My Body Is Doing Its Best and It Deserves My Forgiveness

I am working toward loving my physical body in a way I have never been able to before.

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I want to feel gratitude, appreciation, and admiration for my body, and I want to feel sexy, desirable, and beautiful. I want to feel so many positive emotions when I look at and think of my physical form, but unfortunately, I usually feel like my body and I are constantly at war with each other.

I deal with chronic illness and chronic pain, and it makes loving my body even more difficult than the societally-induced body image issues that so many of us deal with already. Loving a body that is actively causing you physical daily pain and stress because it is genetically different from a “typical” person’s body is a different type of challenge than the hell of trying to overcome accepting you don’t look like society’s attractive “ideal” woman.

Trying to love a body that you feel somehow hates you is… exhausting. I am exhausted from being in nonstop pain, from trying to operate with constant fatigue, from taking multiple medications a day, and from the heartache that comes with knowing that this is not temporary. This is forever. This is my state of being.

This is my life.

I am acutely aware that all of this is extremely valid. I am also acutely aware that my body itself has no malicious agenda, no evil plan, that I was simply born with a genetic defect that’s caused me to have many health issues. That, however, doesn’t make me any less angry.

Have you ever been hurt by or angry with someone who not only had no intention of harming you, they were just kind of moving through life in the most benign, typical way, and had no idea they even harmed you at all? Like a person who accidentally cut you off on the road because you were in their blindspot?

It’s kind of like that.

Learning to love my body is going to have to begin with learning to forgive it for being born exactly the way that it was. My body is not sentient, my mind is, and it didn’t get to choose to have a genetic disorder, it was just made that way. It was made that way, and my consciousness was plunked down into it, with no choices for either.

I know trying to somehow both personify and dehumanize my body at the same time is complicated, but just go with me here.

My body was in the womb, creating itself, doing what little unborn bodies do, but it had the “wrong” blueprint, and it made itself the best it possibly could. How could I possibly be angry at it for that? I still am. But it did its best.

I’m not mad at it for doing its best, I guess I’m just angry that I have to deal with the faulty outcome. Any contractor can tell you that if you build your house with flawed blueprints on an unstable foundation, your house is eventually going to crumble.

My house is crumbling around me. It’s hard not to be frustrated with that.

I am doing my best with the body that did its best to build itself into a stable and safe shelter for me, I’m just frustrated, exhausted, and I pray one day for a cure.

Meanwhile, the most important thing that I can do to move my mindset toward loving my body, the vessel that carries me, is to forgive it for being imperfect, forgive it for not having the right information, and appreciate it for blessing me with its best.