This Body of Mine

cw: this story contains subjects regarding mental health, self harm, eating disorders and body image issues.

As someone who hit another major decade last year, the (once) dreaded 30s, there are many aspects of my life that I am grateful for.

I could talk for days about the endless support I have received from my now tight knit group of girlfriends who are always at the end of a phone if needed. I could mention the health of my family, the fact that my parents are still with me when so many around me have grieved the loss of a loved one. I could mention my first home, my suddenly thriving career, my ability to be independent in a very modern world that still tries to force old-fashioned heterosexual societal norms onto young, single women. In truth, narrowing it down to just one thing is surprisingly difficult when asked (take that, 13-year-old emo self who thought The Black Parade was the soundtrack to her life).

Nevertheless, if I am to truly answer the question with an honest answer, then I would have to tell you that what I have learned to be grateful for is my body. Or what I should really say is my growing relationship with my body, especially considering I grew up in the early 2000s. For my fellow millennial women, this might trigger a response, as this was an era obsessed with pushing an unhealthy body image onto impressionable young girls like me who spent their youth believing their worth was defined by numbers, particularly the ones on a scale.

Now, I know that every decade before me has had its ‘preferred’ body type that it has tried to shove down our throats, but there was something so uniquely toxic about growing up during the noughties. Those years were defined by the infamous Kate Moss quote that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” and a tabloid culture that was literally obsessed with reducing a woman’s worth down to her size. Remember those images of skeletal thin A-listers with the headlines, “The Starving Wars: Who is Really Skinnier”? Yeah, I remember every single one of those glossy magazine pages. Add all that in with a young girl on the cusp of puberty and you have yourself a recipe for a lifelong body image battle that would last well into my 20s.

I was 11 years old when I first became aware that my body was apparently less than ‘ideal’. We won’t name names, but it was at my weekly swimming club lessons when a full-grown adult told me to, and I quote, “stop the snacking”. I still remember the hot flush of shame that flooded my face and how I silently cried in the locker room afterwards, looking down at my swimsuit covered body for the first time through the eyes of someone else. At a young age, my brain thought, well if an adult is saying this, then it must be true. It was then that I learned to view my body through the lens of others, which I now know no child should have to do.

It was through this lens that I went into my teenage years terrified of the changes that were going to happen to me. I had heard the term ‘puppy fat’ thrown at me enough to know that I no longer wanted the talk around my body to be, what I believed at the time, to be controversial and negative. I wanted people to find some worth in me, so that I could find it myself and silence that inner voice that told me I was “hideous” and “fat”. I had been taught that developing a ‘curvier’ figure was a sin, even the so-called monthly ‘teen girls’ magazines reinforced this idea.

So, when one of them shared a diet plan on “how to get your body bikini ready in just two weeks”, I immediately cut the plan out and stuck it in one of my notebooks. In it, I would write things like, “I can do this if I just stick to it” and “I will be skinny by the end of this plan”. I was 12 years old, and I was already learning how to shape my body into something that a society had told me was acceptable and how everyone should look.

When I look back on my childhood, I realize how much of it was defined by a hatred towards my own body. When out for meals with family or friends, I would find myself in the bathroom with my fingers down my throat, trying to bring up a measly half-slice of pizza. You know what they say, “a moment on the lips; a lifetime on the hips”. On school lunch breaks, while my friends were all digging into their food like healthy teenagers, I was sipping a bottle of water and mentally calculating how many hours I had gone without food, just so I could justify taking one measly bite of my granola bar that I would make last the entire day. It’s no wonder my grades weren’t the best during what should have been rather important years for my education.

When I wasn’t obsessing about the calories I had eaten, I was at home cutting out pictures of skinny celebrities from magazines that were slapped with headlines such as ‘Skinny S.O.S’ and ‘Extreme Diets’. Then the internet had a bit of a boom around that time, and, for some reason, I stumbled across specific websites, which I won’t name for good reasons, dedicated to, what I now know, was disordered eating. I look back on that specific time of my life and remember being a teenager who never developed a healthy body during puberty. Instead, my hair was falling out, my skin was becoming patchy, and I could barely cover the dark circles underneath my eyes. I couldn’t even take a bath without my blood pressure dropping so low I had to sit down and heave in breaths like I had been sprinting up a hill.

Throughout the sheer ugliness of it all, there is something I mainly remember. That I had more positive comments from about my appearance than I ever had.

The rest of it is a bit of a blur, if I am honest with you. Though, I do distinctly remember my mum discovering my handmade booklet that was essentially a shrine to thinness alongside some old food in a paper bag underneath my bed. I look back on my mother’s watchful eye on me during mealtimes and insistence that my friends watch over me at school as somewhat of an interesting turning point. I guess that, as I write this now, I have something else to be grateful for, because without a mother’s worry, who really knows where I would be now?

It would take me a while to realize this, though, and I would hate to witness the disappointment in her eyes if I told her that it never stopped there. Over the years, my weight would fluctuate, and everyone would love to comment on it. Once, on a vacation with my friend’s family, their father (yes you read that correctly) would often comment about how things “would move” if I sat on them. In my 20s, I have had people who don’t know me literally walk right up to me and “congratulate” me. They thought I was pregnant. This has happened twice. One man tried to save himself by uttering the next words, “well, I like curvier girls anyway”. Yeah, thanks for that mate, great for my self-esteem.

I can also keenly remember separate occasions on holiday with my family when many other people would compare my body to my much more athletic older sister. It’s taken me great years to realize that she never deserved the sheer hatred I felt for my own internal jealousy that was borne from the comments of other people who had no right to do so.

It all sounds so silly now when I think about it, but when your appearance is constantly judged and compared to what others deem “desirable” or “ideal”, you begin to think you are, and forgive me for this, but a little bit abnormal. Because how could I have been normal when everyone constantly reminded me that I was not? How could I not look at myself with utter shame when everyone else seemed do just that?

So, how does this all tie into how I have become grateful for my relationship with my body, because surely after all of that I can’t be? Well, I guess it’s because I have learned to look at it through a different viewpoint over the years, and that is my own. For so long my body had attracted internal and external criticism, that it became something of an ‘alien’ to me. It was chained down by the weight and ideals of others that I never thought to look at it as something that I wanted, or even cared for.

It’s because, when looking back at my childhood, there was a young girl who should have been playing with friends, before she learned how to grow up in a healthy and safe way. Instead, she was doing 100 sit ups in the morning before school. She was counting calories, even though she sucked at math in general. It’s because it wasn’t just the diet-culture obsessed media that taught me to treat my body and myself with unkindness, as it also came from viewing others around. More often than not I would hear the older generations of women, whether that be from my own family or friends’ family, talk about how they wished their bodies didn’t look a certain way.

While I now know the damage that the way you talk about yourself can be damaging for younger people to hear, but as a child I didn’t think about that. I just thought it was normal for you to struggle with the way you looked. If the adults did, then surely that’s how it would always be? It’s funny the things we inherit from an environment around us.

While I wouldn’t have the absolute audacity to say that the conversation surrounding women’s bodies has changed, but the fact that my own body endured long enough to see the word ‘body positivity’ used much more than any ‘thinspiration’ quote is something that I will always be grateful for. In some ways, it has led me to have just a sliver of hope for the younger generation on the playground who might just have the chance that some of us didn’t get, the opportunity to be comfortable in their own skin.

It’s through watching this rebellion against unrealistic and unhealthy body standards that I have learned to, in some weird way, reclaim my body for my own. It’s not something for others to view as though they have some sort of claim over it, and it never was.

I might never have been in a fight, yet this body of mine certainly bears the marks and scars of a battle that was never my own to begin with. There’s something gratifying about my body’s ability to continue on, even when it had every right to fail me, long enough for me to enter this new phase of adulthood with something that she should have had during her early years, especially the developmental teen ones. Ownership of her own body and I will be forever grateful for the ability to reclaim it for the rest of my life.