I’m not sure when I decided I didn’t deserve all the good the world has to offer; when I had made up my mind that I would stay circling around the toilet of life until eventually some disaster took me out entirely. I can’t say exactly when I decided that I deserved to be punished and since no one was offering to do it, I took it upon myself to do the punishing.
Maybe it was the damaging relationships, maybe it was trying to become a woman in a city that will quickly tear you up if you give it one loose thread to pull.
When did I decide that all the blessings I’d accumulated, every accomplishment, all the lovely people I’d grown close with, were an accident and once the universe recognized the mistake had been made, it would all be taken away, so why enjoy it? It couldn’t possibly because I was someone that worked for all the good things in her life; that was worthy of them.
So, if these things are things I am unworthy of, that do not belong to me, then why would I look after them? This includes the body I have been given, whether by intelligent design or the wonder of evolution.
I spent two whole years (if I really counted, it’s probably more) aggressively punishing my body with bad food, cigarettes and alcohol. Swimming in a murky pool of denial created by the poison I willingly swallowed.
Oppositely, I don’t know when I started to come out of it. I know I didn’t start this journey believing I was worthy of my life, all the good stuff. I have only begun to see it as I pulled myself from the depths of damage I was accumulating. I know I didn’t believe it the first time I climbed the hill outside my house, or the first time I chose to eat something that my body would value. I began to say it to myself when I dusted the smoke off my lungs. Acknowledging, even if for a brief moment, that the body I’d been given deserved to be cared for.
Then, today running down a hill feeling the urge to yell with joy, I really felt like I was worthy of all the good stuff, worthy of that feeling you only get when you treat your body with the value it truly has.