This post is quite personal, and it makes me feel naked to post it, but blogging has helped me so much over the last few months, to arrange my thoughts in packages that I can take with me, as personal snippets of strength that combat my insecurities, so I reveal all in the hope that what I say will help me in the future to... in this case, to remember to accept life as it appears to be to me.

As I mentioned in this post, watching myself in the Ignite video was tortuous.

I remember battling with my inner voices before the event, convincing them not to care about how I looked, precisely because of this post, and the topic of my talk - reputation.

So I saw this, dare I say it, ugly version of Ellen on stage.

I spent the following 4 days suffering with the realisation that the girl that I have worked so hard to find attractive staring back at me in the bathroom mirror was not so pretty after all.

It surprised me - I wasn't aware that my years of work to reprogram the script that says Ellen is ugly, had worked. My art teacher recently told me, "God, is that how you see yourself?" laughing in shock, when she saw my self portrait, acting as though I had a poor self image.

But apparently I did see myself as relatively pretty, so the mirror version of Ellen was none too pleased with being told that she was fooled:

"Sorry to tell you Ellie, but you are ugly," I told her, "even though you didn't know I saw you as relatively pretty before - now, you are definitely not!"

So my brain had been filtering the information from the mirror and interpreting it as overly positive? What was the truth? The person I saw on screen was not the one I saw in the mirror. Who was the real one? What was the real interpretation?

Controlling your weight is a convenient shield:

I have spent the majority of my adult life using, "when I'm thinner," as an excuse. "When I lose 2 more kilos, then I will be pretty."

The fact is that whenever I do manage to lose those 2 kilos, the body looking back at me is not the pretty one that I had hoped for, and I start to worry about the weight loss being due to illness rather than lack of eating, and so I endeavour to put on weight again to prove that I am healthy, and feeling fat again, I lose it again to try to be pretty. It's an exhausting cycle, and probably none too healthy but I would imagine it's what most girls do.

Since a meditation retreat in September, and the advice of my French doctors, I have managed to somewhat "stabilise" this weight of mine. So I am not "thin", but I am at my desired weight. The weight I consider healthy.

When I saw Ellen on stage, the first thing that I noticed was that she was not fat, not by my standards.

I think it would have been easier if she was, because then I could use the old familiar excuse: "if I had just lost weight..."

An unstable weight is almost a convenient excuse not to see the reality:

Once you can control your weight, you realise that you cannot control how you look.

It just sits uncomfortably with me. I am used to plans and action and lists: get fit, eat better, take control. Obviously I could get a tan, and use more expensive makeup, get plastic surgery, buy new clothes... but if you get to the end of that road... where else can you turn? What else can you change? What's at the bottom of it all?

My solution:

So not being able to change how I look to any great degree (I decided not to indulge in plastic surgery :) I decided to try and change the way I think about how I look.

Some people seem to think they are amazingly beautiful when they are clearly not, and they build up this huge self confidence that protects them. They believe, heart and soul that they are beautiful.

I forced myself to sit and watch that 5 minute film, over and over again, uncomfortable as it was. I tried stop judging her as ugly with a silly accent and making mistakes, but took note of the good, the smile, the body language, the intensity, the excitement, the passion, the love, the person behind it - I tried to see her as beautiful, hoping that I could break through the discomfort.

It worked partially, enough that I could face that girl in the mirror without feeling sad, but I ended up asking myself what is beauty - how do you even define it, and why the fuck do I even care so much about it?

Acceptance

So this morning, I came across some diaries that I wrote of my time in India, rambling about the women that we had met in our time there, living in their houses with them, having tea with them, and on the train with them.

They had sacrificed MBA degrees and careers and desires to travel and learn and see the world without even thinking about it, to become the woman of the house. They were cleaning and cooking two hours before the men had even woken up, they were on their hands and knees scrubbing the floor, taking care of the family, and they said they were happy, in their definition of happiness.

They had cultivated acceptance - of their caste, their lot in life, their position as a women in a family, their circumstances and the world that they lived in.

It makes me dismayed at my solution. I am embarrassed that I don't know it all, that I am not right, that I expend all of this energy trying to find solutions to avoid feeling the uncontrollability of life.

I know the deal about uncontrollability. I meditate. But in real life, applying theory to feelings and survival instincts... that's a tough one. I still fall into the old traps. I try and make myself see myself as beautiful.

So do I just accept - I see myself as ugly today, or I see myself as pretty today, and get on with it?

It would probably help if I could accept that, "I look how Ellen looks".

She looked like this in 2010, and she will look differently in 2011.

She evolves.

She is just a body that holds a brain that craves control and love and solutions, and she is embodied in this female form, that has arms and legs and can move and walk and talk and laugh and sing badly, and she is an expression of all that is within, and she happens to look as she does.

Oh, to have the strength to remember that. To accept: Ellen, you look the way you look - not bad, not good, just Ellen.