Revelations

Well, I’m back from Greece and I think I’ve discovered one of the top reasons I love to travel outside North America. It’s the renewed appreciation for beauty.

In North America women are only beautiful when they look like the pictures in magazines. Everyone strives to be young, thin and beautiful.

When I first arrived in Greece and was sitting at one of the many open-air cafes, I watched the people go by in quiet amazement. Women that were well rounded with jelly bellies were strutting around in skintight hip huggers and revealing crop tops. Their soft tummies bare for the world to see.

“How could they go out in public looking like that?” I thought to myself. “Those clothes are way too small for them.”

It hit me when I was lying on the beach, my oil slicked skin soaking up the suns revitalizing rays. I was topless and feeling very beautiful and sexy. There wasn’t anyone else around, just me the sun, the sand, and the water. But I FELT sexy and beautiful.

I wasn’t alone for long though, and when others started crowding the beach I considered putting my top back on. After all, I’m fifty pounds overweight and not exactly the body type men want to see lying around naked. But I liked the way I was feeling and I was reluctant to lose the feeling.

Then slowly I realized that nobody cared. I received a couple of lingering looks from some men, young and old, but that was it. Nobody pointed and laughed, and the young teenage boys didn’t turn into smart-ass punks and jeer at me. Nobody looked and nobody cared that I was heavy and bare and basking in the sun. And the ones that did look, looked on in appreciation.

It hit me that these were people that didn’t take the North American ideal and try to impose it on everyone. It was if they could look at me, and sense that I felt beautiful and sexy, and see me that way.

When I returned to Athens, before flying home, I sat once again at a cafe and watched the people go by. This time instead of feeling embarrassed at the women openly flaunting their less than perfect bodies, I felt pride. And a touch of envy. Because as much as I felt sexy and beautiful while there, I knew that once I was home again it wouldn’t take long for my own mind to once again envision myself as fat and lacking.

When I think back on it, most of my travels have made me feel this way. I go overseas, to cultures that aren’t so wrapped up in filling every minute of every day with as much as possible. To places where people realize what a gift just living, just being, is. And I learn who I really am, and that my body is a gift. It works for me. It gives me pleasure and pain. It lets me know I’m alive, no matter how it looks.

It’s a constant struggle to love myself, and my body, and if I have to go to Greece every year just to make myself feel beautiful…that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. 😛