Growing up as 'the fat kid', I struggled when I lost weight and got in shape to see myself another way. I was in high school, and everyone around me knew me as the fat kid. It manifested primarily in a lack of self-confidence that pervaded my life, and was strongest at parties where I couldn't approach girls because I knew they thought I was unattractive. Surely girls from my school didn't think of me 'that way', but when there were girls who didn't know me at a party, I couldn't fathom the idea of looking like anything but 'the fat kid' to them. When one of them would approach me and show interest, I'd blow it off assuming it couldn't be real and that I must be misreading things.
For me, I carried that feeling through to college, and either hung out along the back wall at parties, or opted to stay in my dorm room instead of going out. College was a very similar setting to high school in terms of the types of people and situations I was in, so it wasn't a surprise that I felt and acted the same. The weird thing is, I was and always have been pretty outgoing and extroverted. So this wasn't just my general personality at play here. This was an outdated self-image stuck in my head from the past overpowering my natural outgoing nature.
It actually took spending a summer in China where the context I was in was so markedly different that I was able to see myself differently. Because I stood out so much from my surroundings, people noticed me instead me of passing by me to go talk to the football team star or basketball team captain.
At the same time as all of this, a high school classmate of mine was seen as shy, quiet, and nerdy yet not brainy (most people thought they were a bit of an airhead). That lasted all four years. Then in college, they took advantage of their new context, and created a new self image that they portrayed out. Popular, but not into cliques; smart but not in a socially awkward way; outgoing; friendly. A near 4.0 student who everyone knew and liked, they consistent made really sharp comments in class. It was literally night and day from high school. Of course, they didn't spend the summer between senior year in high school and freshman year in college in some intensive course on how to be smart, witty and outgoing. The underlying person was always the same, but something in high school was stifling it, and they succumbed to that pressure. High school is weird and does things like this, but it was great to see how they broke free of that to be who they were meant to be when they got to college.
The lesson here is the power of the context in which we live, and how we frame our self image in that context. For me, I was unable to break free of my original context when it changed a bit, and really needed a major context change to be who I was supposed to be. For my friend, they broke free sooner and blossomed.
What I've come to realize is that context isn't something you are subject to so much as the creator of. I was able to shift my view of myself and my health over the past year and half in the exact same context because I decided to look at myself differently. It was literally a light switch being thrown. Just because your surroundings are the same, the people viewing you haven't changed, etc, doesn't mean you can't grow, reshape yourself (literally and figuratively) and blossom. Whether you're in the same situation or not, you can enlighten your body. Knowing this is a contextual shift enough to make it happen. Now you just have to stop fighting it and go for it!
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