I started to write poetry again. I have always found that the easiest way to release my pain was to put my pen to paper and write until the words died from my lips and the tears stopped falling from my eyes.

In the fall of 2020 after grieving for the loss of a loved one I took a look back at my poetry notebook and was amazed at two pieces of poetry I wrote- the pages back to back. The only thing is that these pages were written on six months apart.

In the first piece I can feel my self-doubt and body hate, while in the second piece I stand up for myself against myself. I would love to say that I have achieved the confidence that I tell myself I will have moving forward in the second poem, but I haven’t yet. I am a re-occurring theme of
trying to forgive and love myself. And I suppose by sharing my stories here and those of women everywhere is my way of keeping myself accountable to keep working on self love.

However, I felt a strength re-reading these and the juxtaposition between the two. It gives me confidence that my momentum is changing, that I can forgive myself for the things I blamed myself for.

July 2019

How can a girl whose stature is a house of stone have walls of glass?
How can she be invisible with a width she cannot hide?
How can she forgive herself for the mistakes she has not made yet blames herself regardless?
How can she break the bars of the prison she locked herself into?
How can she love so fiercely and wide yet often feel empty inside?
How can a girl set her shoulders back and stare at her reflection and repeat hallow words she does not mean:
I love me
I love me
I love me.
How can this girl not learn to see– How can I not be; simply, blissfully, happy.

February 2020

For too long my heart has been heavy with hate.
Hate for myself—for not being able to fit into a size two, or four, or six, or even eight. Hate for myself for looking different than the other third grade girls.
Hate at myself for always being on the outside of my friend group—no matte how much I desperately tried to work my way to the inside… the tail end of anything I wanted to be part of.
For too long I’ve cried about every inch of my imperfections.
Every angry red scar, every roll, every outfit that looked perfect on display but so lumpy on my body… For too long I held hate in my heart for myself, a corrosion that ate away at me.
A negativity that paralyzed me. A insecurity that starved my life from love, from friendship, from happiness.
And now I still struggle but I am learning to say FUCK YOU.
Fuck anyone who thought I was less of a person because my body was more.
Fuck you for thinking my heard and my mind and my spirit are damaged by the shell of flesh that I wear.
Fuck anyone who tries to tell me I am not worth it or that I won’t be.
And fuck me for believing them!
Fuck those who don’t believe how great I’ll be and fuck me for getting in my own way.
My time is now and I’m not backing down anymore.

December 2021

I would like to say that everyday since that last poem I have been active in my self love journey.
Unfortunately, like mentioned above, that is not the truth. Some days I remember to be kind to myself and to forgive myself for the blame I’ve placed upon my body and decisions. Some days I remember to tell myself I am beautiful and spend time self reflecting on what makes me amazing.

However, other days I still look in the mirror or at the scale and sob. In the past nearly two years since I wrote that last poem I have had the biggest struggle with my body I have ever faced. I gained even more weight and ended up at the heaviest I have ever been. After finally hitting breaking point I saw what felt like the 100th specialist about my body and the changes that were occurring despite a healthy exercise routine and diet. It was finally through this that I learned I was allergic to a laundry list of foods including dairy, gluten, rice, almonds, egg whites, soy and more.

My inflammation levels were off the charts. For years I had been actively gaining weight while eating what would be a healthy diet for most—except for me I was fuelling my body with my inflammation foods. I am still working on my journey with this full overhaul of my diet and am finally beginning to see results.

And while my goals going forward not only include focussing on my specific health needs, I am really trying to put an active effort into accepting who I am and my body in every stage it faces.

I do believe that it took me hitting the point I have at my heaviest, in my largest dress size to date, to understand that what I really want is to be healthy and love myself more. I tore myself down everyday when I was a size 10-12 for years, only for me to realize that a body I despised at the time is now my goal body for myself.

Hitting this realization made me look down memory lane. It is so hard to look back at all these memories where I remember criticizing my appearance and body—thinking I wasn’t worthy because of it. All I want to do today is hug the girl in the photos and tell her she is beautiful, she is enough, she is loved.

The earliest I remember being aware that my body was different from that of my friends and classmates was in the third grade. In retrospect I grew up going to a small school with not a lot of body diversity. In fact my entire friend group were all lean and thin, some short as well, which made me feel massive as I was tall and broad. It was at this age I began criticizing my body in pictures and compared to that of my classmates.

I used to be a synchronized swimmer. I would envy the girls at swim competitions that looked every bit the proper athlete in my mind in their beautiful swimsuits. I wish this girl believed those closest to her when they told her she was strong and talented. In the photo in the mirror you can even see a picture of celebrity dancer Julianne Hough pinned up—I kept photos of beautiful thin celebrities posted on my mirrors as ‘motivation’ while most days they only managed to show me how I didn’t match up. I wish I could go back and tell myself that I don’t have to be anybody but myself and that is enough.

After facing body shaming and bullying throughout elementary school my confidence in myself was crippled going into junior high. I remember 80 per cent of my first Mexico trip being occupied with how others would view my large body and thinking of tricks to hide it. It hurts to look back and see myself physically trying to hide myself in some of these photos, spending more time criticizing my appearance than enjoying the beautiful vacation with my family. A trend that will continue to plague me for many years to come.

I want to scream at myself when I remember how cruel I was to my high school self. I started to give up on the fun fashion I pursued in junior high to try and blend in better in high school, because having a “larger” body already made me stand out enough. I was stunning and I had convinced myself that I was ugly and unloveable. Something I know realize was largely influenced by the current media and body standards at the time.

I remember facing the same issues I held onto in Mexico on this family vacation to Disney World and Universal Studios. I was visiting the literal location of my dreams— Harry Potter World, and I was still plagued by the idea that I would look horrible in all of the photos of what was at the time, the happiest day of my life. I wish I had treated myself with more kindness, something that would have helped me have the confidence to put myself out there more socially when I went to university. At the time I despised how these photos looked, and really how I looked from 15 to 17-years-old. Now the only thing I see that I don’t like looking back at these photos is the fact that I didn’t properly brush out my curls (if you know, you know).

In my first few years of university I thought I had figured out what body acceptance was, but I was wrong. I equated my worth for myself and my love for my body with the successful weight loss I had. As soon as I gained that weight back I lost that faith in myself. I holed myself up in my room and cried for hours after my sister’s graduation because of how I looked in the photos, when I should have been helping her celebrate.

The point of sharing these photos and memories I had connected with them wasn’t to try to make others see what I felt in those moments, but rather to share that I wasted so much of my life hating my body. I was selfish in moments when I couldn’t be present because I was consistently worried about my appearance, from adjusting my clothing constantly or breathing a certain way to try to disguise that I had a stomach from other people.

I believe that the majority of us can look back to points in our life and wish that we could give our past selves a hug. I refuse to move forward not giving myself the empathy that I didn’t give to the insecure girl growing up.

It is not an easy journey, and I doubt I will ever stop learning. But I hope that my sharing my struggles and journey with everyone, and opening the talk on body standards and societal beauty standards across the world and the major impact that it has on all aspects of an individuals life, from social to economic that this topic will become less taboo. I think it is time to be open and bold with our discussions about not fitting the mold.

I want to tell our bold stories that are defining our bold lives because we aren’t the standard but rather stand out— and that is what BoldLines is all about.

I am excited for this journey to begin. Welcome to BoldLines.

Cheers,
Shaela