My Inner Critic was a B*tch
I went wayyyyyyy outside of my comfort zone this week & participated in a branding magazine photo shoot for ‘40 Women over 40’ 🚀 It was bizarre & fun & very smiley & extremely weird. Oddly, not as bad as I was dreading 🤓 At the time….
The photographer was a total sweetheart & soon enough the hours flew by & I was back in my Mazda 5 driving to my cosy home in a torrential rain storm 💦
I was beat. Dead dog tired. The kind of tired where your eyes hurt ~ my cheeks hurt from all the faux laughing & my stupid knees from wearing heels & sitting criss cross apple sauce on the floor with a hot pink background propping my midlife bod up. Jesus Murphy 🙊
I passed out early & the next morn jumped on Zoom & reviewed hundreds of images with the studio in abject horror 😳 my eyes starting to blur with tears, my stomach lurching in denial, my voice reduced to a pathetic squeak.
This couldn’t be me.
I don’t truly look like this.
How do I have fat where I never knew I had it?
Where did those wrinkles come from?
Why do I look like this?
When did it all change?
How did I not realize?
On & on the negative narrative went.
I just wanted off the phone to cry in the dark & rock back & forth.
This has never happened to me before. I have never had such a deep, visceral reaction to seeing photos of myself. What the hell was going on? I am a strong, independent, clever, hard working female business owner, proud mama of two amazing kids, partner to an incredible man & more.
I dove headlong into trying to understand my reaction & will be posting a longer blog article soon.
Glennon Doyle would challenge us & encourage us to get quiet and ask ourselves, “ok, so what is the most true and beautiful thing about these images?”
This is the work, becoming resilient to these untruths requires we challenge them, correct them, refuse to listen. That mean critic won’t keep flapping her gums if you continually tell her to shut up and sit down.
So that’s what I’m working on now.
Shut the F up inner critic!
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#photoshoot #bodyimage #glennondoyle #midlifecoach #womeninbusiness #womenempowerment #womenover40style #mindsetiseverything #limitingbeliefsbegone