How to be #BodyPosi: A non-guide.
So I bought a new sweater/shirt. It’s an oxblood burgundy color. I also bought a pair of light blue ripped jeans. The jeans are the first I’ve bought in over a year and I’ll tell you why. It’s because I struggle hard with body positivity and its many iterations. I struggle to know when I truly deserve new clothes…deserve them enough to spend lots of money on them — but I’ve learned from other people that trying to deserve nice clothes is inherently damaging to my self-esteem.
These are the people that say “Be who you are and don’t ever try to change anything about your size ever or you don’t/can't love yourself.” It seems unfair to call them out first because they are through their work, eroding impossible body standards and I think the majority of people those people are trying so hard to establish the need in the collective subconscious to completely break away from obsessions over physical appearance that are so ubiquitous in American culture that it all but is our culture. However, this is the mode of thought that I most frequently find myself butting heads with now that I have given up on (most) forms of disordered eating and have begun to reformulate my reasons and motivations for most movement and exercise that I have participated in.
Then there’s the camp somewhere below the aforementioned one which says, “Loving your body by always having an eye on your weight and activity levels is Body Positivity! You should consider being smaller…For you!” This is the place I often have to avoid sliding into when I look at old pictures of myself and think “I would enjoy being that size again” (although I didn’t when I was that size). It becomes the comparison game of if I can get a comparatively better body which ultimately makes me view myself and my body as comparatively worse. It’s inherently unsustainable because of its predisposition toward this backsliding cognitive dissonance. Then there is the faction that isn’t body-positive at all, has no interest in empowering fat people, and believe that the way to feeling good or free in one’s own body is ironically to have it under strict control, “clean eating”, which I’m still deciding whether or not I believe in and if so, in which iteration; and “cheat days” which are intriguing to watch but difficult to reconcile with my conception of what emotionally/cognitively sustainable human eating patterns should look like. On principle, I don’t agree with eating lots of “bad food” only once in a while to mitigate cravings.
While I don’t think that all body-posi or health/fitness related movements can be cut into neat factions as I’m attempting to do here, I have run into so many ideas and representations of what it's supposed to mean to love your body, know your body, and treat your body well that I feel like I have whiplash from trying to hop in and out of all of them throughout the past ten years. I feel like I’ve seen and heard it all and I find myself confounded on how I still haven’t figured it out yet. I understand that my understanding of body positivity and what it means to feel good and free in one’s body has evolved seemingly for the better. I also know, in what I like to call “my academic brain”, that things aren’t exactly set up for me to figure them out and put everything to rest — “Good news everyone: Natalia has solved body issues but only for herself! Good Luck to everyone else! No Excuses!” but at the same time, I think, ‘why does it feel like so many other people have figured it out’? Not just thin people or just fat people but a conglomeration of both and every size in between have on an individual level at least found a way to feel good and free. They’ve found some way to live with themselves — not that they shouldn’t be able to however it's confounding that I’m still finding myself sliding into a large t-shirt and leggings for my menial job because God-forbid I have to see my actual body shape in the bathroom mirror. I feel like every day that I leave the gym and don’t magically show up thin on my next visit, I’m failing or wasting my time. I find myself in a mental backslide or even, less often in a freefall.
Truthfully, at this point in my journey I don’t know if I want to be thin, or love myself in a fat body, or love myself in a thin body, or be in a medium-size body so that I can love myself without feeling like I sold out to the Pseudo-health-conscious-diet-culture-complex and I can still be considered #bodyposi. I look at fat fitness, fashion, and beauty influencers (“influencer” feels like a dirty word now doesn’t it?) and on one hand, I admire them. On good days or really really bad days, they fill me with the hope that maybe one day I will wear my stomach out on the beach and not feel a deep pit of sheepish inadequacy; as if I simply didn’t properly prepare for the occasion by not bringing my flat stomach instead. Other days, I feel a familiar terror that I will never see my thin body again no matter how many days a week I go to the gym and or how many smoothies I drink for breakfast. I feel a terror that I may never again drink a smoothie for breakfast and think only of my pure enjoyment and nothing else.
When focusing on my ‘so-called health’ I try to zero in on non-body image things like the aforementioned smoothies (which are actually really good when made with bananas, lime, and honey) and ways to make them taste even better. Or ways to stretch in order to ease my often-present lower back pain and maybe be able to fit my leg behind my head one day. I try not to look at my body too closely in the shower so I turn the lights off and instead think of how nice the scalding water is on my back. I turn on music, light a candle and obsess about my non-existent career which is a lot easier to do when the hot water is melting the tension out my shoulders and neck. I spend a full 60 seconds washing my face then I wash it again. I lotion my crusty elbows and feet, I turn on the tv. I turn up the music. I scroll and scroll and scroll on my phone and when something reminds me of the body I live in — I scroll some more without actually reading or watching anything. I get up at 5 am to get to the gym by 5:40, to finish my shower by 7 am at the latest, to get to work by 8 am.
Ultimately, in my ‘academic brain’ that agreed to pay for and took all those women’s studies classes, I know that ‘my body is not an apology’ as Sonya Renee Taylor says. That it is not something I have to atone for, to control, to reinvent, to shrink, to detox, or ignore. I know that there is much more wrong around me than within me. My brain knows these things but I worry about how I will feel about myself when I go to bed and when I get up for work. And when I wake up with aching feet, I can’t help but feel that it must be my fault, that so many of the bad things my body has felt physically or emotionally have been a result of my neglect or lack of control. What do I do if the problem isn’t necessarily just me? How do I fix that? How do I do something different? What I’m struggling with now, almost every day, is that if after a decade — if I put away all the shitty things I’ve done and felt, after I finally put away all of those things I used to cope, to account for my body — if I were to just let myself be, would I know peace and what would I do with my body then?
Natalia is a writer aspiring to write professionally, and currently blogging @ theproblemwithlemons.wordpress.com. Click Here for more of her work.
