beautiful

I think about the 13 year old Lahni sometimes, the little girl who hated her 135 pound body, the 98 pound body that she still hated. The doctors told us to put away the scale, but I couldn't, it was the only thing that defined me and determined how I felt about myself. 100 pounds was scary, so back to 99 I went, weighing myself every time I walked past the scale just to make sure I didn't go over. It was emotions and feelings and thoughts that threatened me from the very beginning, that I didn't know how to express, so having control of that one number gave me everything I needed to keep hiding from my pain and I was satisfied. Begin taking that satisfaction away from someone and all they're left to face is the one thing they've been trying to avoid. Take that satisfaction away from someone, and the hell they've been living in begins to crumble, and as they're trying to escape, there's that one demon still clinging to their leg. This was me, and the healing was harder than the hiding, and scarier than the number on the scale ever was, but it was the healing that saved me, and so it was worth it. Feeling beautiful in the realest way was worth it.

I have a journal that I used to write in, and there's an entry dated about two years after all of the madness began, and it reads,

'I feel beautiful...and that's a great feeling...I have come a long way!'

That's all I wrote. I didn't write about why I felt beautiful on that particular day, I just simply felt it. It was the first time I had ever written those words down before, not the first time since I had gotten sick, but the first time in my life. It wasn't a caption for a picture I posted on Myspace that said,'beautiful', like I'm sure I had done many times in the year my eating disorder developed, but it was a simple journal entry, a feeling so dominant in my being that I wanted to document it. Somewhere along the way, beautiful became an adjective, and that's all it was to me. It took me two years to realize that it's so much more than just a description of something...but that it's a verb, a feeling, a gift.

18 years of life are behind me now and I have covered a bit more soil since the years of my sickness. I have made more mistakes, but I've also learned new lessons, I've seen more things, met more people, been new places...I am not dead, I am alive, and that is beautiful.

Beautiful has an ever changing meaning in our world today. I fell victim to the wrath of a frightening disease because I looked at a picture in a magazine and saw beautiful. I didn't see those models taking laxatives, starving themselves, crying themselves to sleep at night, I didn't see any of those things, the things that a picture don't show you. I just saw skinny and the way it was glamourized. The word beautiful plays a new role in each movie we go to see with our friends, it has a new face with each magazine we pick up, a new body on each billboard we pass, but I have learned that I have felt the most beautiful when I have looked far from any of those people that society would label 'beautiful'. When I am in my pajamas writing, expressing myself, I feel beautiful. When I have just finished running a long distance, I feel beautiful. When I am driving with the windows down, hair succombing to any way the wind might blow it, and singing to my favorite songs, I feel beautiful. When I am talking with my best friends about life, I feel beautiful. When I am at an alter, mascara streaked face and all, I feel beautiful. When I am dancing, I feel beautiful. When I am laughing, I feel beautiful. When someone is hugging me, I feel beautiful. When I am hugging someone, I feel beautiful. When I am in the midst of God's creation, a starry night, an ocean that goes for days, a deep sunrise or sunset, I feel beautiful. To me, in it's vast and varying meanings, beautiful at it's richest and deepest is a feeling, something you can't capture in a picture.

I have learned and am continually learning what beautiful is. And I'm not saying that it's vanity to look in a mirror and see beautiful, or to see the outward beauty of others. I gaze at the mountains, and the stars, and the hills in awe of the beauty found in them, a beauty that points to a merciful and loving God, so why then should I ignore it in a reflection, in the flesh? God created us to be beautiful, to feel beautiful, and to understand beautiful. We must embrace this gift, and take care of it, it is precious and fragile, found in a flock of birds, and in a sweet smile, and given to us freely. Don't ignore it and don't abandon it.

I'll leave you with this thought...

"For if what makes us beautiful is defined by our circumstances, then aren’t we doomed? For a man could ravage your body, cancer could steal your breasts, time could warp your bones. And what then? If beauty hangs outside of us, then it is there for the taking. But if beauty is knit up in our soul, then it is only ever and eternally ours for the keeping or for the selling."

I don't remember who said this, but they're right.

So go, find your beautiful. It might not be easy, but it is completely and wonderfully worth it.