Bodies are weird aren’t they?

We’re just given one when we’re born, and it’s supposed to last us this whole lifetime.

It’s supposed to function & operate as best it can, in conjunction with how we treat it.

It’s only been this year that I’ve felt even close to being comfortable in my own skin.

And that’s an amazing rarity for me.

This past year has brought so many ups and downs in my health and managing myself, and although sometimes I feel like I’m falling apart - most often I feel like I’m coming back together.

My body is feminine & soft now, something unexpected after I’d spent 14 years building it up.

This year made me sit out most of the workouts I’d wanted to do, and I am so grateful for that.

I’m grateful and in awe because I never realized how much I needed my own softness before, or that I even wanted it.

But as my body changed, so did my mind.

Thoughts that used to be centred around making my body thick with muscle - a thick armour to keep everyone out, changed to wanting a body that was able to receive a gentle touch; a soft stomach for someone to lay/rest their head on, hips and breasts to give life with, and the mental capacity to know I’m worth much more than the inches of my thighs, or the gap between them.

I kept wondering what this past year had brought me, and how what I thought was my body slowly failing me was actually a coming home to myself.

She needed to rest this past year.

And I was reluctant to let her, until she no longer cooperated with the life I’d had planned out for myself.

Days are still challenging for me, my body cooperating or not.

But I now know to be both grateful and patient with myself, remembering that I need the days that fill me up, as well as the days that hollow me out.

I kept earnestly searching and waiting for the time to get back to the “old me,” the me that I recognized in photographs from even a short year ago. but this new me, this skin now, she feels like a home I could never imagined for myself.

A home I feel centered and grounded in.

A home I truly belong in.

Maybe your home is similar to mine, or your story is illuminated by the same failings and fallings, and wanting to get back to old-selves.

But I pray you ask for something different.

I pray you ask for the strength and the guidance to see the wholeness and the goodness of this new home you’re in now.

And how she may be just what you’ve always been searching for.