#53 Bodies, bodies, bodies
Food, weight, movements
It has been really interesting to think about my relationship with my body and the way that my mind disconnects from it when things are feeling particularly difficult. In difficult periods - like the one between March 2023 and March 2024 - I was feeling mainly more stable and grounded throughout the storms, but I was also doing so from a place of more disconnect rather than embodiment. It was like I knew that embodiment was necessary but I chose to fully focus on my inner world rather than get out of my head and into my body.
This became increasingly obvious with my habits - I stopped cooking as often and completely avoided sensory activities that brought emotional or mental release, such as the yoga practice I had taken up since my early twenties and the playlists I would listen to on walks, during showers, or when writing. I also avoided writing often, and only made the space for it in focused bursts for the sake of producing something, making my newsletter the priority for the only writing I ever wrote. For months, I would sit and pick and choose topics around home, travel, feeling lost, and finding footing again (all very quintessential 20s), but I stayed far away from the murky waters of dissociation and what it was doing to me. So many things become autopilot actions once they’ve been ingrained into your system. It’s no wonder that evolving is a constant, that consciously choosing to change is a decision that’s made every single day — while holding patience, as long as possible, in each hand as you do it. It’s not meant to be easy but sometimes I wonder if it’s supposed to get easier with time, or at all.
I grew up in a household that was very afraid of weight gain. My dad had chosen to circumvent it through gastric surgery; my mom had chosen other more psychologically violent avenues. We would cycle between strict restrictions for soda, candy, cookies, or Nutella only to catch her eating it straight from the jar at eleven p.m. with mindless abandon, like a kid finally left to play to their whims in the sandbox after a long day of summer school. Both parents were filling themselves up with the same things - but they were hiding it in different ways. Isn’t that interesting? One of them continues to eat all kinds of treats and foods throughout the day, passing the time, while working, while driving, on the way home, leaving home. Another polices the rate of sugar and carbohydrates in her kids’ food and tells them to stop eating so much, they’re going to get unhealthily heavy. But then she hides the spoonfull of Nutella. Humans are paradoxical, strange things.*
*(I love my parents, in case that needs saying, but there is also a wonderful gift to be found in being able to look at them as people who are flawed, had kids, and were doing their best).
My weight fluctuated through my twenties. I am now 27 and back on an uptick, after a year of grieving and finding multiple difficult junctures all at once — the sudden loss of someone I love at only 31, the lack of direction in a post-Covid recession, the second-guessing that comes in your 20s when you realize everything’s burning everywhere and there must be something you can do. My favorite snacks became my dinners. Cooking for myself became increasingly tiring, drawing me out to the cupboard where I could make pasta in ten minutes, eat eggs on toast in under five, make chocolate milk for dinner, and get chicken nuggets after a long, tiring day (there were many).
If I were to measure my homesickness and my need for safety in the past six months through how many chicken nuggets I ate, the number would be higher than it’s been in the past six years. I put on weight slowly and then all at once; I came to my hometown on April 1st and after a shower, saw myself again, almost as if I hadn’t been really looking in the mirror for what felt like a very, very long time. There were new curves and dips. My legs were the palest they’ve ever been. My arms felt fuller and new, different from what I remembered. And there I was again, as if my mind came back into my brain and connected to the rest of my body. Where have you been? What have you done?
The morality attached to weight is absurd. It is even more absurd to live in when you’re inhabiting the body of a woman. You know this, and I know this. Such a reality is exacerbated when you travel to countries outside of Western Europe (do not be fooled, Western Europeans are very Eurocentric and thin-centered under the guise of health, but that’s another story). In my hometown, beautiful, thin women adorn the arms of overblown-bellied men with unkempt beards and ill-fitting jeans, often ten years their senior. The women seem to take the least amount of space possible; both in how they walk, how they dress. They are elegant, beautiful, and impossible. Perfectly manicured hair, shiny, bright colored nails, matching gym sets, impenetrable sunglasses, hiding their gaze. They are beautiful. They are immaculate. I wonder how much effort it takes to look like this, and wonder how much of it is a choice and how much of it is a learned habit.
I think of myself and my unkempt nails, growing body hair, how my cousin tuts at my unpainted toenails. There is beauty in the upkeep, that’s for sure; a sensory experience to feel pampered, to feel more put together. I discuss this over the phone with a friend and tell her maybe I’ve taken it to the other extreme just to prove something. My whole life I thought, isn’t there something more interesting than what I look like? I want to nurture that instead. But to live under the pretense of creating a rich inner world at the cost of neglecting any kind of adornment on the physical body is just as absurd. There is no way to win — there never was. There is only one way to go about it: through constant, curious experimentation (yawn).
My changing body has become a topic of discussion amongst my family members, just as any other topic would be dissected at the table (boyfriends, jobs, whether I am ever moving back from the Netherlands). There are several opinions; there are very few questions as to what I would want, and how that would make me feel. I have fielded questions by sharing the honest truth of it: I was feeling depressed and anxious about my life — upended by sudden grief, unemployment, and a general sense of impending doom by the climate crisis — oh, and there are ongoing genocides as we speak. This is not suitable for the dinner table, but questions about the way I look aren’t, either.
I am not writing this so that you’ll think; oh, this is horrible! let’s see how the weight loss journey goes for her. Maybe this is about loving your body and being body positive and what matters is on the inside, etc. and yes — what matters is also on the inside — but no; you cannot forego your physical body in the name of absolute acceptance. The absolute acceptance comes from accepting the shadows, too; that you’ve inherited a relationship to your body, not only created it; that the way we look shapes the way we live our lives, will always be a determining factor in one way or another; that the world is fucked and we should surely focus on more things than the way we look in the first place. And yet. And yet, eating 3 balanced meals a day for yourself and sleeping enough, and having a modest exercise routine make your brain work a bit better. The burdens, whatever they might be in your life — given you’re not living in a war zone — become easier to bear as a result. Your resilience is deeper. You’re less likely to catch a cold. Your immune system becomes stronger. Your fertility (if you’re into that sort of thing) is boosted — or at least not in harm’s way. And and and. And a million other things.
I’ve been reading a few articles about the body positivity movement losing steam; how the rise of Ozempic and Moujaro have been slimming plus-sized influencers for the past year, how once loyal followers, loving supporters are bashing creators for leaving their plus-sized bodies and claiming their entire lifestyle was just a money grab. A MONEY GRAB! When people are just free to choose the kind of body they would like to work with, regardless of what that body looks like. When they want to become more active and address their health and address their desire to simply change. It is impossible to divorce it. The stories around food, the stories around weight gain, the stories around beauty and desirability. The politics are ruthless, and no body is safe. There is no end to the scrutiny and the judgment. There is condescension for using medication and there is a weird applause for people who “muscled and fought their way through it” to “beat obesity” and “change their lives” but also; don’t change the way you look because you’re beautiful as you are!
I don’t have the answers to any of it — there’s an essay from a beautiful woman who laid her patterns bare in front of us, addressing her sudden weight loss after months of questions and an unrelated hospitalization. A lot is going on at the moment. She decided to tell us about the ways she learned to control her body so it would become a shape she was taught to find more acceptable, more lovable, more desirable(?) Or maybe all of the above.
The truth is that there is a lot more to bodies and weight and food and gender than the communities that exist online; that there are ways you learn to relate to the foods you eat that were inherited; that genetics play the biggest role in how we look, how we are shaped; that trends favor a new, different kind of body every few years; that we’re surely reverting to an era that reveres thinness. And yet, and yet, and yet.
Connecting to the physical body is essential. A spiritual life — an intellectual life — whatever kind of life you want to call it — is simply not possible without inhabiting a body. Being in your body isn’t about how to make yourself love it; that is too lofty a goal to set for a society that’s hell-bent on trying to control itself. But connecting to it? Tending to it? Moving it because you know it will make you feel better? This is doable. This is real. This is tangible, and true, and doable. Finding ways to be in it, to connect to it? It is possible, in many different ways, no matter what the body you have can do or is shaped like, or its limitations.
Perhaps my answer was not in rebelling against the conventions of beauty, but in making sure to eat my fucking vegetables.