My Body is My Gift

I could not button my pants the other day.

It makes my insides turn into a knot just to think about it. This is not the first time I have felt this way although my response to the feeling now is different.

Towards the end of my university years, I was exposed to a tremendous amount of stress which resulted in me gaining nearly 30 pounds in just a few months. That is not to ignore the years of unhealthy diets and eating habits but to mention the main culprit in my body’s response to it all. That episode of stress was so traumatic that I attribute my Hashimoto’s diagnosis to it. The realization of how much I gained dawned on me one day when I saw a picture of myself. I can still see it in my mind: me wearing a pink shalwar kameez, hair curly out of the shower, and the sunlight shining through the window behind me. It was a bad photo composition and it only made worst what was apparent. It pulled me out and brought me to focus on myself the effect of which, alhumdulillah, was not all harmful.

I made the necessary changes in diet that I knew at that time and began working out which later became a part of my life. Within a year, I was down to my regular weight and wearing the same jeans again. As much as I want to admit that I was proud of my strength and my agility, the reality was that I was focused more on how I looked. My physical body had found its way to a healthy balance but my mental state was forever harmed.

It would be a lie to say that I am not affected by this current change of circumstance but I am not overly surprised by it, either. My nearly decade long workout years came to a slow end as my Hashimoto symptoms began to develop and the bed became more of a friend than my beloved workout videos. It was a matter of time and yet I was hoping that it would not happen by some miracle.

Oh but the pants did not button!

Before that very thought propelled me to work harder and take more steps to ensure that my body looked the way I wanted it to. Now, I treat myself with a little more kindness. It is the illness after all that has cornered me into a life of less movement and less energy. It is the illness after all that makes me choose between spending the already depleted energy on one task over the next. It is the illness after all that prevents me from doing the things that I once loved so dearly to do.

I look at myself now, my hands struggling to bring the two ends of the fabric together and I take a deep breath. This is the body that is blessed beyond measure. This is a body that has been blessed to be a believer. This body is blessed to be a muhajjibah (one who wears hijab). This is the body that has gone through so much more than it had expected and came out better in the end. This is the very body that lived a life of exuberance and then now flourishes in unexpected ways through a chronic illness.

This body is mine and I am so grateful for all it has achieved.

The journey forward is long without leaving any clues of the hurdles it will cross as it weaves through the complexities of self acceptance and health. I can say this with certainty, though, that I am more kind to myself than I had been before. That makes all the difference.