#66 How does my body make you feel?
A far more interesting conversation.
“You look AMAZING.” Declared in the train station by a friend I hadn’t seen in two years. I know what it means, just like you know what it means - that politically correct, perfectly well-meaning way of telling someone they look beautiful, a direct result of nothing changing, except their weight.
“Maybe it’s because you feel more confident, you notice it more,” another friend tells me when I mention how astounding it is to receive so much more male attention, their gaze snagging on me when I walk down the street. The difference being, of course, my weight.
“You should really consider modeling! You have striking facial features,” my friend tells me over dinner, while we discuss how the past year has gone, how my body has been changing with the seasons. Of course, I register the compliment, I accept it graciously. But I become curious about it later, when I mentally file through my week before bed on Sunday. How interesting, I think. They’ve known and seen my face for years. Of course, the difference is the changing shape of my body.
I accept it all graciously and yet I hold these feelings in both hands: the slight discomfort of being seen after a life feeling very, well, unseen, and the dark, dark void behind the words they’re not saying, the thoughts they’re not sharing, the stories that hang around us, misty and immaterial, but very real and concrete nevertheless.
I am seen as more beautiful because my body is smaller.
I am seen as more attractive because I’ve dropped four sizes.
In bed, a man looks at my body and tells me, “I’ve never been with a thicker girl”, and it almost makes me laugh in his face. Did he know me thirty-four kilos ago? Would he have seen me, sitting at the bar? Would he have registered anyone there, anyone interesting to him at all?
The thing about bodies I find most fascinating is people’s reactions to them, quite frankly. It’s always been that way. Growing up as a woman in a body that was not deemed desirable turned out to be a fantastic personality developer for me. A story I’ve gotten used to telling about my childhood when asked - specifically about growing up in a conservative society, or as someone whose body has changed drastically - is that, from as early as age seven, I knew I wasn’t beautiful like the rest of the girls in school were.
Instead of molding and shaping myself to a kind of beauty I felt impossible, I completely went the other way. I’ll be funny, I’ll be witty, I’ll be smart. If I cannot be beautiful, I’ll be everything else. And it worked! It worked so well, I’ve spent the later years of my twenties discovering how much of me wants to please, how much of me is asking for permission to be, just how much of me ached to be seen, to be loved. How much of me I was willing to hide, to sacrifice, for the feeling of being loved. (Most notably, of course, in my dating life. As it is).
“Hi! I hope it is okay if ask you this, but I saw that you lost some weight, and I would love to know how you did it.”
“Girl, you look so amazing. You look insanely beautiful… tell me how?”
Lo and behold, far and wide — I did it! Beautiful, capable, interesting women in my DMs asking me how I did it. Women who had never asked me such a question before. Women who surely had complimented me, at some point, in my teens - for the most part, did not mention a thing about my appearance - they came out of the woodwork, asking for the secret, the potion, the cure.
Reader, I’ve unlocked a new reality, one I never imagined existed: other beautiful women are asking me for beauty tips. It is morbidly fascinating to me, after an entire life relying on my humor and personality, to be asked about my appearance and how, exactly, it was achieved. Measured steps, surely measurable outcomes. Why not try some portion controlling. Drop all the processed sugar. Try some more exercise. Just mold and mold and shape and shape, sacrifice at the altar of conventional beauty, and surely, you will receive the same results.
This was the script behind every decision in my later teens and into my adult years. I would watch my mother portion control to the point of recurring migraines, while overjoyed at dropping six kilos in a month (by the way, a healthy curve of weight loss, if there is even such a thing, is approximately 2.5 kg a month). I would see her steal a spoonful of Nutella from the jar at eleven p.m. sometimes, her eyes screwed shut in happiness, when she wasn’t having a gigantic cup of coffee every morning, or going to spin class with the girls.
A young divorcée, she was thirty five and the world was her oyster. My whole life, but particularly then, I knew my mother was beautiful. I could sense it in the same quiet way I can sense the world reacting to me now. Perhaps this is how I know I am now deemed beautiful — I see the same look in men’s eyes they used to give my mother when she entered a room, when she walked down the street with me. I hear the same tones of wonder and appreciation from my peers my mother’s friends gave her when we went to birthday parties, dinners, evenings at the cinema with my friends and our mothers, playdates.
It is truly macabre, the type of shit that happens when you turn pretty to the world. You start questioning whether the men who are vying for your attention on Hinge would ever be the same men that texted you years prior - and you know the answer. I was a dating app user throughout the past decade; there were matches, great conversations (and awful ones), a very mid experience overall, a few hits, a few misses. I updated my dating profile in May and the results were simply fucking astronomical. I would filter through virtually hundreds of likes in one week, fatigued by day 7, feeling like a robot in a fever dream, trying to swipe through enough matches so I could keep talking to all of them. It was fucking crazy.
And I know how it sounds! Oh poor her, with all those matches! No, girl, this is fucking insane. The dark, dark void stared back at me then. Well, now you’re pretty, look what happened! All this attention. This is what it’s like when you turn pretty.
It’s fucking devastating, actually. You grow up sharpening your knives and dispensing them with humor, slicing through tension, awkwardness, difficulty, navigating life’s trials and tribulations with hard-earned intelligence and a knack for making the best out of what’s been given. Or something. And then you find out how easily the world opens up when you fit into that tiny, glowing, sliver of a window of conventional attractiveness.
The promised land. And you remember that one girl from your university years with a bitter taste in your mouth when she told you, for lack of a better word, how impressed she was with the looks of the guy you were dating. Because you’re not as attractive as he is. It hangs in the air - you do a double take, look across the table at your other friend, he’s as shocked as you are. It all starts making sense. All the pieces come together, slowly but surely. All the work you’ve done to navigate this world despite all the fucked up stories about beauty pays off in your compassion, your optimism, your freedom to be cringe, your impeccable sense of humor. But none of it really compensates or compares to the way the world sees you when you inhabit a “hot” body. What the fuck! I’ve been scammed, actually. All of this sucks.
The truth is, I can’t give you the answers you are looking for. I fear there are stories I won’t be sharing for public consumption. The truth also is, the details of my changing body — how it changed, why I chose to change, the decisions I’ve taken every day in favor of that change — are not nearly as fascinating as the ways people have reacted to it.
I am far more interested in the dark, dark void I stare at every once in a while, ripples and waves of dark water, thoughts that curve and swerve and climb like vines, up, up, up, unreachable and sometimes impenetrable in the delicious way questions with no real answers haunt you in your sleep.
What can we say of the world that once was full of body positivity? What do we say of the return to thinness as the beauty standard? I would know — I’d tell you it never left. I’d tell you to sharpen your knives, build an arsenal of confidence, wit, humor, intellect. I’d tell you to keep your tools useful and your wits about you. The world keeps spinning, and listening to everybody will drive you fucking crazy.
So, whenever I’m asked how I feel, whenever the way I look becomes a line to question me on — what I really want to know is, how does my body make you feel?