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I’d waited months for the show to get here.
The night came to see Kinky Boots and, just as fate would have it, family friends I hadn’t talked to in years happened to be only 10 seats away from me. In the same row of the same section the same night of the show. Meaning to me, of course, that the universe wanted this interaction to happen.
But while we caught up, I caught something that a few of them said to me upon seeing me. It caught me off guard. Maybe because people hadn’t said it to me in a while.
“You look really good”.
I what?
I wrote a piece recently about my metabolism.
Actually the result of what I would later to be a thyroid issue, for years I’ve had trouble explaining to people that good health is more than skinny and fat. It goes beyond clear and bumpy skin. Healthy-looking people get sick all of the time. We just don’t usually notice.
Looks are deceiving.
And we all know that, yes, we’re a looks-focused culture. We all kinda get that at this point.
But we often think about doing this for our health because we want to be perceived a certain way. When I ask men why they lift, I always get funny looks. They usually tell me it’s more about a look. A feeling. Sure, it’s good for you, but it also helps them achieve a certain ideal.
The kind of man you see on magazines. The Rock. Athletes we look up to. Models covering the front of Men’s Fitness.
Which is fine. It’s not a bad thing to want to look good. To be attractive to others. All that good stuff. But it is also one part of the equation. Because the part we often miss is that looking good also comes with feeling good. And not only feeling good because our clothes fit better, but our energy gets better.
For those of you who have made some sort of change to your health, even if only for a moment, you’ve probably noticed this too. Even the smallest change can give us a little boost. Maybe mentally, emotionally, physically or something else.
And so I hope we stop missing how good we can feel while we’re searching to look better. The way we look in the mirror will always be important to our self-esteem, even if we try to deny it.
But looking good and feeling good often go hand and hand.
Let’s not forget that.
Previously published on Medium
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