A piece I'm considering submitting to the Stop Hating Your Body blog.
What does it mean to 'accept' your body? It's a notoriously difficult thing to explain without resorting to vague cliches. This essay is my attempt to articulate just how I moved from hating my flesh to feeling rather affectionate towards my whole shebang.
I can't articulate what that process was like without first explaining what it meant _not_ to accept my body. My journey towards liking my body is inseparible both from its starting point and from its ultimate result, and it's been the work of a slew of very specific, personal experiences.
For that reason, I'd like to make it super, super clear that this is not The Only Way to learn to like your body. Your body is your own, and so are your experiences. Your path towards body acceptance isn't going to follow mine in its particulars. The purpose of all the specific personal anecdotes that follow is to get behind the veil of "and then I realized that it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about my body," and really talk about what that means. What sorts of thoughts and emotional logic build up someone's confidence to the point where they're equipped to stand up to the world and say, "Hey! I'm fine just as I am, thanks!"
I can't tell you exactly what will work for you, but I can tell you how it happened for me.
It wasn't a sudden realization, and there wasn't any single particular thing that did the trick. It took about a dozen years, and it involved a lot of back-and-forth. Some days I woke up really liking my body. Some days I'd wake up liking _this_ aspect of my body, but not _that_ one. Other days just I'd feel like an all-around sack of shit, but on the whole I've gradually eased my way into something a lot better than that.
So. Here's the tale of how I, personally, learned to stop worrying and love my bod.
********
Once upon a time, I really hated my body. Hate isn't really specific enough to convey how I felt about it. Vexed, perhaps, frustrated, disappointed, and impatient would all be better words to describe how I felt.
I was a late bloomer, and a slow grower. It didn't help that I'd skipped a grade, which put me even further behind everyone when it came to growing. I felt like a shrimp all through elementary, middle, and high school. I didn't stop growing until I'd finished college! Unlike most of my peers, who had a big growth spurt sometime in their adolescence, I simply oozed upward a little bit at a time. My breasts never exploded out of my chest the way my friends' did. I never grew five inches in one summer. My 'womanly curves,' such as they are, filled in almost imperceptibly slowly, a single millimeter at a time.
When I was a kid, I really, really wanted to be an actress when I grew up-- a Broadway actress primarily, but TV and films would be fine, too, once I'd established myself as a theatric badass on the stages of New York. :-) To do so, you've got to be able to act, sing, and dance at a high level. I popped out of womb knowing how to do the first two, but I needed a lot of help mastering the third one. So, when I was about eight, I started taking lots of dance lessons. In particular, I ended up doing a lot of ballet; the idea being that ballet is so hard and physically demanding that if you can master it, all of the other forms of dance will come easily.
Ballet was both a blessing and a curse when it came to liking my body. Professional ballet dancers are all extremely thin, which is what all of us in class aspired to look like. Throughout middle and high school, until I quit ballet at the age of 16, I spent a huge amount of energy despising my so-called physical flaws: my feet weren't arched enough, my neck wasn't long enough, my turn-out-- oh, my turn-out-- wasn't even close to good enough, and my back would never get ramrod straight, no matter how hard I tried to maintain that posture.
And my stomach. Good Lord, my stomach. It was HUGE (or at least, so I thought). I did sit-ups and crunches and all sorts of stomach exercises every morning and every night before I went to bed, but the damned thing remained convex. I hated my stomach-- HATED it. I'd look in the mirror before getting into the shower each morning, and fantasize about taking a knife and slicing off all of the extra flesh that stood between me and an ideally flat abdomen. If only it were smaller, I thought, my hip bones would stick out the way they 'ought' to. My movements would become stronger and more graceful. I'd be beautiful. All of the guys would love me, and I'd magically become the best dancer in my class.
Or at least, so I thought.
I had other requirements that my body seemingly failed to meet. As an actress, I'd need to make a living with my face, and my face just wasn't cutting it. I have a weak chin, and acne-prone skin. If I wanted to make it as an actress (especially in film or TV), I needed to have a button-nose and a smooth, square jaw line. Of course, neither of those things are in my DNA; I've got a strong shnooze, and, well... see what I said earlier about that weak chin. I thought I needed to look like a model, which meant I had to be tall, willowy, and in possession of big boobs. I was only about 5' tall, and if I could have relocated the flesh of my troublesome stomach about a foot to the north, maybe I could have passed as Kate Moss, but I couldn't, so, no dice.
I really, really, hated my body. "Grow!" I thought. "C'mon, boobs, grow! C'mon, legs, grow! Get me up to 5'7" already!" I waited and waited and waited for that magical growth spurt to come upon me: the one that would stretch me out into a tall, skinny lady just made for TV.
It was all in vain, of course. If I couldn't force my body to get longer, though, I could at least try to do something about my girth. I learned how to tickle the back of my throat with a toothbrush-- toothpaste seemed to help, oddly-- and vomit up the meals I'd just consumed, one agonizing mouthful at a time. (They don't tell you this about bulimia. It was like eating those meals in reverse, but a whole lot less fun and infinitely more disgusting.) I skipped meals. I skipped eating for days at a time, using increasingly sneaky tactics to hide the uneaten food from my parents. I drank a lot of coffee; I practically lived on coffee. It gave me energy, you see, but it didn't have any calories!
I planned my food intake a week in advance, and kept a running tally of how many calories I'd consumed that hour/day/week/month in my head at all times. (They say girls are bad at math, but they have no freakin' idea how much intensive mental arithmetic a dieting girl can do.)
Looking back on it now, from the vantage point of someone who simply eats when she's hungry and stops when she's full, it was... I mean, that's an eating disorder, for sure. And it was fueled, largely, by the image I hoped or feared to see in the dance studio mirrors after school.
So. That's where I was coming from in terms of (dis)liking my body.
Within that context, though, ballet also gave me much to love about my body. I have long limbs and a small torso, which are kind of odd-looking in everyday life, but good for ballet. Dancing really made me grow to like my feet, un-arched though they are. I have really sturdy, cute little feet. The balls of my feet are wide, and my toes are well-proportioned for pointe work (none of them are particularly longer than the others, which meant none of them bore a disproportionate amount of my weight). I never got really horribly blisters from dancing on pointe. I mean, sure, my pinkie toes got rubbed raw in a couple of places, and sometimes I'd get raw places on the bunion-parts of my feet, but my feet took to pointe dancing pretty easily. I was super proud of those sturdy little feet.
Dancing also put me in touch with my anatomy, with my muscles particularly. I learned to feel where they were in my body, which movements they controlled, and how they strengthened day by day and class by class. I remember, particularly, the day that I first really got a feeling for what my back muscles were up to. We'd just done a moving combination across the floor, probably something involving jumping. Whatever it was, it must have required a lot of lifting a leg up behind us in arabesque, because my back was exhausted by the time I'd finished. I remember putting my hands to my back (kind of like putting my hands on my hips, but with my fingers resting on the lower back) to brace that tired part of myself as I walked back to the corner of the room, and that's when I felt something amazing.
With every step I took, something like a steel cable pressed up under my hand on the same side as the leg that was stepping forward. Back and forth as I walked, I felt these things bunching and releasing under my fingers. It took me a second to realize that those things were _muscles_. They didn't feel like soft tissue at all-- they really felt like something made of iron or steel, not of flesh.
Those steel cables were _in my back_! Those were my _back muscles_, which had just finished pulling my legs up behind me! I had muscles in my back so strong they felt like freakin' _steel_!!
As soon as I realized what was going on, I told the other girls, and we all put our hands to our backs and marveled at how COOL that was, at how incredibly strong we were back there. It made me realize that, even though my arabesques were far from perfect, that movement required incredible strength, and that my body was unusually powerful-- that I had muscles inside of me that literally felt like steel.
I cannot overstate how fantastic that was.
Ballet also taught me flexibility. It took ages to learn, and it came agonizingly slowly, but my joints have been permanently changed (for the better, I think) by all of the specific, rigorous, sustained stretching we did over all of those years. There's nothing quite like getting into a perfect split for the first time. I still have dreams where I'm stretching, and the amazement at how my body can bend has never left me. It is kind of like having a superpower, really. It hurt, but it amazed me at the same time: my hips and legs and back can do _this_? Really? I never thought they'd be able to bend like that, and yet there I was with one leg held up straight over my head.
That was ME. That was my own body, doing these things. These difficult, painful, beautiful things that defied gravity. My own imperfect, fat-stomached, too-short, flat-chested body was doing all of these things. That flawed body could balance on the tips of its toes. That body could balance itself against gravity through double and triple piroettes. That body of mine could hang in the air in running jumps. That body of mine could bend and flex and hold itself out in seemingly impossibly positions for longer and longer lengths of time.
My body could do all of these things, and it could get up the next morning and solder on through the incredible pain left behind in my muscles, and not break. It could do all of these things, and it kept getting stronger and stronger, until nearly every part of me felt like steel. (Maybe not my stomach, but even it got pretty hard as time went on.) My bones did not crack under that pressure. My tendons didn't snap. My muscles kept growing, even though I was sabotaging their efforts as best I could with my no-calorie diets and post-prandial vomiting.
Ballet was both a blessing and a curse when it came to loving my body. In the short run, I think the pressures to be overly thin won out and did bad things to me. As the years go on, though, it's become easier for me to see the positive legacy that that discipline has had on my body image.
One other thing : remember how I really wanted to have big boobs? (In my family, the womens' breast sizes fall all over the map, so I had no idea what to expect my final cup-size would be.) Well, as I got increasingly serious about dancing, I realized that having large boobs would be a liability. They'd jiggle when I'd dance, and that wasn't something a professional ballet company would want. I remember praying-- literally praying-- "God, please don't give me big boobs, because then I'll never be able to make it as a dancer."
It is the only prayer of mine that God has unequivocally granted; fully grown, I'm a 32AA. It makes bra-shopping kind of frustrating, but even though our culture strongly recommends having 36Cs, I feel an immense affection for my tiny boobs. I think they're amazing. Looking at them in the mirror makes me really happy. "These are MINE!" I think. "These are my gift from GOD!" It isn't rational, really, but they're one of my favorite parts of my body.
********
When I was about 13, my family visited England. One day, we ventured out to my Mom's ancestral stomping grounds, as determined by Dad's assiduous geneology investigations.
Mom's ancestors included the Earl of Estowell, who had built a small chapel on his property a thousand years ago. The chapel is still standing-- people still hold services there every Sunday, though it only holds half a dozen pews. The Earl and his wife are interred in the church, in these stone sarcophigae to the side of the nave, which were made more-or-less in their likenesses.
The lady, of course, was very small, having grown up in the nutritionally-limited Middle Ages. The tomb-sculpture of her was only about 5' long. That was her full-grown height. That's also how tall I was at the time (and remember, I was none too happy about it). The lady of the manor, the most important woman in that place, had only been 5' tall. And it didn't make her any less noble or powerful. That really made me think.
I also noticed the carving of her face. She had the exact same nose my mother had given to me: straight, prominent, not at all button-like. She had the same small chin I did, too. She had tiny breasts. She looked, in other words, a lot like me. Now, I know that those carvings were certainly idealized and not exact likenesses of the people they're meant to represent, but those three traits were so idiosyncratic... I didn't see them in most of the other old church tombs we saw on that vacation, so I'm inclined to believe that she really did possess them in real life.
It hit me that those features, the very ones that so exasperated me, had been surfacing in every single Estowell descendent for about a thousand years. Those features clearly weren't getting in the way of any of those people falling in love, attracting a mate, and getting laid. And, especially, that there must be something important and good about them if they'd proved durable enough to persist through 30 generations and get passed down onto my face.
I mean, just think about how strong those traits must be if they appeared unchanged in my own body after an entire millenium. Thirty generations would have been more than enough to dilute most things that DNA carries, but not these. They're quite literally set in stone.
It really hit me how my nose, my height, my boobs, and my tiny torso were a legacy that this noblewoman had left to me. That I could claim my tiny share of her nobility and power and beauty just by showing my face to the world, and letting everyone see how much she resembled me. That my nose, in some sense, was what proved me to be a minor queen.
That was the day I abandoned my long-held plans to get a nose job.
********
When I was about 23 (I'm ancient compared to most of you!), I made the mistake of dating a seemingly sweet guy who got a little... creepy... once we parted ways. Ultimately, he never hit me or hurt me or anything, but for a few months I had a persistent, uneasy feeling that he might try.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how to keep myself safe. I realized that the police couldn't be of much help to me until something bad had already happened; a cop couldn't reasonably be expected to follow me around until I'd been attacked at least once, and... well, the whole point would be to avoid getting attacked _at all_. Until then, if I wanted protection, I'd have to hire a bodyguard with money I didn't have.
I realized that I needed to be my own bodyguard. So, I signed up to learn Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
The first class left me exhausted. I thought I was going to throw up in the middle of practice, it was so hard. There weren't any other women in the class; it was just little 'ol me and a couple dozen remarkably burly young men. The lightest among them outweighed me by at least twenty pounds, and they were all far more athletic than I was. (That ain't sayin' much. At that point, most office furniture could have be said to be more athletic than I was.)
The pain, frustration and humiliation were totally worth it, though. In the first class, we learned how to do arm-bars. This locks someone's arm in place, and then bends their elbow back the wrong way. Amongst other things, it's an easy and effective way to break an ex-boyfriend's arm.
After that first class, I rode the bus home, and I realized that it didn't matter if anyone on that bus hated me. It didn't matter if any of those big guys standing in the aisle disliked what I was wearing or how I was sitting or anything else about me. If they decided to hurt me, I could make them stop: I could break their arms. After one class, I already had the means to ensure that no one could hit me.
I sat taller upon realizing that.
As the classes went on, I put on a noticeable amount of muscle. Outside of class, I began going to the gym, doing push-ups, trying to do pull-ups, doing weight training, and running. I didn't want to hold the rest of the guys in the class back, and I didn't want to feel like every warm-up was going to make me vomit. And I got better. I was always the worst one in the class, but I still improved. I was never able to pin anybody to the mat, but I was able, on occasion, to throw a 180 pound guy off of me. (He looked as surprised as I felt.)
For the first time in my life, I wanted to weigh _more_. I wanted there to be _more of me_, because it would let me succeed in grappling with the guys. I wanted to be larger. I wanted to take up more space, to have more heft, to be big and burly. I wanted to make my body into a huge, powerful weapon.
Until then, I hadn't realized what the flip side of all that had entailed. When I'd wanted to slice off my stomach as a teen, I'd wanted for there to be _less_ of me.
Think about that for a second: I had essentially wanted to remove a sizable chunk of myself from the world. All of the worries I'd had about being 'too fat' had centered on 'selfishly' demanding an 'unreasonable' volume of space. It had all revolved around carving myself into an acceptable shape: one that didn't demand too much space or fear or inconvenience or respect from the people around me.
It made me angry to realized what all of that dieting had meant. That it had been an expression of profound disgust and disrespect for the space my body and soul were entitled to claim. This pissed me off something fierce. My body was freakin' _meant_ to be big and sturdy. My legs and hips were _meant_ to have power and heft. My arms existed to be strong and bulky, and my stomach muscles were _supposed_ to bulge out.
All of the messages that had told me to slim down, to reduce my weight, and to eat sparingly had essentially been telling me NOT to be my own bodyguard. I'd been bamboozled out of learning how to protect my own self for all of those years. Every time I'd skipped a meal and lived instead on coffee, I'd basically given everyone around me the opportunity and ability to hit me, abuse me, and overpower me.
But no more. I had a right to be 'too big,' and if they didn't like it-- well, I knew how to break their arms. I knew, now, how to pin an untrained person down so that they couldn't beat me up for being 'ugly.' I even knew how and where to press their throats to make them pass out-- or, possibly, die.
I now had not only a house but also a security system for my body, and that meant I no longer had to take any shit from anybody. I had the freedom to do what I wanted.
To be clear: I've never yet felt the desire or the need to use this training on anybody. It hasn't made me into a violent bully. I don't fantasize about attacking random people, and I'd still definitely prefer to use non-violent tactics to protect myself in dangerous situations. However, knowing that I've got something fierce and effective to fall back on if everything else fails sets me infinitely more at ease as I move through everyday life. Using Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu on someone would be my last resort, but it's a resort I didn't have before.
*******
There are a lot of other things that have shepherded me towards loving my body. The three stories I've shared above are the most dramatic ones, but the process is made up of a million little nudges and a lifetime of small swerves towards extending respect to my own body, and to the bodies of those around me.
Being in relationships with guys who touch my body with respect, affection, and no small amount of wonder definitely helps. Getting specific and genuine compliments from my friends on things like my hands or my ears or my eyes helps. Learning how to sew or alter my own clothes so that they look good and feel comfortable has been really good for that.
There's a painting that Rubens did of his beautiful young wife, who he apparently loved like crazy, which has helped me a lot. In it, she's mostly naked, with a fur robe clasped around her belly. The painting is Rubens' love-letter to her beauty: her golden hair, her rosy cheeks, her perky boobs. It's an idealized portrait of her. And you know what else is in it? Her cellulite. Rubens did not have to include that, and yet he did-- because he thought it was beautiful. One of the greatest painters who ever lived, a man who had an unarguably keen eye for what was beautiful in this world, thought his wife's cellulite was part of what made her the sexiest woman alive. I keep that in mind when I debate whether or not to wear shorts that expose my less-than-perfectly-smooth upper thighs.
Keeping my eyes peeled for things I find beautiful in other peoples' bodies turns out to be extremely helpful. There's a wide range of human beauty walking the earth, and only a small portion of it gets photographed and distributed for mass consumption. This isn't to say that models like Lara Stone aren't beautiful-- they are! If they weren't, we wouldn't enjoy looking at them. However, there are lots of other kinds of beauty (many of which also photograph well) that we don't see a lot of in magazines or on TV. There are curly-haired people and darker-skinned people who don't get their due. There are short people and tall people and big-nosed people and bearded people and short-haired people who don't show up in our culture's current look-book of What Is Desirable, but they're all right out there, passing you every day on the street.
Keep an eye out for all of those unsung types of beauty. Once you start to recognize it in other people, I've found it becomes easier to also recognize it in yourself.
********
Realizing that a flat stomach or perfect boobs or lovely hair is no hedge against death also helps. Bullets are lethal to beauties and trolls alike. So are hurtling busses, ebola, and old age. We are all going to die, now matter how ugly or lovely we are. Having a straight nose won't gain you another year of life. There's a huge body of evidence that shows being overweight won't push you into the grave any sooner. (In fact, it seems to be a bit of an advantage. Skinny people tend to have more health problems as they age.) We're all going to get wrinkles, and someday we will all cease to be.
Everyone reading this is also in possession of a body that allows them to exist in this world. As frail, faulty, ugly, or otherwise frustrating as your particular body seems, you have to bear in mind the uncountable number of things that have to go _right_ in there every second of every day to keep you breathing. Go read up on all of the redundant safety systems that are solely devoted to keeping your heart beating-- if that doesn't make you like that part of your body, I don't know what will. Read up on the crazy, Transformer-like stuff that happens to a pregnant woman's body. Read up on the amazing intricacy and power inherent in the physiology of your brain. Learn what's going on in there. You're the owner of this thing, and you deserve to know how it works.
The more you learn, the more you come to realize that your body is truly your temple. Take note: it's _your_ temple, and it is a sacred thing, regardless of whether or not anyone else likes its decoration or design. It was made specifically for you, and specifically to suit _you_. Other peoples' opinions on the matter are completely beside the point as long as that temple of yours remains standing.
There will also never, ever be another body like it on this earth. No, really-- however many billions of human bodies there have been and will be, not a single one of them will ever be exactly like yours. For that reason alone, try to recognize it as the mind-blowingly unique and awesome thing that it is.
********
So, there you go. That's more-or-less how I've moved from wanting to amputate parts of myself to really appreciating those same parts. Again, you're going to find your own reasons for liking your body, reasons that may be nothing like any of these. It's not going to happen in an instant, and you'll likely flicker back and forth in that middle ground of 'well-I-guess-some-parts-of-me-are-okay-but-I-really-wish-this-part-and-that-part-were-different.' Thus is life, so don't get discouraged.
I hope this helps, and if you've got stuff you'd like to add to the discussion please tell me! I'd love to hear all about it.
I can't articulate what that process was like without first explaining what it meant _not_ to accept my body. My journey towards liking my body is inseparible both from its starting point and from its ultimate result, and it's been the work of a slew of very specific, personal experiences.
For that reason, I'd like to make it super, super clear that this is not The Only Way to learn to like your body. Your body is your own, and so are your experiences. Your path towards body acceptance isn't going to follow mine in its particulars. The purpose of all the specific personal anecdotes that follow is to get behind the veil of "and then I realized that it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about my body," and really talk about what that means. What sorts of thoughts and emotional logic build up someone's confidence to the point where they're equipped to stand up to the world and say, "Hey! I'm fine just as I am, thanks!"
I can't tell you exactly what will work for you, but I can tell you how it happened for me.
It wasn't a sudden realization, and there wasn't any single particular thing that did the trick. It took about a dozen years, and it involved a lot of back-and-forth. Some days I woke up really liking my body. Some days I'd wake up liking _this_ aspect of my body, but not _that_ one. Other days just I'd feel like an all-around sack of shit, but on the whole I've gradually eased my way into something a lot better than that.
So. Here's the tale of how I, personally, learned to stop worrying and love my bod.
********
Once upon a time, I really hated my body. Hate isn't really specific enough to convey how I felt about it. Vexed, perhaps, frustrated, disappointed, and impatient would all be better words to describe how I felt.
I was a late bloomer, and a slow grower. It didn't help that I'd skipped a grade, which put me even further behind everyone when it came to growing. I felt like a shrimp all through elementary, middle, and high school. I didn't stop growing until I'd finished college! Unlike most of my peers, who had a big growth spurt sometime in their adolescence, I simply oozed upward a little bit at a time. My breasts never exploded out of my chest the way my friends' did. I never grew five inches in one summer. My 'womanly curves,' such as they are, filled in almost imperceptibly slowly, a single millimeter at a time.
When I was a kid, I really, really wanted to be an actress when I grew up-- a Broadway actress primarily, but TV and films would be fine, too, once I'd established myself as a theatric badass on the stages of New York. :-) To do so, you've got to be able to act, sing, and dance at a high level. I popped out of womb knowing how to do the first two, but I needed a lot of help mastering the third one. So, when I was about eight, I started taking lots of dance lessons. In particular, I ended up doing a lot of ballet; the idea being that ballet is so hard and physically demanding that if you can master it, all of the other forms of dance will come easily.
Ballet was both a blessing and a curse when it came to liking my body. Professional ballet dancers are all extremely thin, which is what all of us in class aspired to look like. Throughout middle and high school, until I quit ballet at the age of 16, I spent a huge amount of energy despising my so-called physical flaws: my feet weren't arched enough, my neck wasn't long enough, my turn-out-- oh, my turn-out-- wasn't even close to good enough, and my back would never get ramrod straight, no matter how hard I tried to maintain that posture.
And my stomach. Good Lord, my stomach. It was HUGE (or at least, so I thought). I did sit-ups and crunches and all sorts of stomach exercises every morning and every night before I went to bed, but the damned thing remained convex. I hated my stomach-- HATED it. I'd look in the mirror before getting into the shower each morning, and fantasize about taking a knife and slicing off all of the extra flesh that stood between me and an ideally flat abdomen. If only it were smaller, I thought, my hip bones would stick out the way they 'ought' to. My movements would become stronger and more graceful. I'd be beautiful. All of the guys would love me, and I'd magically become the best dancer in my class.
Or at least, so I thought.
I had other requirements that my body seemingly failed to meet. As an actress, I'd need to make a living with my face, and my face just wasn't cutting it. I have a weak chin, and acne-prone skin. If I wanted to make it as an actress (especially in film or TV), I needed to have a button-nose and a smooth, square jaw line. Of course, neither of those things are in my DNA; I've got a strong shnooze, and, well... see what I said earlier about that weak chin. I thought I needed to look like a model, which meant I had to be tall, willowy, and in possession of big boobs. I was only about 5' tall, and if I could have relocated the flesh of my troublesome stomach about a foot to the north, maybe I could have passed as Kate Moss, but I couldn't, so, no dice.
I really, really, hated my body. "Grow!" I thought. "C'mon, boobs, grow! C'mon, legs, grow! Get me up to 5'7" already!" I waited and waited and waited for that magical growth spurt to come upon me: the one that would stretch me out into a tall, skinny lady just made for TV.
It was all in vain, of course. If I couldn't force my body to get longer, though, I could at least try to do something about my girth. I learned how to tickle the back of my throat with a toothbrush-- toothpaste seemed to help, oddly-- and vomit up the meals I'd just consumed, one agonizing mouthful at a time. (They don't tell you this about bulimia. It was like eating those meals in reverse, but a whole lot less fun and infinitely more disgusting.) I skipped meals. I skipped eating for days at a time, using increasingly sneaky tactics to hide the uneaten food from my parents. I drank a lot of coffee; I practically lived on coffee. It gave me energy, you see, but it didn't have any calories!
I planned my food intake a week in advance, and kept a running tally of how many calories I'd consumed that hour/day/week/month in my head at all times. (They say girls are bad at math, but they have no freakin' idea how much intensive mental arithmetic a dieting girl can do.)
Looking back on it now, from the vantage point of someone who simply eats when she's hungry and stops when she's full, it was... I mean, that's an eating disorder, for sure. And it was fueled, largely, by the image I hoped or feared to see in the dance studio mirrors after school.
So. That's where I was coming from in terms of (dis)liking my body.
Within that context, though, ballet also gave me much to love about my body. I have long limbs and a small torso, which are kind of odd-looking in everyday life, but good for ballet. Dancing really made me grow to like my feet, un-arched though they are. I have really sturdy, cute little feet. The balls of my feet are wide, and my toes are well-proportioned for pointe work (none of them are particularly longer than the others, which meant none of them bore a disproportionate amount of my weight). I never got really horribly blisters from dancing on pointe. I mean, sure, my pinkie toes got rubbed raw in a couple of places, and sometimes I'd get raw places on the bunion-parts of my feet, but my feet took to pointe dancing pretty easily. I was super proud of those sturdy little feet.
Dancing also put me in touch with my anatomy, with my muscles particularly. I learned to feel where they were in my body, which movements they controlled, and how they strengthened day by day and class by class. I remember, particularly, the day that I first really got a feeling for what my back muscles were up to. We'd just done a moving combination across the floor, probably something involving jumping. Whatever it was, it must have required a lot of lifting a leg up behind us in arabesque, because my back was exhausted by the time I'd finished. I remember putting my hands to my back (kind of like putting my hands on my hips, but with my fingers resting on the lower back) to brace that tired part of myself as I walked back to the corner of the room, and that's when I felt something amazing.
With every step I took, something like a steel cable pressed up under my hand on the same side as the leg that was stepping forward. Back and forth as I walked, I felt these things bunching and releasing under my fingers. It took me a second to realize that those things were _muscles_. They didn't feel like soft tissue at all-- they really felt like something made of iron or steel, not of flesh.
Those steel cables were _in my back_! Those were my _back muscles_, which had just finished pulling my legs up behind me! I had muscles in my back so strong they felt like freakin' _steel_!!
As soon as I realized what was going on, I told the other girls, and we all put our hands to our backs and marveled at how COOL that was, at how incredibly strong we were back there. It made me realize that, even though my arabesques were far from perfect, that movement required incredible strength, and that my body was unusually powerful-- that I had muscles inside of me that literally felt like steel.
I cannot overstate how fantastic that was.
Ballet also taught me flexibility. It took ages to learn, and it came agonizingly slowly, but my joints have been permanently changed (for the better, I think) by all of the specific, rigorous, sustained stretching we did over all of those years. There's nothing quite like getting into a perfect split for the first time. I still have dreams where I'm stretching, and the amazement at how my body can bend has never left me. It is kind of like having a superpower, really. It hurt, but it amazed me at the same time: my hips and legs and back can do _this_? Really? I never thought they'd be able to bend like that, and yet there I was with one leg held up straight over my head.
That was ME. That was my own body, doing these things. These difficult, painful, beautiful things that defied gravity. My own imperfect, fat-stomached, too-short, flat-chested body was doing all of these things. That flawed body could balance on the tips of its toes. That body could balance itself against gravity through double and triple piroettes. That body of mine could hang in the air in running jumps. That body of mine could bend and flex and hold itself out in seemingly impossibly positions for longer and longer lengths of time.
My body could do all of these things, and it could get up the next morning and solder on through the incredible pain left behind in my muscles, and not break. It could do all of these things, and it kept getting stronger and stronger, until nearly every part of me felt like steel. (Maybe not my stomach, but even it got pretty hard as time went on.) My bones did not crack under that pressure. My tendons didn't snap. My muscles kept growing, even though I was sabotaging their efforts as best I could with my no-calorie diets and post-prandial vomiting.
Ballet was both a blessing and a curse when it came to loving my body. In the short run, I think the pressures to be overly thin won out and did bad things to me. As the years go on, though, it's become easier for me to see the positive legacy that that discipline has had on my body image.
One other thing : remember how I really wanted to have big boobs? (In my family, the womens' breast sizes fall all over the map, so I had no idea what to expect my final cup-size would be.) Well, as I got increasingly serious about dancing, I realized that having large boobs would be a liability. They'd jiggle when I'd dance, and that wasn't something a professional ballet company would want. I remember praying-- literally praying-- "God, please don't give me big boobs, because then I'll never be able to make it as a dancer."
It is the only prayer of mine that God has unequivocally granted; fully grown, I'm a 32AA. It makes bra-shopping kind of frustrating, but even though our culture strongly recommends having 36Cs, I feel an immense affection for my tiny boobs. I think they're amazing. Looking at them in the mirror makes me really happy. "These are MINE!" I think. "These are my gift from GOD!" It isn't rational, really, but they're one of my favorite parts of my body.
********
When I was about 13, my family visited England. One day, we ventured out to my Mom's ancestral stomping grounds, as determined by Dad's assiduous geneology investigations.
Mom's ancestors included the Earl of Estowell, who had built a small chapel on his property a thousand years ago. The chapel is still standing-- people still hold services there every Sunday, though it only holds half a dozen pews. The Earl and his wife are interred in the church, in these stone sarcophigae to the side of the nave, which were made more-or-less in their likenesses.
The lady, of course, was very small, having grown up in the nutritionally-limited Middle Ages. The tomb-sculpture of her was only about 5' long. That was her full-grown height. That's also how tall I was at the time (and remember, I was none too happy about it). The lady of the manor, the most important woman in that place, had only been 5' tall. And it didn't make her any less noble or powerful. That really made me think.
I also noticed the carving of her face. She had the exact same nose my mother had given to me: straight, prominent, not at all button-like. She had the same small chin I did, too. She had tiny breasts. She looked, in other words, a lot like me. Now, I know that those carvings were certainly idealized and not exact likenesses of the people they're meant to represent, but those three traits were so idiosyncratic... I didn't see them in most of the other old church tombs we saw on that vacation, so I'm inclined to believe that she really did possess them in real life.
It hit me that those features, the very ones that so exasperated me, had been surfacing in every single Estowell descendent for about a thousand years. Those features clearly weren't getting in the way of any of those people falling in love, attracting a mate, and getting laid. And, especially, that there must be something important and good about them if they'd proved durable enough to persist through 30 generations and get passed down onto my face.
I mean, just think about how strong those traits must be if they appeared unchanged in my own body after an entire millenium. Thirty generations would have been more than enough to dilute most things that DNA carries, but not these. They're quite literally set in stone.
It really hit me how my nose, my height, my boobs, and my tiny torso were a legacy that this noblewoman had left to me. That I could claim my tiny share of her nobility and power and beauty just by showing my face to the world, and letting everyone see how much she resembled me. That my nose, in some sense, was what proved me to be a minor queen.
That was the day I abandoned my long-held plans to get a nose job.
********
When I was about 23 (I'm ancient compared to most of you!), I made the mistake of dating a seemingly sweet guy who got a little... creepy... once we parted ways. Ultimately, he never hit me or hurt me or anything, but for a few months I had a persistent, uneasy feeling that he might try.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how to keep myself safe. I realized that the police couldn't be of much help to me until something bad had already happened; a cop couldn't reasonably be expected to follow me around until I'd been attacked at least once, and... well, the whole point would be to avoid getting attacked _at all_. Until then, if I wanted protection, I'd have to hire a bodyguard with money I didn't have.
I realized that I needed to be my own bodyguard. So, I signed up to learn Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
The first class left me exhausted. I thought I was going to throw up in the middle of practice, it was so hard. There weren't any other women in the class; it was just little 'ol me and a couple dozen remarkably burly young men. The lightest among them outweighed me by at least twenty pounds, and they were all far more athletic than I was. (That ain't sayin' much. At that point, most office furniture could have be said to be more athletic than I was.)
The pain, frustration and humiliation were totally worth it, though. In the first class, we learned how to do arm-bars. This locks someone's arm in place, and then bends their elbow back the wrong way. Amongst other things, it's an easy and effective way to break an ex-boyfriend's arm.
After that first class, I rode the bus home, and I realized that it didn't matter if anyone on that bus hated me. It didn't matter if any of those big guys standing in the aisle disliked what I was wearing or how I was sitting or anything else about me. If they decided to hurt me, I could make them stop: I could break their arms. After one class, I already had the means to ensure that no one could hit me.
I sat taller upon realizing that.
As the classes went on, I put on a noticeable amount of muscle. Outside of class, I began going to the gym, doing push-ups, trying to do pull-ups, doing weight training, and running. I didn't want to hold the rest of the guys in the class back, and I didn't want to feel like every warm-up was going to make me vomit. And I got better. I was always the worst one in the class, but I still improved. I was never able to pin anybody to the mat, but I was able, on occasion, to throw a 180 pound guy off of me. (He looked as surprised as I felt.)
For the first time in my life, I wanted to weigh _more_. I wanted there to be _more of me_, because it would let me succeed in grappling with the guys. I wanted to be larger. I wanted to take up more space, to have more heft, to be big and burly. I wanted to make my body into a huge, powerful weapon.
Until then, I hadn't realized what the flip side of all that had entailed. When I'd wanted to slice off my stomach as a teen, I'd wanted for there to be _less_ of me.
Think about that for a second: I had essentially wanted to remove a sizable chunk of myself from the world. All of the worries I'd had about being 'too fat' had centered on 'selfishly' demanding an 'unreasonable' volume of space. It had all revolved around carving myself into an acceptable shape: one that didn't demand too much space or fear or inconvenience or respect from the people around me.
It made me angry to realized what all of that dieting had meant. That it had been an expression of profound disgust and disrespect for the space my body and soul were entitled to claim. This pissed me off something fierce. My body was freakin' _meant_ to be big and sturdy. My legs and hips were _meant_ to have power and heft. My arms existed to be strong and bulky, and my stomach muscles were _supposed_ to bulge out.
All of the messages that had told me to slim down, to reduce my weight, and to eat sparingly had essentially been telling me NOT to be my own bodyguard. I'd been bamboozled out of learning how to protect my own self for all of those years. Every time I'd skipped a meal and lived instead on coffee, I'd basically given everyone around me the opportunity and ability to hit me, abuse me, and overpower me.
But no more. I had a right to be 'too big,' and if they didn't like it-- well, I knew how to break their arms. I knew, now, how to pin an untrained person down so that they couldn't beat me up for being 'ugly.' I even knew how and where to press their throats to make them pass out-- or, possibly, die.
I now had not only a house but also a security system for my body, and that meant I no longer had to take any shit from anybody. I had the freedom to do what I wanted.
To be clear: I've never yet felt the desire or the need to use this training on anybody. It hasn't made me into a violent bully. I don't fantasize about attacking random people, and I'd still definitely prefer to use non-violent tactics to protect myself in dangerous situations. However, knowing that I've got something fierce and effective to fall back on if everything else fails sets me infinitely more at ease as I move through everyday life. Using Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu on someone would be my last resort, but it's a resort I didn't have before.
*******
There are a lot of other things that have shepherded me towards loving my body. The three stories I've shared above are the most dramatic ones, but the process is made up of a million little nudges and a lifetime of small swerves towards extending respect to my own body, and to the bodies of those around me.
Being in relationships with guys who touch my body with respect, affection, and no small amount of wonder definitely helps. Getting specific and genuine compliments from my friends on things like my hands or my ears or my eyes helps. Learning how to sew or alter my own clothes so that they look good and feel comfortable has been really good for that.
There's a painting that Rubens did of his beautiful young wife, who he apparently loved like crazy, which has helped me a lot. In it, she's mostly naked, with a fur robe clasped around her belly. The painting is Rubens' love-letter to her beauty: her golden hair, her rosy cheeks, her perky boobs. It's an idealized portrait of her. And you know what else is in it? Her cellulite. Rubens did not have to include that, and yet he did-- because he thought it was beautiful. One of the greatest painters who ever lived, a man who had an unarguably keen eye for what was beautiful in this world, thought his wife's cellulite was part of what made her the sexiest woman alive. I keep that in mind when I debate whether or not to wear shorts that expose my less-than-perfectly-smooth upper thighs.
Keeping my eyes peeled for things I find beautiful in other peoples' bodies turns out to be extremely helpful. There's a wide range of human beauty walking the earth, and only a small portion of it gets photographed and distributed for mass consumption. This isn't to say that models like Lara Stone aren't beautiful-- they are! If they weren't, we wouldn't enjoy looking at them. However, there are lots of other kinds of beauty (many of which also photograph well) that we don't see a lot of in magazines or on TV. There are curly-haired people and darker-skinned people who don't get their due. There are short people and tall people and big-nosed people and bearded people and short-haired people who don't show up in our culture's current look-book of What Is Desirable, but they're all right out there, passing you every day on the street.
Keep an eye out for all of those unsung types of beauty. Once you start to recognize it in other people, I've found it becomes easier to also recognize it in yourself.
********
Realizing that a flat stomach or perfect boobs or lovely hair is no hedge against death also helps. Bullets are lethal to beauties and trolls alike. So are hurtling busses, ebola, and old age. We are all going to die, now matter how ugly or lovely we are. Having a straight nose won't gain you another year of life. There's a huge body of evidence that shows being overweight won't push you into the grave any sooner. (In fact, it seems to be a bit of an advantage. Skinny people tend to have more health problems as they age.) We're all going to get wrinkles, and someday we will all cease to be.
Everyone reading this is also in possession of a body that allows them to exist in this world. As frail, faulty, ugly, or otherwise frustrating as your particular body seems, you have to bear in mind the uncountable number of things that have to go _right_ in there every second of every day to keep you breathing. Go read up on all of the redundant safety systems that are solely devoted to keeping your heart beating-- if that doesn't make you like that part of your body, I don't know what will. Read up on the crazy, Transformer-like stuff that happens to a pregnant woman's body. Read up on the amazing intricacy and power inherent in the physiology of your brain. Learn what's going on in there. You're the owner of this thing, and you deserve to know how it works.
The more you learn, the more you come to realize that your body is truly your temple. Take note: it's _your_ temple, and it is a sacred thing, regardless of whether or not anyone else likes its decoration or design. It was made specifically for you, and specifically to suit _you_. Other peoples' opinions on the matter are completely beside the point as long as that temple of yours remains standing.
There will also never, ever be another body like it on this earth. No, really-- however many billions of human bodies there have been and will be, not a single one of them will ever be exactly like yours. For that reason alone, try to recognize it as the mind-blowingly unique and awesome thing that it is.
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So, there you go. That's more-or-less how I've moved from wanting to amputate parts of myself to really appreciating those same parts. Again, you're going to find your own reasons for liking your body, reasons that may be nothing like any of these. It's not going to happen in an instant, and you'll likely flicker back and forth in that middle ground of 'well-I-guess-some-parts-of-me-are-okay-but-I-really-wish-this-part-and-that-part-were-different.' Thus is life, so don't get discouraged.
I hope this helps, and if you've got stuff you'd like to add to the discussion please tell me! I'd love to hear all about it.