Self Body Image

The Torch Bearers

I hold visions of my mom. I hold onto every time she felt disgusted with her body. Every time she and her sisters called themselves fat pigs. Every Slimfast diet. The unrealistic expectations that determined nothing. The time my dad bought her an expensive evening gown because he saw Vanna White wearing it. My mom never wore it. Even though she’s more beautiful than Vanna White. She didn’t know.

She never knew. She still doesn’t. She knows she’s pretty but it’s more out of compliance to society’s measures. That doesn’t count. 

So I take her disgust and I feel it, because I see myself through the same eyes she sees herself. I see myself the way my aunts see themselves. They don’t see how beautiful they are, so how would I know to see myself as beautiful?

As the next in line, I become the disgust. I live it. I carry it now. It was passed down, from generations beyond generations.

Disgust. Disgust with this body.

So now I take my mom and my aunts disgust, as well as all the disgust and shame from my ancestors, and I lift it all up.

I lift it for myself, for my sister, for my niece, for my daughters…

It’s time.

I replace the feeling of disgust with POWER. Through each memory of passive self-bashing, veiled in humor, I take and I replace with DEEP REVERENCE FOR SELF.

I take the pain behind every cringing mirror-glance since childhood, and I replace it with TRUST AND CONFIDENCE.

I decide in that moment, for all of us, that we will only see ourselves from the eyes of the Truth from here on out. I will no longer contribute to anything other than honoring my body, and having gratitude for surviving my own verbal lashings and abusive constrictions. And yet my body still finds me worthy to be here. There is forgiveness and grace.

I understand now that whenever I placed my worth in my body’s God-given shape or size, I was merely lost….so now I hold myself. As I see that I’ve lost touch with who I really am, I give myself love & attention, and I sit with the disgust until it burns into GOLD.

That GOLD is the Armor of God.

I stop the generational cycle.

“For where there is hatred, let me sow love.”

And so it is. The art of alchemy & the power of who we are.

And our daughters will never even know this existed. For they will be FREE, and we get to be the ones to free them…

and then we realize we wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Not only were we selected for this, we begged to be the ones to get to do this for them, by walking through it for their freedom. 

It comes from the knowing: we were never disgusting. That entire time. Never once. We’ve only always ever been Chosen.

How great thou art. 

Amen.

-Autumn Bouakadakis

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