On Being a Body

An Essay About Existing in my Own Skin

TW: In this post I share about my experience with disordered eating, body dysmorphia, and wellness culture. The content may be triggering to some; and if that doesn’t feel like its going to serve you today, please feel free to skip <3

Memories

Some of my earliest memories are of women scrutinizing their bodies. I was younger than ten when I began scrutinizing my own.

I remember the first time I was acutely aware of my appearance, and how that awareness quickly turned into hatred. You see, my mother had been a fitness instructor my entire life, and she was the leanest and strongest person I knew. I was constantly self conscious in her presence.

“Mom, how can I lose this belly fat?” I asked, pulling at the barely pudgy portions of my tummy. She replies, “Oh, it is just baby fat, it will go away on its own.”

I was mortified.

She validated my belly fat, and I wanted to crawl into a hole and die there. My mother, with the abs of a female-formed superman, recognizes that I am fat.

All I can think about is cutting it off with scissors. I play with the idea of attempting, and quickly realize that would never work. I feel stupid for even thinking about it.

Desperation

I have spent the last decade desperate to feel okay in my own skin.

I have spent hours feeling different sensations, learning about how my skin moves and breathes, and feeling the expression of that exploding through my tissues. I have learned what real pleasure is, and finally started to engage with it, both individually and in partnership. I did what I could to align with my values, both in body and in mind, after years of feeling out of control of my own belonging. I finally began feeling my body for the very first time, and it was undeniably life-changing; in every way, shape, and form.

In the same breath, I have engaged in so many behaviors that I have previously labeled as “healthy,” that were actually riddled with pain and dysfunction. I became obsessed with eating foods that were organic and vegan— and found myself locked inside of an eating disorder I am still trying to pry my way out of— all while being praised for being the thinnest I had ever been. I was small, and I felt it, both physically and figuratively.

I lost not only the weight on my skin but the resonance in my voice, and my ability to be full and whole had next to diminished, and I felt myself getting stood on over and over again.

It felt like the only things I could say without choking were ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I’m fine’ and it all came crashing down the moment I actually needed to tell the truth.

Healing

It took everything in me to take that first bite of chicken and not want to throw it up. I winced as I started chewing, trying to hide my face from the person sitting across from me.

Then suddenly, something happened, and my tastebuds began to come alive.

The taste of fried chicken was coating my mouth, and I had forgotten what it felt like to taste food that made my body glow in delight.

It has been years since I allowed myself to touch meat, or anything remotely close to it, let alone put it into my mouth. It had been years since I could eat anything that wasn’t vegan and organic, because of the crippling fear I felt about putting something in my body that wasn’t of those two categories.

I started going to grocery stores and actually buying food, rather than standing in the aisles for hours, dissecting each individual ingredient, only to leave with nothing but the foul taste of hunger on my breath.

It was so exhausting, to fear food with such force. It was exhausting to try and control every little thing that entered into my body. It was exhausting and desperately lonely to try and use food as a way to “cure” my mental illness, my horrible acne, and my never-ending stomach issues. It was exhausting to continue the behavior that was causing all of these issues to flourish.

Then, I ate the fried chicken, and I didn’t want to die.

Freedom.

Contradictions

The weird part about living in the digital age is that everything we put out into the internet is somehow eternal, because everything we put out into the internet is always capable of being found again.

I have written so many things that I no longer agree with and now feel deeply deeply ashamed of, but in some way, this is a test to the artistic experience of being a creative person in an ever-changing and confusing world—and I honor that as much as I still have a hard time coming to terms with it.

Furthermore, everything I type and share is not always my first (or my last) thought.

Even now, as I write this, I am feeling the discomfort of my bellies rolls on top of one another, and the subtle moist sensation underneath my chest. There is something so potent about being in a body, and also something so entirely revolting about it. I have lived so much of my life trying to escape this skin to then desperately lose myself within it, that I am still learning how to find the balance within those realms. I am still learning how to be comfortable in a body that is not skinny enough but also isn’t fat enough. I am still learning that I can exist in a body without losing myself in it. I am still learning that I don’t have to restrict and contort myself in order to be enough.

I understand that all of the ‘enoughs’ are merely that, enoughs. They are words that I’ve used to make meaning out of a feeling that seems to be universal but also entirely personal and vulnerable and lonely, a feeling that I can’t quite put my finger on but somehow drowns me every single day.

I am still learning how to embody what I write, and feel what I think. I am still learning to feel in general in a body that is all-feeling. It is always a work in progress, and it likely always will be. I will never fully detach from the billions of thoughts that are constantly moving through my mind, through the cultural mind, the universal mind— about what a body is and how we relate to it—but I will likely spend the rest of my life trying to understand it, dissect it, and make sense of the seemingly nonsensical.

Unfathomable

Whenever I try to encapsulate my feelings about toxic wellness culture, eating disorders, my body, and my relationship to all of it—I seem to go off into a land of theorizing and forget what it means to actually exist in a body that has been through all of this in a relatively short lifetime. I suddenly have no reference point, no ability to tap into the internal research and information, because it all becomes so melded together, like a canvas beginning to blend its paints as one.

I want to say more, about what all of this means and why I felt the need to write it, but I somehow don’t have the words. I somehow don’t have the words for why this is important or why it is relevant, because it doesn’t seem like it could be anything other than important and relevant.

I hope this still reaches some of you and left you feeling less alone in the world of bodies and “wellness.” I would like to think that we are slowly getting closer as a society to what that word actually means, and the more we individually explore it for ourselves, outside of what the cultural narrative has historically been— and outside the toxic narratives that lives inside of wellness culture— I think the closer we get to the truth.

One thing I always remind myself when I feel lost or stuck, is that nothing, absolutely nothing, lives in absolutes.

And anybody who says otherwise does not have your best interest at heart.