Ok, I’ll be frank. I have body image issues. I don’t like to take my shirt off in public. I hate it in fact. I am really self conscious.
So the idea this morning of going down to the YMCA to go swimming was filling me with dread. I had even considered wearing a life vest with a t-shirt on under it so I could stay clothed.
I don’t actually like it that I am that self conscious, and I wanted to overcome it. I forced myself to go.
It wasn’t that bad. I could wear my shirt into the pool area from the locker room, and then took it off and slipped into the water. Once I was in the water I was a little more at ease. It was also cool because there were very few people there.
With my shirt off, I wanted to ask the few people that were there “Did you get your tickets?”. And when they looked at me quizzically I would flex my arms and say “To the gun show…”.
I will post some of my thoughts on using swimming to heal later.
Nicholas Cage has some good words about this: whenever he gets into a situation where he feels uncomfortable, he asks himself; What would Brad Pitt do? and then he just does that. ;)
Hilarious. I can wholeheartedly understand the desire to remain under the
cover of clothing. Now this is going to sound like the kind of advice you’d
get from mom, but… There’s always someone in a worse situation than you,
heaver, skinnier, uglier, whatever. I also tend to calm myself down by reminding
myself that it’s kind of silly to think that I’m not even on the radars of the folks around me. They are there to work out, not fixate on my level of perfection.
Good luck with it!
I’m afraid to take my shirt off in public, too, except it’s because I don’t want to intimidate anyone.