I think a lot about my body.
I also think about how much I think about my body, my obsessiveness over it, our society’s general obsessiveness over bodies and what they should look like. It’s not enough that we terrorize each other with strict regulations of what makes a valid body—we terrorize ourselves too.
My body, like many bodies, has carried many versions of itself over the years. As an adult, I have been thirty pounds heavier than I am right now; I have also been thirty pounds lighter. I have known how it felt to take up space, and I have known the bird-like weightlessness of bone-skinny. The median point my body rests at now is where I have spent most of the last twenty years, somewhere in between skinny and fat, the two poles of Western body image.
It occurred to me recently that in Western society, and many other parts of the world, if you are not skinny, you are fat. There exists only the two. Our brains, so used to balking at the smallest roll accumulating around our bellies or the slightest rounding of thigh, immediately associate any presence of fat as fat. I think of what has constituted a plus-size model in the fashion industry for the last forty years—anyone larger than a size 6.
We don’t have language for people who fall between, who are not skinny and are not fat. We struggle vaguely to describe them, waving our hands around trying to approximate their bodies. We are cruelly more succinct when describing ourselves, inspecting our reflections and photos for evidence of too much or not enough. How many of us, I wonder, feel fat simply for the presence of it?
I took these photos in my bathroom a few weeks ago with these thoughts in mind, in the middle of my workday (I work from home). I intentionally wore no makeup, bedhead untouched, in plain white briefs and cropped tank. I thought about what parts of me have changed as I’ve gotten older, the texture of my skin, where parts of me have landed.
I visited the doctor for a skin rash and was quietly handed a printout informing me my BMI falls in the overweight range. I read the printout’s suggestion I eat 500 fewer calories per day and wondered if that’s possible. At home, I open a draft of this blog post and scrutinize the photos; today I think I look small. Other days I do not.
Over the years, I’ve talked to a lot of other people about their bodies as part of portrait series surrounding body image, but don’t often talk about my own. I volley continuously between feeling good about how I look and wishing I looked differently, and practice honoring my body no matter what mindset I’m currently in.
And it is a practice—there will never come a magic day for any of us where we arrive at full acceptance of ourselves and never turn back. There will always be the pendulum swing between self-love and self-loathing, but the practice of holding space for yourself exactly as you are helps keep the swing reaching closer to love.
Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.