Before and After

After receiving hundreds of emails these last few months I knew I had to finally open up about the transformation I have gone through over this past year. Its only been about 10 months but I know I have already come so far. Last August I was Shumane just a different version from the Shumane I am now. I was still beautiful to all those around me but I was not able to really be me because I was hidden behind 321 pounds. You should be aware that there are many women out there who are much bigger and are fully confident in themselves and carry themselves as sexy beasts each and every day. That however, was not me. I avoided cameras, barely left my house, and with my feet having been broken for quite a while I had gotten used to the seclusion. I loved being around people and I projected plenty of confidence but I rarely looked at myself. I hated feeling like I was unworthy but thats just what I felt. I gave up on myself so many times and so easily that it turns out I was my biggest nemesis. But last November I decided to become my biggest fan and cheerleader and embarked on a journey to lose 160 pounds. When I said it out loud most just sort of gave me the raised eyebrow look like sure Shumane.... whatever you say. Here's some cake.... But 10 months into this journey I have grown so much and I am already close to having lost 190 pounds. Im so close I can taste it. Sitting here having lost 187 pounds thus far, I feel amazing, I look amazing and the smile on my face is genuine. I now look at myself everyday and I smile. Although I look at certain areas and in my mind figure out my plans of attack on how to tone it even further I am happy where I am at this moment. I will never give up on myself again. And thats a promise you can take to the bank Shumane. :)

I’m going to share a message I just sent to a good friend. It has to be the 100th time someone has asked me "how I did it". "What’s the secret?"

You really want the truth? Working out 6 days a week. Hitting the gym hard, working out for up to 6 hours a day. Weight training. Nothing but protein shakes and steamed fish and veggies. Counting the calories so I don’t go over. Lots of sweat. Lots of ice packs. Lots of heat pads. Pulled muscles but working through the pain anyway... it’s been hard as hell, but every day I get up and I do it because I know I can’t stop until I finish. I work out in the middle of the night if I run out of time during the day. It’s not going to bed until the workout is done, no excuses, no I’ll just make it up tomorrow bs. Just getting up and knowing that failing yourself is not an option. You can do it though. You just have to want it. Until I truly wanted it... nothing changed. I dieted for years. I just didn’t want it bad enough until 10 months ago.

I hope that’s the answer you guys are looking for :)

Living

You can be the most beautiful person in the world and everybody sees light and rainbows when they look at you, but if you yourself don't know it, all of that doesn't even matter. Every second that you spend on doubting your worth, every moment that you use to criticize yourself; is a second of your life wasted, is a moment of your life thrown away. It's not like you have forever, so don't waste any of your seconds, don't throw even one of your moments away.
— C. JoyBell C.

Today it dawns on me just how much time ive wasted. I have doubted myself at every turn, allowed the things others say to keep me from truly reaching for the things I deserve in life, and all of that has meant I have thrown away a lot of moments I’ll never be able to get back. This last year though it has changed. I don’t want to watch those moments pass me by any longer. What I know for sure is that although all of those moments and beauty are gone and I’ll never be able to get them back, I am fully aware that its up to me what happens from this moment on. Truly living means taking every opportunity that comes your way even if it is scary. It means standing your ground instead of running. It means taking risks and no matter what happens good or bad knowing that you put yourself out there. Its going to mean heart breaks, and pain, and hopefully a whole of beauty as well. 

Believe

Believe in the power of this day,

Believe in the beauty of your smile.

Believe in the strength of your soul,

Believe in the resilience of your heart.

Believe in the magic of this moment,

Believe in the purpose of your life.

Believe, for they are all true.

~Doe Zantamata

There are times I'm too busy to think of all the beauty around me. However, usually when that happens, I stop. I stop and take a minute to ingest it all. I know I'm new to all of this belief crap, but it turns out I'm human like everyone else. Yes I have been jaded and hardened by this life. Pain tends to do that to an individual. But it's only been in the last year that I have truly started to see what my life really is. It's not about the past or the horrible things that have happened along the way... It's about the things yet to come. So this weekend I am going to cleanse myself of the past. I'm going to simply let go. I'm going to look at all those moments, ingest them one last time and then I'm going to smile and move forward. None of those things will never define my worth to me again. To any of you reading this who are aware of my past, I can't stop you from allowing it to define me in your mind, but I'm choosing to stop it in my own. If we ever cross paths and you choose to throw it in my face, I'm just going to smile and walk away. Your words aren't worth my time and neither are your actions towards me. Remember this one thing.... I was a little girl. I was powerless and if you choose to see me as that same powerless and frightened little girl then you are missing out on the beautiful woman I am becoming. I'm not that person and I never truly was... You just forced me to believe I was. But I believe in my beauty. I believe in my resilience. And for once I'm believing in my purpose. So fuck you. :)

Darkness

Life is cruel. It throws so many shitty things at us. I know just how cruel life can be and so I have spent most of my life trying not to feel. It has been easier that way. It seemed much easier to live a detached life than to allow the pains to consume me completely. But you know, we as human beings were not meant to live that way. We are supposed to feel and allow those pains to take us on their dark journeys. We are meant to embrace that darkness so that even though it feels like life is taking so much away from us we are able to appreciate all of the good it gives us as well. How would we be able to recognize the beauty of the light if we had never experienced the pain that darkness brings? So eventually I allowed the pains to do their job. I allowed them to mold me, make me stronger and wiser as I navigated my way through this life. I have had many failures, losses, heartaches, and struggles but I have always managed to continue to smile. I often wore that smile as a suit of armor. It was my way of saying “You will not get the best of me” to this world. But sometimes even that smile was hard so I painted it on and refused to let it fade.

I wouldn’t call it a fake smile; it was more of an intentional one. It took hard work and commitment to wear that smile but I put it on every day always wondering if it would become genuine. Then I would have moments every now and again that would take my breath away and my smile was natural, warm, and bright and so I appreciated every single person and every single moment that brought that warmth to my life. Now it seems life is handing me a new obstacle and although I know it will be quite the journey full of its ups and downs, I am not afraid of those struggles one bit. In fact I embrace them because they are leading me to someone truly remarkable. Someone so beautiful I cannot even believe how fortunate I am to have found him. His fragile heart is full of so much beauty, love, and tenderness that it astounds me. How is it that this damaged person before me can be so brave I wonder? Maybe it’s because like me life has always tried to strip him of happiness and all of those pains have made him even stronger. Maybe the darkness that has for so long enveloped his world has made him wise enough to know when the warmth of this light is nearby. I look at him and I can see all of my pains inside of him staring back at me. Its a pretty haunting experience to find someone who might be able to honestly understand what this level of pain feels like. I have gotten used to keeping it all to myself because I am fully aware that most are incapable of handling it. I have found a small number of people who could understand it, but not many have faced it themselves. It is a spectacular feeling to know when you have found that light in the darkness but it’s even more amazing when you realize that you could be that light for another. I am confident in one thing, that we will be close friends for a very long time. Today my message to you is simple. Be that light for someone. Be the one that saturates that darkness with so much tenderness, love, and compassion that the dark can no longer exist in the brightness you bring. If you can do that for another than you are able to say proudly, that you have lived.

Raised by Hip Hop

Did you hear about the rose that grew

from a crack in the concrete? 

Proving nature's law is wrong it 

learned to walk with out having feet. 

Funny it seems, but by keeping it's dreams, 

it learned to breathe fresh air. 

Long live the rose that grew from concrete

when no one else ever cared. 

Tupac Shakur

There are times I wonder how I've managed to do it. No one really cared much. The few that did seemed so far away at times. No one tended after me or pulled at the weeds that threatened my existence. I was rarely watered or nourished and most times I was trampled on to the extent that my growth was stunted time after time. But I continued to reach for that sunlight. The few times it rained that beautiful cool rain I absorbed as much as I possibly could because I knew it never rained for long. And although the odds that I would make it seemed grim I continued to believe in the beauty that would one day bud and blossom. So I had no choice but to persevere. Keep tending to myself. Every once in a while I could feel it happening but something always happened that would make it hard to carry on. But I kept going all the while being encouraged by people like Tupac. You told me that I could be this rose as long as I kept my head up and when the road was hard to never give up. So I listened. Big Poppa told me that the sky was the limit and if I kept pressin on I could have what I wanted and be who I wanted. So I listened. Lauryn Hill told me that change would come eventually but she also told me I was never going to win if I wasn't right within. So I listened. And because of Wu... because of Wu I went through life knowing I was nothin to fuck with and pretending that time would change the ending. And every time I listened I waited. I knew if I could just be patient enough, the words of the wise ones would eventually ring true. And now here I am. The fresh air is nice Pac, thank you. I pressed on Poppa and you should know Lauryn I am finally starting to get right within. And thank you Wu, because of you I know that time will eventually give me the ending I deserve. You'd be proud to know I'm still nothin to fuck with :)

Monsters

As children we all know what its like to be afraid of the monsters we believe are lurking in the shadows. We imagine them to be in our closets, under our beds, or behind our doors waiting for their moment to jump out and do their worst. We picture them in our minds; big, ugly, menacing. Its amazing to me how often we fear the things that don't exist. As a child myself though I was never afraid of those boogeymen. I knew they didn't exist, and besides I was afraid of the realities. I knew that people were far more menacing than any imaginary monster ever could be. Instead I feared the night time because I was fully aware of the people who would be waiting for me in the darkness. When you grow up in a scary world filled with evil people you learn very quickly to not trust. You learn that everyone no matter how nice they might look has an evil dark side just waiting to be revealed at the most unexpected of moments. You learn to never truly sleep. You learn that sleeping with one eye open is actually possible and if you are ever dumb enough to put down your guard you will live to regret it, if you're lucky that is. So this was how I grew up. I grew up knowing that I had a mother whose concern was not for my safety and well being but for her own. She threw me to the wolves many times and each time she did I felt the betrayal of it all just that much worse. Eventually though, I became numb to it all. I would simply detach myself and go somewhere else. I am fascinated by how resilient the human spirit can be. Even as a child I realized that if whatever was happening was to horrific for me to handle all I had to do was let go and take myself away from it all. I could go to this beautiful place that existed only in my thoughts. A place where people were kind and loving, a place where night didn't exist and everyone basked in the glory of the sun. If I shut my eyes tight enough and was able to really escape I could even feel the warmth of that sun. Somehow that got me through some of the most horrific nights and some of the worst pains. Now I'm an adult but the reality is that very often I am still that scared little girl in the night. It affects my ability to sleep and so for 25 years I have struggled with insomnia, a condition I forced upon myself for so long that now I am at the point where my body knows no other way to live. Eventually I hope to find an inner peace that will undo all of that damage but until then I wait. Now that I myself am a parent I watch my children be afraid of monsters in the closet. It is such a relief to occasionally have to check for those monsters to relieve their innocent fears because it tells me that their childhoods will be completely different from my own. They will never experience those horrors or know what its like to have to face real monsters every night. Just knowing that is finally making it a little bit easier for me to sleep at night.

The Roads Less Traveled

For some reason we have all had moments where we have thought about giving up on something. The sad thing is that there are many people who choose to do just that. They give up imagining the journey is just going to be too hard and it won’t be worth it. But I believe if we really truly want something, then we are more than capable of getting through all of the hard moments to achieve the dreams we are waiting for. As I get older, I realize that the things in life that are easy are easy for a reason. They don’t require that much energy, they don’t require too much time, and they because it’s so easy to achieve we often do it halfheartedly going through the motions. But those hard things to achieve they take a lot out of us. We must be willing to give all of our energy, our time, patience, and willingness to face the crappiest of moments just to get to the other side. But once we are there we seem to appreciate it so much more. Maybe it’s because we remember just how hard it really was and the harder we must work to achieve those goals, the more meaningful it is to us that we made it. It is those achievements though that we relish the most, and are usually the most proud of.

In life I have been offered many roads and yet for some reason I have always picked the hardest ones. Many times I imagined I must be crazy, who would so willingly take the hardest, roughest, steepest paths in life? I watched the many around me choose the easy roads and sometimes I envied how easily they navigated through this world, with small triumph after small triumph. And there I was muddy, exhausted and still so far from my own triumphs. But I kept moving down my path no matter how hard it ever got knowing that eventually I too would be there. And now after all of these years and all of those struggles along my hard to travel roads I have finally realized why I have always chosen them over the more traveled roads. One day I will be sitting perched upon the highest mountain taking in the most breathtaking view. I will be bloodied, filthy, and exhausted but the struggles would have been more than worth it because the view from those roads will be spectacular. And when I look down and I see all of those people so far below enjoying their meager view of this world from the easier roads they traveled I’ll feel sad for them knowing how much better the view is from up here. They may get there faster, they may be more rested, and maybe even more put together but they would have been cheated from a miraculous journey. When I was a child Robert Frost encouraged me to choose my roads carefully. So that’s what I have done. Mr. Frost, you were right. I have taken the roads less traveled and that has made all the difference.