Unaccepting myself

Yesterday was supposed to be the day of accepting myself. I failed. I suppose you can't undo 31 years of negative self-talk and low self-esteem in a day by simply deciding to. Though I do think there are some things that you can change by simply deciding to change them. I think it is possible to wake up one day and say I am going to behave differently and then do so. I have seen people do this over and over again in AA. The other day I read something on a blog about someone learning to accept herself just the way she is (I won't link to it though cause I don't know if she would mind), and it really helped me. It made me realize how little I have changed in regards to accepting myself. There I go, beating myself up again.

I frequently think in my head things like - I am too tall, my feet are too big, my hair is too thin, my body is proportioned funny, I wish I weighed less, I wish clothes fit me differently, I wish my legs weren't so long. Why is everything I think about myself spun in a negative way? I worked through this book on self-esteem quite some time ago and one of the exercises was to describe yourself (mine was predominately negative) and then you had to re-write everything you wrote in a positive or neutral way, i.e., I am X feet/inches tall, my feet are X size, I wear size X. It was eye opening. Did anything change when I did that? Yes and no. It is really hard to re-train your brain when those thoughts have become automatic. I am aware that I do, but I still do it.

I haven't been able to change it on self-knowledge alone. I guess I have to try harder. Self-knowledge is never enough. I guess I knew that. Every time you catch yourself thinking something in the negative, you are supposed to change the phrasing around in your head so that you have new automatic thoughts. Right now I am trying to change my automatic thoughts about breast cancer. Is this working? Well, I have an awareness of it, but it's easier said than done, like all things related to changing yourself. I think that is the hardest thing a person ever has to do, change him or herself.