Exposing My Truth

Today I am going to expose myself in more ways than one and I am not going to apologise if this offends anybody!

Firstly I want to say thankyou for all my kind birthday wishes, I literally had hundreds of kind comments which to be honest blew me away a little. As I am naturally quite a solitary being this world of social media that I find myself in can be very daunting. However I love that we can connect across the oceans with a shared love of the natural world.

As some of you are aware I posted a simple photo of my legs in the bath with a glass of G&T to celebrate my birthday and myself. I have to admit that I debated sharing it. I know that may seem strange when we are fed shocking images everyday. The reason I debated sharing is because I have always had a hard relationship with my body. I have vivid images of being seven years sat on the loo and watching my thighs spreading I would pull back the flesh trying to imagine what it would be like to be the idea of what I had been fed by the media was a beautiful woman. But guess what? It didn't get any better as I got older. From the age of fifteen I was looking at what diets were around, which would be the fastest and the harshest. I didn't care about the side affects I just wanted to be skinny. Did I need to diet? Did I fuck! Then I was told I had PCOS and that my weight would probably be hard to control and that as a cherry on the top I would develop facial hair that I have to painfully wax every four weeks and have done so for the past ten years. It's not sexy, most of the time I don't feel like a woman and every time I look in the mirror or feel a prick of the growing hair on my chin I'm reminded of the infertility of my body.

I have cried and screamed at my body, tried to claw at it in the mirror like a crazed woman and even hit myself with the hatred I hold inside. I know some of you may now be thinking 'gosh this lady needs professional help' but I think if we were all honest there would be many more of us that would hold our hands up and say yes! I have felt something similar. We are told how to behave, how to feel and how to look and I for one am sick of it! How dare that troll tell me that my legs depicted an attention seeking whore gagging for c**k (Some would say I shouldn't share her words but I feel its important to know the abuse we have to deal with) I am also aware that she was a troll and I should just shake it off but it doesn't matter who this person is or if they even meant it. To me she found a wound that had begun to heal she tore it open and watched the blood rush out, should I shake that off? I shouldn't have to because I am a person with real feelings and although this social media world is distant and in many ways make believe its also the place some of us emerge in our realness.

But instead of retreating to lick my wounds and cover myself up I have decided to do something different. I have taken the decision to share my wounds through my words, my admission of having excess hair is probably one of the most uncomfortable things I have ever done. And look at those beautiful wounds on my body! the pale skin I hated, the rolls I tried to remove, the hair colour I tried to dye. I could have staged this photo better, stood in a way that makes me appear slimmer, added a filter to make me appear flawless or remove the crappy clothes I'd dumped on the side. I don't know about you but I'm pretty bored of those images. We need to stop being made to feel inadequate as humans, we are enough!

This is the woman I was dealt and the woman I am.

P.S I absolutely love that people are saying they want to change their profile pictures to images of legs in the bath, lets do it! I think there also needs to be a G&T in there and perhaps a hairy leg or two