How to become indestructible

Trigger warning: mention of eating disorders

A few days ago, I received a lovely compliment from a near-stranger. It went something like this: “You present yourself to the world very well. I don’t know how, but you just seem so confident.”

Those were truly kind words that made my day. But my first thought when I heard it was — damn right I am!  I fought tooth and nail for this, I thought to myself. The confidence, the temperament, the supposed ease — all of this.

After all, it wasn’t too long ago that I well and truly hated myself. Really, I did. In that moment, talking to that stranger, I was taken back to a less-than-pleasant memory from high school, one I’d been trying to suppress for a while.

I was a sophomore back then. It was a few days before Christmas. I was in the girls’ bathroom, kneeling on the tiled floor. Oh, and I’d just thrown up my last meal into the contents of the toilet. Easy.

This was my punishment. I deserved it. For daring to eat a handful of chips and a cookie, because that would push me past my self-imposed calorie limit of 800 calories a day. And self-hatred was a far more powerful force than self-love could ever hope to be for me.

“Are you okay?” Unbeknownst to me, I’d been followed in by a classmate. Shit.

“I’m fine!” I lied through my teeth, hoping she wouldn’t linger to investigate.

The few seconds where she stayed, unsure of what to say or do, seemed to last an eternity. But eventually, it passed, and I was alone again.

I waited until she left. Then, I leaned on the bathroom stall and cried. Stared numbly at the tiles on the floor until the pattern burned itself into my brain.

There was a time that I needed to shrink into nothing. Disappear, if you will. Because I couldn’t stand simply existing, exactly as I was.

Those behaviors were cyclical. Restrict my food. Binge accidentally, and then throw up. Again and again and again.

Still — I got smaller and smaller. I finally had the dainty “look” I’d wanted my whole life. Well, okay, not quite. But when I hit less than 100 pounds — then, I thought, I’d be satisfied.

My hair started to fall out. I lost my period. It was when my doctor told me that I was literally making myself sick from the stress I was putting my body under that I realized that I was, in fact, sick. I never confessed my illness to her, but I knew that she’d figured it out.

It was when I hit the point of being physically unwell that I realized — Namankita didn’t deserve this. She deserved better. I deserved better.

Making that conscious decision to love myself, exactly as I was, literally saved my life. And it brought me to a very important realization, one I’ve only fully come to appreciate so much later —

Your purpose in life is not to love yourself, but to love being yourself.

If your goal is to merely love yourself — that is, the external facade of the self — then your focus is always directed inward towards yourself, towards your every little flaw and failing. You end up constantly watching yourself from the outside, thinking about how the world sees you, disconnected from who you really are. Instead, you’re always trying to summon the “correct” feelings towards your being,  or coming up with drastic ways to get there. You get stuck trying endlessly to fashion yourself into something you can approve of. It’s exhausting.

But if your goal is to love being yourself, then your focus is directed outward towards life, your life. On living it to the fullest, enjoying the present moment, and making decisions that bring you joy and fulfillment.

Be the subject, not the object. You can come up with a thousand ways to criticize yourself, a thousand reasons to be less than happy with yourself. But that’s far more cruelty than you deserve. After all — you are experiencing life. Life is not experiencing you.

I write this because in spite of all the good I have in my life, I feel myself backsliding lately. There are days, like today, that I really don’t love being in my own skin. In the last few weeks, I’ve been silently, viciously critical of myself — my body,  my mind, whatever — in a way that I haven’t in a long, long time.

But I also know I didn’t come this far to only come this far. And I remind myself of how much I’ve grown, and how much further I have to go.

I’ll sign off with a quote I read a few days ago, one that really changed my perspective on things. “Imagine,” it said, “if you loved yourself the way you loved another person. Not caring about the flaws in the body or failings inside the mind. Seeing their virtues as even bigger and brighter than they are, supporting their dreams, taking care of their heart. That, truly, would be a new level of self-esteem. That would be yet another way to become indestructible.”