Love is in The Air

February is the month of love thanks to Valentine’s day so here on Safe Space we wanted to take this theme and run with it but instead of the traditional love of another, we wanted to talk to you all about self-love. In this post you will see what self-love means to some of the team members, how hard it can be to love ourselves in a society that constantly points out your flaws and imperfections, and what actions we take when it comes to loving ourselves and putting our needs first.

Jess: I used to think that people who said that they loved themselves were lying. That’s such a sad statement to write, but it’s true. I was brought up in a society that encourages you to constantly want to change and tells you that you’re not good enough and if you dare to love yourself is quick to shut you down and tell you that you’re being big headed. As women we are taught to be humble and play down our achievements, that nobody likes a show off. Society constantly sends the message out to girls and women that loving yourself is not okay. So yes, growing up I found the idea of loving myself an impossible concept, so much so that I didn’t believe it when people told me that they felt that way about themselves and I find that incredibly sad.

This all changed for me last year when I started following women online who promoted self-love and body confidence whatever your shape or size. These women were bright, vibrant and from all walks of life. They all looked completely different but the one thing they had in common was that they radiated self-love and positive energy, not only for themselves, but for all women. I found their confidence beautiful and I realised that if they could love themselves then I could too. Something clicked for me and when I looked in the mirror I started to like what I saw. I’ve never felt so confident or sexy and yet nothing had changed except my own attitude towards my body. Other people noticed this change in me too and I started to receive so many compliments from the people around me.

Around the same time I also went into recovery for my mental illnesses and started doing things I never thought I would do. This gave me a huge surge of confidence in who I am as a person. It made me feel strong and capable and I gained a new level of self-respect that I’d never had before. This woman I was discovering was a badass and I liked her very much.

Over the past year I finally learned to love myself both inside and out, but like any relationship it’s not perfect. I still have days where I look in the mirror and don’t like what I see and there are still times where I doubt myself and think I’m not good enough but for the most part my attitude towards myself has completely changed. In learning to love myself I have also learned to take better care of myself, to be kind and to treat myself as I would a friend whether that is by giving myself a break when I’m not feeling well, knowing when to say no, or treating myself to a new lipstick. You’re the only person you’re with for your entire life and the relationship you have with yourself is the most important one of all. Loving yourself in a society that encourages you not to is a constant struggle but finding that inner love will give you an aura of confidence and self respect that you will carry with you for the rest of your life that no magazine or mean comment will ever be able to take away.

Louise:

I have a seven inch scar down the middle of my abdomen. It’s red and an ostomy bag sits on the right-hand side.

Scars are the map to my past.

My scars are also the battle wounds of my previous fights. Yep, fights. I’ve been a long-term battle with my body since September 2011. My invisible illness of Crohn’s Disease meant that I secret fought my body both physically and mentally. Most of the mental acceptance of having this invisible and chronic illness has been come from others being unable to see what is wrong with me; they can’t see how ill I am, they can’t feel my pain my guts have given me, they can’t understand how much I wish this wasn’t my life.

I still fight my body but now I am winning not only the physical battle but the mental one. It has taken five years, two big surgeries and multiple wounds to realise that my disease doesn’t mean I love myself any less. If anything, I have grown to appreciate my body and how I see my body because despite having something physical for people to identify my illness with – my ostomy bag and midline scar – I have grown to accept myself; scars and all.

People would consider my flaw to be the fact that I poop out of my abdomen now but I see that as my quirk. It isn’t a normal thing but it is by no means a rare thing either. So many people have ostomies and no one knows because they are concealed under clothing. I show my ostomy when I choose too; it is my little secret. I am proud of my secret and you are privileged if you have seen my ostomy bag. Don’t mistake my secret as a dirty little secret, I am supremely proud of my ostomy because it has changed my life and without it I would be still living a life of chronic pain, or possibly not even be here. I celebrate the fact that medicine has come this far to give me this in order to live a life I am proud of. I love my ostomy; it gives my life purpose. It gives me hope. I keeps me out of hospital. Its taught me that my body is a wonderful thing, despite its differences. I’ve accepted that it might look different, it might operate differently but it is still worthy of love. And I love it, for all that it is, and all it will be.

Lily: Learning to love and accept myself has been a long process that is still ongoing. For a long time, particularly growing up, I hated the way I looked. I hated that I was gangly and tall and I didn’t feel feminine, I hated that my hair was neither curly nor straight but this weird in between frizzy mess. I hated my spots and my braces and my nose. Honestly, I could go on.

Thankfully, a lot of that has changed, but it’s taken a long time. I try to embrace my height as much as possible, but there are still days I find difficult (trust me, clothes shopping when you’re a 6ft woman is not a fun or easy experience). I’m learning to love and embrace my natural hair for what it is despite society telling me all of the different products I could use to make it straighter and prettier and ‘more normal’ (don’t even get me started).

Growing up I can’t necessarily remember hating my personality but I think like many people I didn’t particularly like myself either. I’ve always just spoken without thinking and things have come out wrong. I don’t like a lot of the things a lot of people my age enjoy like drinking and clubbing – which is perfectly wonderful and valid if you do like those things, it’s just not for me. There was a period of time about two years ago when I hated myself for not being like other people my age – for being introverted, for having anxiety, for preferring a night in with pizza and Disney movies to ‘the sesh’ as it’s not referred to.

Over the past two years I’ve come to really start to accept that part of myself, and that it’s okay if I want to do things a bit differently to the rest of my peers. I love my interests and that sometimes I care maybe a bit too much. I know now that I can be a good listener and that people feel comfortable coming to me for advice and comfort and I love that about myself. It’s definitely a process that’s still ongoing, but I think I’m getting there.

Faye:

Only a few weeks back I wrote a post about how at the moment I am struggling to love my body. I keep looking in the mirror and not liking what I see. Cursing myself as my clothes feel tight and just do not seem to fit the way they used to. And of course, on top of that are all the connotations of what being bigger than people leads to and how it feels like I am taking up too much space - literally. However, today I wanted to talk a little bit about how despite not particularly loving my body right now, I do quite like myself. There are times, naturally when I hate my personality and I end up questioning everything I do and whether I am even a nice person or very good at what I do but more often than not, I love me.

This is something that has taken me a long time to do. For years I have struggled to love myself, did not feel that I was worthy of any love, let alone my own. But I have finally come to a place in my life where this has changed and I am so very happy about it because in my opinion, if you don’t love yourself then you will struggle a lot in life - as I did. I’m not entirely sure when or why I changed my mind about myself, but I did and I am glad for it. I love that I know who I am now. I love that I am stubborn, emotional and organised. I love that I am also messy, closed off and easy-going. Because these contradictions are what make me human. I love that I can be high as a kite just on air and that I can make people smile just by being me. I love my laugh and my weird quirks. These make me, me. Now I am not saying that loving myself is easy, there are times when I hate everything about me but it is my love of myself that keeps me alive and keeps me going and that is good enough for me. Plus, if I can’t love myself, who the hell else will?

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Big and Beautiful?

I am a fat girl.

I haven’t always been a fat girl. As a teenager I fluctuated between a UK size ten and twelve, it was only when my agoraphobia developed and I started taking antidepressants that I began to pile on weight. At my largest I was a size 22 and as of right now I am a size 16-18. Since putting on weight I have never really been comfortable in my body and have felt that it is something that I should be ashamed of and try to hide. I’ve avoided the bright and fashionable clothes that I wanted to wear in favour of dark tunics that hide my figure, there are fashion trends that I haven’t tried because I didn’t feel like I could “get away with them” and there are jeans that I’ve bought in a smaller size to entice me to lose weight.

Big and beautiful are two words that you never see together in a sentence and this year I’ve been really challenging why that is. What is it about being a bigger woman that is so unacceptable in our society? After a lot of research and questioning it seems there are two main reasons society tells us that we cannot be both big and beautiful.

1.) Being fat is unhealthy 

2.) Fat people are unattractive

Last week I went to see my doctor for a check-up, he asked me to step on to the scales so that he could update my medical file with my current weight. Turns out in the last few months I’ve lost almost a stone. My doctor, a medical professional, praised me for this weight loss and told me to keep up the good work. He did not ask me how I had come to lose the weight and if he had I would have told him that it was through a month of barely eating anything because my anxiety and depression were so bad and because stress would make me physically sick every day. As far as my doctor was concerned this weight loss was good and healthy, but was it really?

There is a lot of misinformation out there saying that fat people are lazy, that we eat too much junk food and are unhealthy but I have come to learn that that isn’t always true. I can’t claim to have the heathiest lifestyle ever but I do eat well and I do exercise. I eat fruits and salad for breakfast and lunch, I don’t drink alcohol or caffeine and every day I exercise when I take my dog out for a walk or run. I am not unhealthy and I’m not the only person who is carrying some extra weight whilst still living a healthy lifestyle - check out Faye’s brilliant post on the subject here. Assuming that every single fat person is unhealthy is like assuming that every thin person has an eating disorder. Bodies come in all different shapes and sizes that aren’t necessarily influenced by lifestyle. So is being fat always linked to being unhealthy? I’m gonna have to say no.

Body shapes and sizes go in and out of trend as much as fashion. In the fifties society thought it desirable to have a fuller curvier figure like Marilyn Monroe. In the nineties a thin straight up and down frame came into fashion with the arrival of Kate Moss and now in 2016 women are paying money to have the curves in all the right places look that the Kardashians are so well known for. What this tells me is that the “perfect body” is always changing, so doesn’t that suggest that there isn’t one superior body type? That every size is perfect and has been celebrated at some point throughout history? Despite Marilyn, Kate and Kim having very different bodies they all have one thing in common: confidence. They have each stepped out into the limelight rocking their body shapes unapologetically. I think that the confidence in their own skin is what’s desired here, not the actual body type and that the two things often get confused. So are bigger ladies really unattractive? Again, I’m going to have to say no.

Upon realising that the reasons most commonly given on why big can’t be beautiful are totally false and inaccurate I took a long hard look at my own body in the mirror. It was like taking off this lense that we’re all conditioned to develop and for the first time I saw myself for who I truly am and I liked what I saw in the mirror. Before, if a stranger was to ask me how I would describe my body I would say "curvy" or "full figured" to try and soften the image of what my body looks like. The F word was big and ugly and undesirable and wrong. But now I am learning to reclaim what it means to be fat in the same way that homosexuals have reclaimed the word queer and made it into this word that they identify with and how nerdy people have shown that being a geek really just means being smart and passionate. I think it’s time that we did the same thing with the word fat. I’m reclaiming it as my own by being unapologetic about who I am showing that fat means confidence, fat means healthy, fat means happy. When being fat becomes reconditioned in your mind to mean all of these wonderful things instead of what society tells you it should mean it suddenly takes away the power that word has to hurt you and turns it into something beautiful.

This year I have been on a journey in coming to terms with who I am and loving all of me, not just the parts that society deems acceptable. I’ve learnt that it’s okay to love the parts of you that society says are not worthy of love. Flip them the bird and show them that a big butt looks awesome in jeans, that you can rock the latest trends no matter your size, show the fuckers that you are beautiful and most of all worthy of love, self-love, the best kind of love that there is.

I am big and I am beautiful and no matter your body type you are too.

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Pink Power

This week has been a shit week but has reminded me how much Elle Woods is my hero.

She is one badass woman who gives every other woman the chance to feel empowered when really all they want to do is curl up in a ball and cry.

I thought today I’d share my favourite Elle Woods quotes from the movies and musical that might give you a little boost when you’re feeling down or give you some extra motivation when you need it most. I must admit I am a HUGE Legally Blonde fan. I know the movie off by heart and I may have seen the musical twice…

When representing her Delta Nu alumni client, Brooke, Elle brings up a very important fact about exercise:

I just don't think that Brooke could've done this. Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don't shoot their husbands, they just don't.

Lesson learnt here: exercise makes you happy AND can also keep those feelings of hate at bay.

***

When a scheming saleswoman tries to sell Elle a dodgy dress for her engagement dinner:

It's impossible to use a half-loop stitching on low-viscosity rayon. It would snag the fabric. And you didn't just get it in - I saw it in the June Vogue a year ago. So if you're trying to sell it to me for full price, you've picked the wrong girl.

Lesson learnt here: don’t take shit from no one. Stand up for yourself and trust your instinct and own intelligence.

***

Being true to yourself never goes out of style.

PREACH DAT GURL.

***

When Warner realises the error of his ways and comes grovelling back to Elle:

Though I dreamed of this day long ago,

Now my answer is thank you, but no.

Look, I've barely begun; I'm hardly through...

I was living in ignorant bliss,

'Til I learned I could be more than this! (Gestures to her hair.)

And, you know, in a way I owe it all to you!

I though losing your love was a blow I could never withstand...

Look how far I have come without anyone holding my hand.

I had to find my way.

Lesson learnt here: always remember that things will get better; even if it hurts at first, you will find that in time everything falls into place again and you can learn to live a new way. Heartbreak doesn’t have to equal misery.

Basically if you’re feeling shit, get a duvet, a bar of chocolate and watch Elle Woods kick some ass. Cos it’ll make you feel a million times better. Fact. 

I'm off to do exactly that. 

BEND AND FUCKING SNAP. 

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