Body Image & Why I Write About It

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I am a woman who makes a constant effort to eat healthy and feel good about herself. I am also a woman who loves red velvet cupcakes, ice cream and can eat an entire box of cereal in one sitting. I stand with all women who are told what size they should be. How their legs shouldn't be touching. And to ignore hunger or indulgences. At the grocery store, with our carts full of low fat, low calorie slim-and-trim snacks, we pass by dozens of magazines that offer an iconic image of beauty and offerings of advice: Super Simple Slim-Down..... How to Turn Off Hunger.....Tips to fit those jeans.We are never good enough. We could always be thinner, prettier, better in bed.

After reading this article, I was inspired. This is why I write about body image: 

Notice the contradicting headlines. And the awkward why her hand was airbrushed.

 

I write about body image because "How can I know what I think until I see what I say." - E.M. Forster

I write about body image because I hardly ever feel beautiful, but know that I am. 

I write about body image because beauty is an alienating thing--a terribly lonely thing--belonging not to the the person in possession of it, but to all those with the eyes to behold it.  

I write about body image because at the age of eighteen, heartbroken and homesick and absolutely out-of-my-depth, I learned what a calorie was. 

I write about body image because it takes five minutes in front of a mirror to reshape how I perceive my own body.

I write about body image because the body is flesh and bones and tangible in a way that everything else is not. 

I write about body image because it's easier to think a man doesn't love me because-of-what-I-look-like than to hang in the gray space of the-infinite-unknown. But why, why doesn't he love me?

And I'm not good at the gray space.

I write about body image because body-image sometimes seems like a life-raft worth clinging to in the choppy waters of this impossible sea we call life.

It isn't.

I write about body image because for years when I would feel too much, and couldn't control a thing, I would control the one thing I could. Only to feel nothing, if only for a moment.

I write about body image because some days it is absolutely unbearable to live in my skin. And I think I cannot endure this sensation a moment longer. And I know it has nothing do with my physical body...yet it feels like it does. 

I write about body image because for a long time it was easier to hate my thighs and my hips than admit I really did not like myself.

I write about body image because it is the prism through which we, as women, see and talk about the world.

We talk about wanting to look this way or that way, when (I'm convinced), what we really want is love and acceptance and life-alteringly-good-things. (And appearance, for the most part, does not alter one's life--not in the big ways we always imagine it might).

I write about body image because it is the code by which we discuss things so large they scare us to say aloud.

I say “I'm fat” when what I really mean is “I'm sad.” And I berate the size of my thighs because that is easier than admitting I am untethered and adrift and totally lost at this point in my life--that notion is too big and too true and will surely make others uncomfortable, so I make it small...so small that it is about the size of my waist or the awkward way I smile.

I write about body image because before I can tell you just-why-it-is-I-really-don't-care-for-a-particular-woman (and sometimes, I really don't) I can say no less than five judgmental and evaluative things about what-she-looks-like. (Think about it, I bet you can do this too).

I find this both appalling and fascinating.

I write about body image because it shouldn't be a thing, but it is a thing, and more than that.. it points to THE THINGS!(all the big and significant things that life is really and actually about and therefore difficult to break down into small, manageable pieces).

I write about body image because eating disorders have effected women that I love madly and cherish deeply. Including myself.