HappyComeLucky

This is a bit weird but this is a post to explain why I am not posting.

I chose the title of this post in case anyone has been knocking to see where I have gone.

I know my mental health and body mage posts are read much less than my Sinful Sunday posts but if you are a reader who has followed them, you probably know that not everything is wonderful for me. I started this blog all those years ago as a space for me, owned and curated by me, for me to share images and thoughts. I am so glad that I started it. I don’t have anywhere else that I can be this aspect of me.

If you visit my archive, this blog is Sinful Sunday posts interspersed with a variety of others. It’s almost all about the image. In fact, until these last few weeks, I had posted every Sinful Sunday since I had begun. The only exception being one weekend when I had spent the day with my dad in hospital planning his funeral and then on leaving the hospital had a message to say that an amazing friend had died that morning.

Throughout these years, taking and sharing these images has been really important to me. It has forced me to see me, to look at myself and to think about myself in a different way. It’s probably verging on vanity but it has made me, during these years, have compassion to myself and understand myself as visual and physical entity. I’ve never had a proper relationship with the image of me. I don’t look at myself in mirrors and if I have to, it’s a very targeted gaze. What do I mean by that? Well, I will look at my eyelashes while I apply mascara. I will look at my hair while I fix my parting. I will look at my face near my mouth to check that I haven’t got a smear of toothpaste. I will look at my hemline to make sure it’s OK for the type of place I am going to. Mirrors have always been a tool rather than part of my relationship with myself.

Taking photographs has forced me look at myself rather than just check details. There are images that I really like and that I am proud of. However, it hasn’t really fixed what goes on in my brain. I don’t really recognise the good images as me. They feel like tricks or flukes. As such, there is a part of me that feels as though I am a fraud for sharing them and enjoying the comments.

I can’t be kind to myself about this. When I am, I set myself up for hurt when I am confronted with the unposed reality. The psychological pain of seeing the short, fat, flabby reality when I have convinced myself that I might be attractive hurts too much and it seems to builds scars. It might not be so problematic if I sometimes caught sight of myself and was pleasantly surprised but the reality is that only happens with clever photos and not in real life.

I have lots of ideas for pictures. Lots that I would like to take but the mismatch between me and what I want to see is too big a gulf. The lines, shapes and contrasts that my creative mind wants to capture are not possible with my body. Trying and failing hurts too much and makes me hate my body. I am already struggling with my body as I am losing what limited flexibility I had in my hips and knees. My struggle with that limits me further. I need to engage in things that uplift me, not ones that amplify the insecurities that have been fed by comments since my teenage years – I wish that night had understood how good I looked then – although I never fitted with expectations of beauty and was rarely able to buy clothes easily. Even when I wasn’t as fat, I was too short and too busty.

I used to be able to challenge myself and take those images and share every week. I don’t feel I can any more. I don’t fit. I don’t fit in so many ways. I am protecting myself from the storm of harmful emotions by avoiding the situation. Just like I am protecting myself from feeling isolated and not fitting by not currently logging in to twitter. I’m better alone than feeling isolated and excluded whilst watching lots of other interactions between all the people who do fit.

I’d like to be back but as my physicality makes losing weight nigh on impossible and my hours are too long to fit in the gym, I can’t see what could change to make it work for me again. I’m not closing the door though. There is always hope that my mind may become a safer place.