“That I was a child, with a body…”
This line from my story is echoing today, the source of so many things dysmorphic, disordered, disturbed. I’m an adult now (so they tell me). I still have a body. And I still don’t know how to live in it.
But I know – I think – that a key to making peace with the past, and to finding grace in this skin I’m in, is to dismantle everything that’s kept it from being mine in the first place.
One of the many mixed messages of my childhood was this: I was fat, and therefore conclusively unworthy (I was, in actuality, neither of these things).
And yet, my body was a pawn, owned and exchanged. The physical outlet for the grandfather’s powerlessness in the face of the women he feared. The amplifier for a mother’s insistent obsession with appearances, her toxic projections, her self-righteous and viciously skewed system of values. The reflection and reassurance, by comparison, of the better-ness of those around me.
I’ve started and stopped dozens of times. I don’t know where to begin.
I don’t know whether to write a timeline, to chronicle the size of me, year by year. I know that at barely 4’9”, in this particular decade of adulthood, I have been 157 pounds (for reference, that’s a BMI of 34, the higher end of the category labeled "obese") and denied treatment by an ob/gyn whose own significant weight loss had rendered her suddenly superior, and I have been 88 pounds and fired a doctor who refused to see this unintended, undesired smallness as a problem.
I don’t know whether to disassemble myself, part by part, starting at my feet and working my way towards the crown of my head.
I don’t know whether to recount being reprimanded, at sixteen, for a tank top that revealed the meat of my upper arms, or to post photos of the filigreed, jeweled ink that now encircles this same skin with pride and permanence.
I don’t know whether to describe the house in which I grew up, where there are few photos of me among the hundreds displayed, a conspicuous lack of representation in this place that is no longer home.
Or the times I avoided short-girls-in-front group shots, hid myself at tables and countertops, hugged close to friends to make me seem smaller.
Or the crisp Saturday afternoon, shortly after the 2016 election and just minutes after a near-assault in the parking lot, when I ruthlessly bared my skin before a trusted photographer’s lens, shivering but insistent, makeup free against a background of white, trying to figure out if I was still real.
I don’t know whether to start with the most painful, shame-filled moments or begin at the places where I can, objectively if not viscerally, identify strength.
I don’t know whether to reflect on being asked “do you really need that [brownie, extra slab of cream cheese, elusive moment of comfort]?” or confide the habit, now, of eating the same meal for months on end, simply because I can.
I don’t know how to report on my own uses of my body as currency, or to calculate whether I’m still in the red, overdrawn.
I don’t know how to silence the contempt in his voice as he spat accusations of my fourth-generation fatness, even as his hands grabbed at the places he purported to find repugnant, or how to forgive the girl I was for not doing enough to stop him. What did I do?
I don’t know whether to chronicle the ways I have tried to disappear, or the tricks I use now to take up as much space as I can.
I don’t know whether to start from the outside in, or the inside out.
I only know that it’s time to start.
Much love,
Jess
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