On Better Late Than Never

It's just before 6 a.m. in Hawaii, and I'm sitting on my lanai (balcony) with a little tiny bird near my feet. Yesterday some birds flew into my hotel room, hung out for awhile, and then fluttered back out, all made up of calm and air and light. This morning I couldn't sleep because of the cacophony of the birds, the hundreds of these little singing featherpuffs living inside the tree near my balcony. This is sort of endearing, and sort of annoying, but mostly it's just different. I could curl up inside of anything different and live there forever.

So far, this trip has been sock-rocking. It's funny, I never want to go to places like Hawaii because I often feel they're overdone. Everyone goes to Hawaii, therefore, it's not special anymore, right? What a stupid, snobby way to think. Travel is the same (sometimes) as literature - there is a reason that certain places (books) are beloved. Maui is exceptional. It's so beautiful it's irritating. It's so joyously colorful and bright that it's stupid. I could live here forever and never grow tired of those mountains and that sea. 

The photos below, of me wearing a bikini on a beach, happened on day one, and I need to memorialize them here. I have wanted this moment since I was old enough to understand that girls are supposed to be beautiful and thin, and if they aren't, they have somehow failed at girlhood and should be whole-bodily ashamed. I absorbed that lesson young. Definitely before my teenage years, and possibly before I was 10. I have spent my entire youth loathing this body, instead of loving it.

I wish I knew at any point in time that the power to feel beautiful is always in your own hands. You can either find it by being healthy and fit, which then (as a little bonus) conforms you to certain societal standards, or you can buck all of that and just be confident with what you have, but either way - the power to feel gorgeous has always been inside of you. No one ever took it from you. You just gave it away. 

I'll be 32 in a few weeks. I had the idea that, when I lost weight, a svelte 19 year old body would pop out. Obviously, I've been wildly disappointed in that. My body is every inch of my age. But yesterday I walked on the beach for a few miles with my husband. Then I sprinted a quick mile in the hotel gym, then I lifted weights for an hour. Later that day I ate a big lunch, a huge ice cream cone, and drank a sugary tropical drink. Then I swam in the ocean. I feel bad about none of it. I felt alive and healthy and vital. Which is gorgeous. Finally.