but to remind myself that I have earned the way I look, every wrinkle and bit of sag, the grey and the age spots, the scars and veins. That all of that means I have done something and learned things and to learn to find the beauty in the imperfections that add up to the person that people see. Because there is fuck all that I can do about most of it and I am damn sure not going to get myself a gym Dom and start frittering away the time that I could be busy living to workout.
I am going to take a page from those I see enjoying their bodies just the way they are, and get on with having a grand old time in the body I have right now.
Won’t you join me?
Michael
P.S. Thanks to the amazing people I follow on twitter for the inspiration for this post.