Care and Feeding
I am still learning how to care for this body. "After so long?" you ask--I know, I know. At thirty years old, I am just now learning to feed her when she is hungry. Learning to let her rest when she needs sleep. When to move and when to quit moving. It doesn’t sound like such a revolutionary thing. Seems like the kind of thing most folks learn long before their thirties, but here we are. I spent years believing that I could will my body into submission--so when I couldn’t, it always felt like a failure of mind over matter. My mind and body had been at odds for so long that I’m just now coming around to learning the stuff we teach toddlers.
After years of avoiding mirrors and carbs and dairy and sugar and tank tops, clothes that hugged too tightly or pulled in the wrong ways over all her "problem areas", I'm learning how to dress her again. I'm still learning that there's no medal for martyrdom--that the only reward for running yourself ragged is more work. Learning that constantly running on empty isn't a thing to be proud of. Learning to really look at her, not laser-focused on all the ways she doesn't fit in. Learning how to look in the mirror and find anything other than shame.
It's true when they say, "no one's gonna care for you but you". What they don't tell you is how to do that. And the thing is, I've done the thing most of us keep saying we want more than anything. I've lost a whole bunch of weight. And standing here, it's a whole lot easier for me to preach the "Love Your Body" mantra. It's easier to love your body when everyone around you loves your body, too. When you're not constantly reminded by clothing racks and airplane seats and Tinder profiles that the world doesn't want you in it. I'm not on some kind of skinny high horse about body positivity. But having been on both sides of the weight-loss equation, I'm here to say that the shitty thoughts you think about yourself don't magically disappear when you shed the pounds.
For years I thought that the only way to care for a body like mine, one that wiggles and destroys jean thighs, was to make it smaller. That all I really needed was more discipline--more miles, more reps, more protein, more and more and more stuff to make me less, less, less. It didn't make me any smaller, at least, never for long. It did, however, squeeze out the parts of my brain where joy and creativity live. Shame and judgment moved in in their place.
My body looks different than it's looked before, but I refuse to treat this body as a "before & after" experiment. If before & after photos really motivate you, carry on, but I find that for me all they do is validate all of the warped garbage that I told myself for years. I saw those photos as a visual test of my discipline: big, bad; small, good. So I don't take them, because my "before" body was worthy of love, even if I never figured out how to love her. I did a lot of great dancing in that body. Built a career, traveled the world, crushed it at karaoke. Had some killer sex, too. None of that was off limits to me unless I created the limit myself, which I often did. Thoughts about what I "could" and "couldn't", or worse, "shouldn't", do moved in alongside shame and judgment.
As a result of that, I'm still learning how to love this body I'm in. How to dress her and how to get rid of the pernicious thoughts that dog my heels, even now, when I have ostensibly reached the imaginary mountaintop with the "after" body I was told should be my most important goal.
I'm grateful to my friends who've commented on the way my body looks now. I'm grateful to those who noticed but kept their mouths shut, and to those who love my heart so well they never even noticed the change.
Over the past 10 years, I've been a size 6 and a size 20, with varying amounts of time spent at each stop in between. Now that I'm settled pretty comfortably in the middle, it's hard to remember how much grief I gave myself at either end. But I just don't have time for that anymore. I don't have the brainpower to waste on whether or not I should consider coffee creamer an indulgence. I'm too busy researching shit I actually care about to go down a keto or paleo or grapefruit or Atkins rabbit hole. I don't have time to learn a whole new way to restrict my eating--because I am using that time to get to know which foods I actually like, regardless of their caloric content. I've made my peace with the not-flat stomach and the thighs that rub together. I'm still working on accepting the arms, and the stretch marks, and the extra chin I have in photos sometimes. I'm learning to drink more water and less coffee, and asking myself what those cigarettes are actually doing for me, anyway.
For so long, I considered my body a separate entity from me: I was the brains and the heart, and she was the '91 Corolla I schlepped around in while I got on with the rest of my life. But we are in this together, which should have been obvious to me but wasn't. If I could say anything from size-L me to size-XXL me, it's that I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I treated you like a battleground. I was so busy fighting you, and demanding things of you, that I never realized that it's always been "us". We are in this together. We got shit to do, and our shape never had anything to do with anything.
All I know is that God gave us French fries in exchange for giving us the DMV. I know my body isn't an experiment, or an unruly child in need of discipline, or a statement, or an enemy. We are just out here, trying to get along, and trying to love one another. We are, above all, still learning.
