I love food. One of life’s greatest pleasures is eating delicious food. The fact that I get to sometimes photograph food and food stories are always a favorite part of my job.
It’s taken me a long time to be able to say “I love food” again. You see, I have never had a great relationship with food. From far too early an age, I was taught by almost all the people around me to be ashamed of myself. I was chubby growing up and struggled to be slim like my peers. I was frequently teased – both by people I both looked up to and people that were supposed to be taking precious care of me. After all, I was an easy target – as most people with visible differences are. I carried around this albatross for years until developing disordered eating patterns that lasted well into my 30s.
For the life of me I will never understand why people think it’s appropriate to discuss someone’s appearance, particularly that of a child. For me in particular, it lead to a lifetime of trauma I have to unravel. 50 years of comments on my appearance by people who are supposed to be responsible adults, doctors, authority figures in my life re knotted into a mess of me not feeling like I am enough. The work I have done on myself the past 10 years is like no other work I have done in my life.
We all carry the mistakes of others around with us. Comments made by others that were inappropriate at the time or that sliced us precisely in half at a vulnerable crossroads are a heavy burden to bear. They become a knotted mess that seems to never want to unravel.
We must be careful how we talk to one another. We must stop judging how someone else feels based on our experiences. It has to stop here. With each one of us.
Start seeing beyond yourself. Start loving people where they are. Start apologizing for your missteps…because we all have them. We all make them. Start with you. Start where you are today. And find the joy in each day.
I am gonna start with my next delicious plate of pasta. Unapologetically.