What a Waste

5 years. 8 months. 3 weeks. 2 days. 12 hours.

No, that’s not a countdown to some magical, tropical vacation or a retrospective recap of the time I spent in a shitty job or a toxic marriage.

I actually wish it were as meaningful as any of those things.

Instead, it is a reckoning of sorts. It is the first step in facing the reality of the years, months, weeks, days, and hours I’ve wasted, consumed by a single task, dedicated to nothing other than changing my body.

And maybe that number doesn’t hit you the way it hits me, but if it helps, I can break it down a bit to give you some perspective. 

Let’s do days. Days feel more tangible. Just a touch over 2000.

That’s 2000 sunsets. 

2000 chances to wrap my arms around the people I love. 

2000 invitations to make myself one of those people.

Or how about we break it down into minutes.

2.8 million. I said million.

And minutes might be small, but they’ve also been known to pack a hell of a punch.

My life is filled with memories when a minute stretched into an eternity:

Like the first time I laid eyes on each of my children.

Or the day my divorce was final.

Or the night my daughter almost died.

Or the moment I married my wife.

Eternal minutes, 2.8 million of which I had sacrificed at the altar of female thinness, only to be handed a painful lesson in female obedience instead.

And maybe all that wasted time was easier to swallow when I was younger, but as I sneak into the second half of my life, I am heartbroken about what I have lost as a result of this pointless pursuit. I want that time back. I want all of those dinners I missed with friends because I “couldn’t afford the extra calories.” I want all of those days I spent dragging my littles to the gym because I had to make up for the pizza from the night before.

I missed 5 years of living. 8 months of laughing. 3 weeks of napping. 2 days of loving. 12 hours of playing..

So that I could figure out a way to make sure there was less of me in the world.

What a waste.

But since I can’t turn back time, I know only one way forward:

To dedicate the time I have let here to building a world where every BODY belongs. 

When The Beautifull Project was beginning to come together in early 2018, I really had no idea what it was going to become.

I knew I needed to write. 

I knew I needed to heal.

I knew I wanted my daughter to know her body differently than I had known my own.

But I didn’t know if any of this would matter to anyone but me. I didn’t know if it would matter to you.

I had to reconcile with the reality that it didn’t matter if it mattered to you. It mattered to me, and that had to be enough for me to move forward.

Over two years later, I know now that the invitation back to our bodies is an invitation important to every BODY. 

Because the world is more than it used to be when you are all of you in it.

And that’s the kind of world that matters to me and you and every body in between.