On Bodies I

TW: Eating disorders, body dysmorphia, weight loss, infertility

I’ve been feeling a change in the relationship I have with my body coming for a while now. It’s like I’ve been standing close to the edge of a cliff, and I’m not so far away that I’m not aware there’s just empty space all the way down, but I’m also not so close that the plunge feels imminent. I’ve just been swaying back and forth, occasionally glancing toward the edge, wondering what was going to lead me over there to take a look. Turns out, it was a text from my cousin saying she wanted to start a capsule wardrobe.  A text about a capsule wardrobe (which I’d never heard of) doesn’t seem like the likeliest catalyst for a new, healthier relationship with my body, but there we are. Maybe I was just ready to jump.

Like every woman on Earth, I have a complicated relationship with my body. What society tells girls and women about what their bodies should look like and how much space they’re allowed to take up is certainly one complicating factor, and that’s not uncommon or new among American women. But for me, a desperate, deeply seated desire to push back on those expectations has also been a part of it. As a teen, I wanted so badly to not get sucked into thinking my body shouldn’t look a certain way that I never learned to honor it or listen to it or understand it on its own terms. I never learned to listen to what made it happy and satisfied and full; I just did the opposite of what I thought society expected of me. And this unexamined but simultaneous disconnect and obsession has influenced how I see myself, how I care for myself, what I feel about myself as a mother, as a lover, as a friend. How could it not? Our bodies are the vessels that carry our souls through the world and our lives.

Like most teen girls, I became aware I had a body and might be expected to control it in some way when I started high school. Ninth and tenth grade were awkward for me, not least because after being perfectly flat-chested for most of middle school, I developed into a C-cup over the summer between 8th and 9th grade. I started high school and got boobs in the same year. Complicating matters was the fact that this development (ahem) occurred during the early to mid 2000s, when even adult women were expected to be tall and impossibly thin (think Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Christina Aguilera). When I finally did start to develop a woman’s body around 11th grade, it didn’t look like any of theirs, or like a lot of the girls I went to school with. I’m not tall, I had those boobs I mentioned before, and I didn’t know that what I thought made me fat was just….having hips. I was also a swimmer, and swimmers, like gymnasts, have a particular type of body.

While I worried about not being thin or tall enough, I was also almost perversely proud that my body was different. Awareness and prevention of eating disorders became more and more visible in the early to mid-2000s, but a lot of the literature boiled down to “eat, but don’t throw up”. A good place to start, I guess, but not heavy on the particulars of how to avoid that or what to do instead.  I never had an eating disorder because I was never prone to that disease and not (as I thought then) because I possessed some kind of self-control or strength that teens who did develop eating disorders just didn’t have. I had friends with eating disorders, and I remember a mix of both fear and empathy as I witnessed them trying to purge or starve or exercise their bodies into the right shape. It was a confusing and heart-wrenching time to be a teen girl (not that it’s any different now) but I remember feeling grateful that while I didn’t have the standard body type, I wasn’t trying to alter it, either. Looking back now, it’s obvious why I didn’t feel overwhelming pressure to change. It’s not that I possessed some self-awareness or body positivity that my classmates and friends didn’t. It’s just that I was thin, if athletic, with hips and boobs that filled out my homecoming and prom dresses well. My body was good enough. I could also afford to reject society’s standards by eating Burger King every day before swim practice because I didn’t have to make a conscious effort to care for my body in other ways: I was an athlete, I was 16, 17, and 18 years old, and my body took care of itself. I never saw my body or nurtured my body on its own terms; I used it as a tool to push back on society, rather than treating it as a part of me to be cherished. Even as I grew to womanhood, past the age when high school sports could take care of me when I didn’t do it consciously for myself, I never adjusted my thinking. I didn’t realize there was anything wrong with it. 

When I got pregnant, that failure to connect with my body in any meaningful way continued, but it also revealed that lack, too. I had a high-risk pregnancy with chronic high blood pressure and polyhydramnios (excess amniotic fluid) that required twice weekly doctor’s appointments in the last three months of my pregnancy. It resulted in my hospitalization and induction at 37 weeks, culminating in an emergency c-section when my water breaking caused a placental abruption that led to my daughter’s heart rate plummeting. So it was stressful and scary and felt so long. But I also didn’t experience many traditional pregnancy symptoms. I had morning sickness for five days at most, when I was five or six weeks pregnant. I never felt particularly hot or heavy. I didn’t have any cravings. So my body and I had this weird relationship during pregnancy where I felt both not at all and also undeniably pregnant. I treated my body well, but I did in the name of caring for my daughter. It didn’t have a lot, or really anything, to do with me.

But there was something else going on between me and my body during my pregnancy that was born (heh) out of the fact that I never really learned to listen to it. I felt weirdly and strangely disconnected from my pregnancy – the first indication that I was disconnected from body as a whole. Before I got pregnant, my anxiety and depression (and lots of other unhealthy thought patterns) told me that because I had waited so long (until I had completed my PhD and my husband and I bought a house) to try to get pregnant, it would be hard or impossible. When I did get pregnant within the average amount of time, with a perfectly healthy and developing baby, I thought that since getting pregnant had been relatively easy, something terrible would go wrong. My anxiety and my relationship to my body meant I couldn’t trust it, so I spent a lot of time unconsciously disconnected from the physical act of being pregnant. That way, if this body that I had never learned or trusted on its own terms betrayed me, my heart would be protected. I don’t want this to sound like I was completely detached. I loved feeling my daughter kick, and I would often poke at her so she’d poke back. But even after I gave birth, I remember feeling so strange reading other moms’ birth stories. I didn’t feel like a warrior, my scar didn’t (and doesn’t) feel like a badge of honor. I didn’t even really feel like I’d given birth. All I felt was anger and exhaustion and a little bit of relief. My body hadn’t done pregnancy right, and I hadn’t been able to give birth right, and the most I could muster was grudging gratitude that my body had grown and given me my daughter. Eight months after she was born, the world went into lockdown. At the time, I wasn’t super happy with my body and my weight, but I was down a bit. Then I gained it all back, plus some. And lately, I’ve been deeply unhappy with my body: what it can do for me, how it looks, what it wears.

So this was the state of my relationship with my body when my cousin texted me about the capsule wardrobe. I’d heard the term before but wasn’t super familiar with it, so I did some research (trained historian, can’t help it). The rules for creating one are simple enough: pick a base color, add in a palette of neutrals and one or two accent colors, and then build a wardrobe of staples off that palette. But the rules that really pushed me to do it (although I didn’t realize it at the time) had nothing to do with colors or numbers or style of pieces. The other two rules for a capsule wardrobe are: 1)everything in your closet must fit and 2) every piece must make you feel good. Not fits okay or makes you feel alright. Must fit well and must make you feel good. Within 36 hours, I had completely emptied my closet, dressers, and shoe organizer, and culled my wardrobe.

The morning after I started the process, I decided to eat something healthy for breakfast, and I ended up getting a salad for lunch. I could tell that my food choices were somehow related to my wardrobe remodel, but I couldn’t figure out how. At dinner, I ordered nachos simply because that’s what I wanted. Sometime later that night, it occurred to me that what the capsule wardrobe had done, aside from significantly reducing the amount of stuff I have in my closet and dresser, was force me to be kind to my body. It had, in fact, made a rule of it. No more pushing past pants and skirts that didn’t fit and the guilt that comes with having to reach beyond them. Every single piece of clothing in my wardrobe fits, and none of it causes me to unconsciously pass judgement on my body every single day. That unconscious act of listening to my body and meeting it where it is right this minute, was the first time I really asked my body what it needed, and then listened. The food I fed it didn’t have any value attached – I was (unconsciously) simply listening to my body and doing what it wanted. Salad for lunch. Nachos for dinner. Eating as an act of giving: giving my body what it wants or needs in any moment without worrying what it means and without listening to the voice inside that has been directed, for so long, by what I heard on the outside.

The one thing I don’t want to do in writing about this is to come across as having had some road to Damascus epiphany out of the clear blue sky. I said earlier in this piece that I’ve felt on the edge of change in my relationship with my body for a while, and there are reasons for that: therapy with an amazing therapist, the podcasts I listen to (in particular, Busy Phillips Is Doing Her Best and Glennon Doyle’s We Can Do Hard Things), the people I follow on social media (especially Lizzo, Ashley Graham, and Katie Sturino), plus a lifetime of living in it. It’s not that I’ve come to a point of full body acceptance. But I’m listening to my body, willing to open up and engage in a relationship with it that is somehow simultaneously banal and sacred and in a way that precludes, from the outset, a set target or goal. This is a strategy I’m using in other areas of my life already. At the suggestion of my therapist, I started writing again a couple of months ago. I used to write creatively all the time, from the age of about 9 until 20, and then I entered academia, where my creative writing fountain was shut off and welded shut. My therapist encouraged me to start writing again because I told her I wanted to but was terrified in case I found my ability and skill and talent were irretrievably lost (they weren’t) and as a way to battle my perfectionism. Now I write for the joy it brings me, and the sense of peace, and the ability to be wholly within myself. And now I’m going to approach my body the same way. Build a relationship with it, listen to it, give it what it wants and needs with no goal or target in mind. No certain weight, no specific size, just being wholly within and connected to it for its own sake, and for mine. 

I feel like I finally understand a quote by Nayyirah Waheed that has been making the rounds:

and I said to my body, softly, ‘I want to be your friend.’ It took a long breath, and replied, ‘I have been waiting my whole life for this.’

It doesn’t feel like jumping off a cliff. It feels like shuffling toward the edge and realizing that there are stairs cut into the mountainside. It’s a slower way down, but safer. It means I’ll have to rest, it means I might look up and think that walking back up is easier than continuing down. But it also means that if I keep putting one foot into front of the other, I’ll make it.