After reading Lose Weight with Ang’s beautiful thank you note to her body, I felt compelled to write one of my own. It has been a rough year, and my body has taken a back seat to my mind, a theme that needs to change as my 50th birthday looms in the near future. I hope you appreciate, and I hope you are inspired to write a thank you note to your body!
Enjoy!
Dear body,
Thank you for being so strong and healthy.
It didn’t start that way.
The danger of the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck made my birth
scary for a first-time mother and landed me in the high-risk nursery for the
first week of my life. That week was the
last time I spent the night in the hospital, thanks to your strength and health.
I would need that strength and health of body, because my
mind was often too broken to properly take care of you. A mind that refused to eat at an age when food
was needed to grow. A mind driven to submit
to hour after hour of training in order to excel in running and figure skating,
despite having no natural talent or gifts. A mind that insists on endless showers and hand washings. A mind needing to be beaten into submission as the outside world
triggered it into chaos.
You have been my rock, my pillar. No matter what damage I inflicted upon you,
you kept getting up, kept living, kept surviving.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year and a half since
you put on a show, negative splitting the last five miles of the New York
Marathon and finishing under five hours.
I was a lean, mean, running machine, and the future loomed bright. There were so many things I could do for you
to make you even stronger, even faster, even more beautiful.
But my mind was still healing from another breakdown, one
that ended my job and my relationship that year. Marathon training had to be put on hold as I
struggled to stay ahead of the bills.
Again, you rose to the occasion, allowing me to take on
several physically intensive jobs that required being in top shape. As a global pandemic of an unknown virus shut
down the world, your immune system kept me from succumbing to disease, allowing
me to shuffle and adapt as furloughs loomed.
It was a glance in the mirror on a warm July afternoon that I
noticed the damage I had inflicted upon you.
My face, always a source of pride, looked crooked. My angled jaw was now rounded and
chubby. I looked at my body, the lithe
sinew that traveled across the five boroughs of New York City, atrophied into a fluffy
marshmallow.
My mind broke again, fearing everything from a possible
stroke to a horrible disease. It was in
this fear that I realized how much I had taken your strength and health for
granted, how many times I had skipped the basic checkups and maintenance, the
things I had done to hurt you instead of care for you. Inside of a world that could not return to
normal and hours of isolation, my mind went into a tailspin, sliding down a
spiral of self-pity and self-abuse instead of giving you the love and caring
you deserved.
By the time I finally made it to the dentist and the doctor,
I learned that once again, you had risen to the occasion. No cavities, no major health issues, and no
serious illnesses. You gave me the gift
of being able to heal my mental illnesses without having to battle physical
ones as well. I cannot thank you enough
for that.
It is why I end this letter with a promise. I promise to care for you, to treat you with
love, to do everything in my power to nourish the strength and health you have given
me all these years so that we can have many, many more years to come.
With Love,
Erin
