This may be one of the most honest pieces I’ve ever written about my weight/body size. Here goes.
I was always big. Never so big that I suffered any real social outcasting in middle and high school, but noticeably larger than my mostly thin and short friends. Because of my history of sexual abuse and violence, I was mostly disconnected from my body and while I can recollect a few times wishing to be thinner or shorter or prettier or whatever, I can’t recall ever really daring to think about it too much.
In a way, I think I convinced myself that if I didn’t think about my body, it wasn’t really real and the things that happened to it weren’t really real and its size wasn’t real and you can see where I’m going.
But then I found feminism. And college. And messages of body positivity that required me to think about, to thank, and to love my body. I tried for awhile to get on board with the fat-positive and body-positive movement, and though it’s one I fully support and admire, it never felt like a movement that was home for me. Though my body had been policed by a few family members and relatives over the year, I hadn’t really had the scarring moments of those I love telling me my body needed to be thinner. I remember trying to “diet” a few times in high school, but I usually gave up after a few days-noting that I didn’t want to think that much about my body and I wanted a piece of cake. So I had to try to figure out how to love this body of mine that I have that doesn’t seem to fit any of the paths I’m supposed to use to learn to love it.
I found my answer by focusing on the things my body does for me. It hugs people, it makes love, it takes me from one place to another, etc. I also would stand in front of the mirror and admire my body and say “Damn girl!” until I truly felt good about the reflection. I did this to overcome my natural negative response to my body. I tell this story often, but I leave out probably the most important truth. I didn’t’ do those damn girl exercises to overcome my negative body image in the sense that I thought I was fat or ugly, I did it force myself to own the physical space I occupied as a beautiful part of who I am. I’d never really accepted my body in that way-never wanted to let it become too much a part of who I was, lest the bad things that had happened to it would have too much power.
My mistake in this, however, was that I didn’t realize that I needed to address the issues of my abuse and assault and to learn to see them as something that happened to my body, not something that defined it. This is something I work through every day, and I wouldn’t pretend to have any advice on making this easier.
And now to the present, where I’ve recently decided that this semester, I really want to commit to getting cardio exercise 2-3 times a week and doing yoga 2-3 times a week. I want to do it because I feel like my body wants me to. It wants to move. Both it and I (or I guess just I? congruency is difficult) don’t like that it’s stiff in the morning and that I can’t run or go up the 4 flights of stairs to my classroom without losing my breath. I’m 20 years old, and I don’t want to spend my 20s feeling like my body isn’t capable of doing all that it could. And I know it well enough that dieting is not the way to achieve that, as my body is incredibly good at telling me what it needs to eat and how much of it it needs to eat-especially if I just listen closely enough.
So now I’m here-resolving to exercise more and even tempted to buy a scale because I know that seeing tangible results will help motivate me. (I also think I’m at a point where seeing numbers not going down on the scale will not destroy me and that I don’t feel the need to set a goal weight, which I think is good.) And I feel like I’m somehow betraying my feminism by doing so.
I suppose it’s less that I feel I’m betraying my values with this new dedication to exercising my body, but that I fear my actions will be misinterpreted as some kind of body-hate, when really, they feel like body love to me. As twisted as this sounds, if I gained 100 pounds, no one in my inner circle would ever raise the issue or bring it up. They would truly continue to love me and not judge me and trust me to love my body. But, I fear that if they catch wind of me owning a scale, they will feel room to criticize me. I wonder if these fears are imagined or real? And I wonder if other feminists ever struggle with these issues.
I’m not really sure where this whole journey will take me, but I think I’d like to write about it more on this blog. If you have any advice about reconciling all these conflicting things I’m feeling, please feel free to share.
Xoxo
P.S. Blog about my Christmas haul coming soon!
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