Strength training

There has always been this refrain, in the background.
Lose ten pounds.
Pretty. Dark. Big. Graceful.
Lose ten pounds.
Wide hips. Bad skin. Great hair. Big feet.
Lose ten pounds.

Through years and phases, swinging through all my memory of childhood and beyond, are these words. Physical descriptors, half-pleasant, half-unpleasant. The day I overheard my PT instructor pass a comment about my giant hips, and the same evening that the ladies in the temple gushed over me, asking if I was the dancer scheduled for the evening's performance. The day I was supposed to be sleeping, when a despairing maiden aunt asked my mother- "She's so dark and fat, make sure she loses weight or you will never find a groom." I was twelve. Being told, through acne and awards, top marks and good writing and terrible physics, to lose ten pounds to look good. As if they were all that stood between me and confidence, success and true love.

Confused, I chose to lose the body, in dreams that left me single, and preferably invisible. And when the refrain changed, it only confused me more. Suddenly, it is acceptable to be unhealthily obese and still consider oneself lovely. There are opinions and clothes and people and places that have expanded to fit these sizes, and I am still confused, unsure whether to stand when they call for the petites or the large-framed women, the tall or the average or the perfectly-toned. I am lost in many descriptors- It is only one body, and I don't know where to place it.

I see-saw in self images, the woman's compliments struggling to outweigh the child's hurt, all over an image and size that has remained largely unchanged. I've asked, over and over- Am I beautiful? And never believed the answer yes, because beauty itself was so hard to define, it seemed. Of late, this is my answer- Lift the weight, don't obsess over losing it. Don't avoid the comments, just outrun them.

And I forget them all, in the hardest, most comforting way I have found. Beauty is in strength, in knowing my possibilities and reaching past my toes, and resilience is in beauty, expanding my limits as my arm arches overhead, weights in hand. And beauty and strength come together in the most perfect way possible when I run, in the feel of road and wind and sun.

And to all those words that I questioned myself with, I have an answer that pleases both the child and the woman within.

"Oh you're so pretty!"
Perhaps, but I can run 20 miles.

"You'll never get those jeans past those hips."
Perhaps, but I can still run 20 miles.

In strength and health, in the light of my clear, fatigued mind after a run, my body becomes visible to me, slowly. Just as it is, and it fits me perfectly, regardless of the perceptions its sometimes squeezed into.