Can I hurt your feelings?

Someone asked me the other day if they could tell me something that might possibly hurt my feelings right now. I was actually really impressed with the ask. I have been pretty open with everything recently, and it’s nice when people stop and realize I need a little baby bird moment.

So, I explained to them that no– I was in no way wanting to get my feelings hurt, even a little bit right then, and honestly if we could just talk about anything else, then that would be great. I kind of went into an overshare and everything about exactly how terribly I was doing in that very moment, and that just the very idea of getting prepared to get my feelings hurt was making my palms all sweaty.

Cue the deep breath. Right? Crisis averted.

Wrong. They responded with, “Oh, it isn’t anything that horrible or anything, I was just going to say that you should lift weights.”

Well, thank god i’d just taken a deep breath, because that knocked the very wind about me.

I had just spent the better part of the last five minutes explaining, in detail, why I would prefer not to have my feelings hurt if I could help it at all, and you thought it would be the move to comment on my body?

And here’s the thing, this person wasn’t commenting on my body at all. Not in the least. They were commenting on how I should use them to get stronger. To pick up pebbles at first, so that I could move the boulders in my life.

It’s a great insight into me, into who I am, and the thing that has kept me tied to an abusive man for all those years. The way I have trouble breaking things down to knock out the bigger badder things– they were right. Completely.

But in that moment, it wasn’t what I heard. I heard that Jamie needed to get her scale back out and start standing on it five times a day again. I heard that Jamie needed to start counting her macros. I heard that Jamie needed to run harder, faster, and stronger, because right now there is someone out there that thinks she needs to lift weights. There is someone out there that has a comment on what her body needs.

And the truth is, that isn’t what happened there AT ALL. They had a comment on what my mind needed. This was all about my mind. This was someone who actually looked at me, a 46 year old woman and said, “You are in good enough shape you could absolutely lift some weights and become the strong b*tch you need to be for your mental health right now…”

But how do I see that? How do I see that instead of spending the next day counting every piece of food? How do I hear it? Like really in my head?

How do you accept constructive criticism when it unintentionally feeds into your own negative belief system?

I have no idea the answer… but I promise to keep trying to figure it out.