From the outside looking in, I was the embodiment of living your best life.
I ate chia seeds and spinach for breakfast.
I was clearly super healthy and undeniably happy.
@wayofgray
On my channel, you would have found countless pictures where I roared, Love yourself!
while I flashed my core.
But underneath all of the flashy workout clothes and spray tans, it never felt authentic.
I felt as though I was living a double life.
I had workout clothes that were specifically for photo shoots, then the workout clothes I actually wore.
I always loved food, and now it made me miserable.
It was all for the gram.
Reading this, you may think I was knowingly deceiving my audience.
You probably think Im incredibly vain, also.
I was deceiving myself.
I desperately wanted to be that girl.
I was trying to squish myself into a perfect little Instagram box.
I wanted to love it.
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I was boarding the first of two flights from New York to my home in Edmonton, Canada.
When the airplane doors closed, I was suddenly drenched in sweat.
I was freezing cold, and yet unbearably hot.
I was shaking uncontrollably.
My thoughts raced, but my lips couldnt form a single word.
I felt as if I might throw up and poop my pants simultaneously.
It wasnt the flu.
I was freaking the f*ck out.
Whatever you want to call it, my world turned upside down.
To this day I cant entirely remember what happened on the rest of that 45-minute flight.
I did, and I can never forget it.
It was the moment I allowed my anxieties to take full and total control of my life.
My now husband and I picked up the rental car and put our destination into the GPS.
At that time, I thought I was taking the easy way out.
I was going to avoid four hours trapped on a plane with my uncomfortable feelings!
I soon discovered I was deceiving myself again.
During the first few hours of the drive, I felt great.
But as the sun began to set, my anxiety rose.
Have you ever been in the middle of rural Wisconsin in the middle of the night?
There is a shit-ton of open space.
While it can be beautiful, in that moment I couldnt to take in the beauty.
I was in the middle of nowhere with nowhere to escape.
I took a deep breath and decided that I would do my best to take her advice to heart.
And then, it hit me.
I had thought it was flying that was to blame for my absolute terror.
It was the void I spent the last decade trying to fill.
All of a sudden, I felt a rush of emotions.
My 16-year-old self flashed through my mind and greeted me with a tape measure wrapped around her body.
My 13-year-old self stood helpless and in pain of her own doing.
Then, I saw the moment when the void was formed.
And I saw the ways I was trying to use Instagram to fill it.
I saw my 11-year-old self crying alone in a corner, rejected by her peers.
She was left out, ditched and bullied.
It all started to make sense.
I had found acceptance in being the girl who shared fitness photos.
I found validation with every post I made.
With every follower I gained, I felt the acceptance I never experienced previously.
It was as though my life was a movie and had the underlying theme of acceptance woven throughout it.
My experience withbullyinghad led me to believe that part of me wasnt deserving of a voice.
But that voice was desperately trying to be heard.
And, I did.
I spent the next few weeks crying every morning.
Without knowing the significance of it in my life, I started a journaling and breathing practice.
At first there were more tears than words in my journal.
But every morning, I tried and tried again.
Though the tears eventually stopped, my practice did not.
I slowly started to put the pieces back together.
As I discovered on the road trip, I had no place to hide.
The feelings came from within, and I was finally willing to listen to myself.
Each morning I would journal and engage in a dialogue with a part of myself Id been ignoring.
I journaled with my body, with my past, with my emotions.
It may sound odd, but it worked.
I started connecting with myself.
Through journaling I found the value my body offered, regardless of its size.
I connected with my worth and found my own acceptance.
During this process, what I had been previously sharing on my accounts faded away.
I stopped flashing my abs and masking self-doubt with costumes and contrived poses.
It was a public reckoning that caused me to lose over 70,000 Instagram followers in the year that followed.
But I gained much more than that.
I finally found my way to Sophie Gray.
Sophie Gray is the founder of DiveThru, an introspection app, and writes atwayofgray.com.
you could find her onInstagram,Twitter, andFacebook.
