body image

When I reach a benchmark in my weight loss and get all excited and proud, or when someone compliments me on how good I look now and I get a little self-esteem-boosting thrill, it's hard not to feel like a traitor to my feminist roots, and to the fat women who fought so hard to liberate me from the rigid and narrow social constructs of female beauty.

--Greta Christina

I've written about my weight issues time and time again, so I won't bore you with the details here. Suffice it to say that my relationship to my body is about as complex as any other woman's.

Last month, I reviewed a book for Herizons called Purge: Rehab Diaries, a memoir about a woman with an eating disorder who spends three months as an inpatient trying to get well. Part of her reason for writing it was to give other people with eating disorders hope.

I really enjoyed the book, but hope? Eesh. I put that book down with a whole bunch of old unhealthy habits and thought patterns triggered.

Not that I've ever had an eating disorder, and believe me, I was checked. When you show up in a psychologist's office with all your bones poking out, they are on those bones like flies on shit.

It's true that my food intake was severely restricted, but it wasn't a conscious decision. I wasn't trying to keep myself under about 700 calories a day, I just couldn't make my body swallow enough to get past that. What made me plain ol' depressed rather than eating disordered was mainly that I had a very accurate view of how thin I was and just how big a problem it was.

And this part, I've said before, but I think it bears repeating: I don't think other women had a very accurate view of how thin I was.

My family did. They were horrified and worried sick. So much so that even now, just last weekend, my mom eyed me and said "You've lost some weight, you know?" That furrow between her eyebrows.

But other women? I'm sure that some thought the weight loss didn't suit me, I can't say. What I can say is that I got one hell of a lot of compliments on being able to lose weight, so many jealous comments telling me how lucky I was. From acquaintances, from co-workers, from strangers.

It was like not eating. I knew the comments and their self-esteem-boosting thrills were bad for me, hit home in a way that was bolstering crazy unhealthy behaviour. But I found it impossible not to store them up at the same time. To be satisfied that I was this one thing that people wanted at the same time that most of the rest of my life was an utter shambles.

When I started gaining weight again, I did not get one single compliment or any comments on how lucky I was to have some padding. Not. One.

It still infuriates me.

So this has all been on my mind lately, after Purge, after being reminded of how easy it is to get so fucked up, how much cultural support there is for that particular brand of fucked-up-edness. After spending a few days unconsciously limiting my caloric intake, after a few days of consciously not.

In the Change Room of R&W

I try on the 6s and the 4s I've brought in. They don't fit quite right. The nice sales girl gets me a 2. Parts of it fit, parts of it don't. In my underwear, I stick my head out of the change room and ask the nice sales girl can she please go get me a 0, just to check.

I turn around to face the mirror.

First thing my mind says: "How did your inner thighs get so fat? When did you get cellu-"

Second: "Shut. The fuck. Up. We just asked for a zero, jackass. You will go home and you will get on the scale and you will see that you are pretty much the same weight as you were last week."

Johns writes in Purge that fat is a feeling, and oh, is it ever. She writes that it is "code for feeling scared, angry, ashamed, hurt and sad all in one." Fat is the container in which we store all the derision aimed at us, our imperfect and ungainly bodies; the hatred sometimes too, the violence we are almost always looking out for. It is what spills off the shelf onto us when our defenses are down.

Third: "Not this. Not on my watch."

This vigilance, it is sometimes exhausting.

I had one of those grand nights last night, where everything that was feeling a little out of control started spinning a titch slower.

Mostly, this happened through getting shit done around my house. Every single pot I owned was dirty and piled up on the counter, plus one of Shelley's as well, so scrub scrub scrub and why not fill up the kettle for coffee in the morning as well. I cleaned all the rotting vegetables out of my fridge. I used the vegetables that were on the edge of rotting in a big ol' lentil salad. I managed to not overcook the lentils. I finished an arts & crafts project that had been on the list for a couple weeks. It involved the use of power tools, and that pretty much makes any evening a good one.

The good mood was a bit of a surprise, considering that my late afternoon involved extended bouts in change rooms.

I bought bras. Without crying. This, sadly, is worth noting.

How I shopped for bras in such a way so as to prevent a body-loathing meltdown in front of strangers:

• I only looked for bras that were about like what I wear most days now. When I was tempted to stray and try on pretty things, I reined my cleavage- and lace-loving self back in. New = sad.
• I did not get it fitted. Every time I get a bra fitted, I end up with a too small bra that I spill up out of. Useful in certain circumstances, not what I want for every day. The only explanation I can come up with for this is that when people are looking directly at them, my boobs shrink.
• I settled for good enough. Does this bra make my tits look weird? No? Cheque please.

But then it was interview clothes shopping time. I have to admit, I had used up my initial surge of change room fuck you in La Senza.

Part 2, coming up...

It's been an exhausting few days. Only 5 hours sleep a couple of nights in a row, with a cat who seems bound and determined to make the last two hours of sleep intermittent. Last night I just crashed out at about 10, and tonight I think I'll do the same. And tomorrow night. And maybe the night after too.

Between the lack of sleep and writing, I'm finding myself without a whole lot in the tank. That means more lists for you.

1) Meditation Is Stressing Me Out

I'm halfway through the mindfulness clinic. I'm finding it interesting, and I think I'd probably get a lot more out of it if I actually engaged with the homework. Some of the homework is a half hour of breathing or body scan meditation. I'm cool with that, obviously, I think it's a good thing to do. But I don't have an extra half hour. That half hour comes out of food prep, or physical activity, or hanging out with friends (email included), or writing and blogging. I don't want to give up a half hour of those things.

Also, it's in Vanier. You know what I hate? It's not Vanier, which I'm sure would be a nice place to live if you never had to leave it. Because getting there and back nearly drives me to distraction. The 12 is the bus from hell, as far as I'm concerned. It's either late or runs a different route and always has at least one person on it who is entirely and loudly obnoxious.

Though today I left the clinic feeling worn the fuck out anyway. So maybe, when I eventually got on the bus, wasn't actually so loud that I had to close my eyes and plug my ears and concentrate on my breath going in and out of my nose. Just another crazy lady on the bus. But at least my crazy was quiet.

2) I'm Hoping It's Short

Part of the reason I left feeling worn out is because I'm having one of my intermittent periods of Severe Body Hatred, and it cropped up fiercely in the first round of meditation when we were sitting cross-legged for 20 minutes during which it felt like someone was slowly inserting a white hot rod alongside my right scapula.

The SBH, however, started with the fact that I've gained about 15 pounds over the winter. I can tell myself all I want that it's fine, that I'm a healthier weight now, that I like round curvy bodies, but what I can tell you is that I am frustrated by my new body. My clothes don't fit it properly. I was used to my old body. I liked my old body.

It's not just the weight though, because I also remember quite clearly weighing more than this and being happy with it. I've been through this before, this shift from skinny to thin, and I've always had this reaction when I'm getting used to the new state. What it tells me is that if I have to talk myself down from the "I'm fat!" reaction, then our world is some fucked.

So if it's not just the next size up, what is it? My damn shins. I can't run any more and I am FURIOUS with how unfair that is. It makes me feel like throwing a tantrum, in fact. It's not like I was a marathon runner, or was graceful or fast or anything like that. I shuffle along like an old lady. But god, it kept me sane, it kept me in my body and my brain working reasonably happily along with it.

Until it broke my body, at any rate.

I can shift to biking, I know. But it's not the same. The seagull apocalypse is a blur when you're going by it at bike speed. Same with smells, the sound of the water. If I do it enough times, it will eventually becomes a part of me the way my shuffling was. But it's hard to make that kind of transition. It's always hard to make new habits. But I'm feeling crazy, and I know this kind of crazy will be fixed by two runs in the outside and a couple yoga classes.

Which I haven't started back on since the tattoo. Sunday though. I'm almost healed.

3) Triple Purpose

Composting at the organic gardens was a revelation to me, revealed by one Black M. I ran into her one day, a bag full of garbage, and asked her where she was going.

"To the compost," she said.
"Man, I wish I could compost," I replied. "But there's no place to put one at our house."
"No, us either. I'm taking it to the garden over on Rochester."
"What?"
"Yeah, they have huge bins there. I take my bag over, dump it, and then they have a garbage bin right there for the bag."

It was like a light from heaven shone down on me. I've been doing it ever since, though I have a tupperware container in my fridge, since there is a hell of a lot more room in my fridge than on my counters. Depending on the day of the week, there's sometimes more compost in our fridge than edible food.

Although, as I discovered not long ago and long long long after I should have, you can make vegetable stock from your compost.

Vegetable stock is like iced tea. As Jennifer has quoted, it's three ingredients! Why would you buy a weird smelling chemical that you stir water and ice into when you can pour water on a tea bag and add ice?

And really, when consider that ice and water are pretty much the same thing, it's only two ingredients.

Like veggie stock. You can agonize over low sodium or high sodium or what all chemicals are in what stock, or you can pay a zillion dollars for a wee organic cube that you have to add two measly cups of water to, or.

Or, you can put one part of your garbage in a pot and boil it in two parts water.

Don't throw out those squinchy mushrooms you forget what you were going to do with! Put them in a pot! Dig out the fennel trimmings and the onion bits out of the tupperware! Wash off those coffee grounds! Why not this apple core too! And sure, why not one of those perfectly good green onions that you know will be in the compost in a week because you hate them. And that carrot is edible, possibly, but very hairy. In you go, carrot.

I cannot tell you how thrilled I am about this. My only problem is that there's only so much vegetable stock one person needs.

The idea was that I was going to work from home for a couple of hours, go outside for some exercise, and then head into work for another 5 or so hours.

All part of my quest to self-medicate with fresh air and endorphins.

But here's the problem: I'm sitting at my archipelago, finished my early morning couple of hours, and I'm facing the window. The snow is alternating between coming down in woolly sheets and blowing almost horizontally across my line of vision.

And I've already been outside to check the mail. I know how cold it is: goddamned.

I'm not that hardcore, not when it comes to cold or snow. I'll haul myself out to exercise in all sorts of rain and wind, but this? Fuck. It.

Doing pretty well though, all in all, the post-christmas body blues pretty much over. The formerly baggy pants and I have come to a truce: I don't wear them and they don't call me fat.

Not that my body looks any different than it did one, two, four weeks ago. It's got the same amount of fat on it* in roughly the same distribution that was causing me angst about 10 days ago. But when my pants removal companion twisted that fat up in a tight grip last night, my first thought was not "don't touch that," but "yes, please."

It would seem I'm feeling more comfortable in my skin. Which, of course, is all in my head.

*Which, before anyone says anything, I recognize is not a lot. The actual amount is irrelevant to how I feel about it.

It's normal to hate yourself every once in a while, isn't it? Everyone does, don't they?

Anyway, I think it's normal.

Maybe that's because I spent enough years hating myself so fiercely and pervasively that a few hours every now and again, feels, well, awful and sad, but also eminently manageable.

It's no surprise, either, that the self-hatred gets played out through my body. It's no secret that when women become enraged, ashamed, worried, guilty, they often don't push those emotions out into the world, but focus all that swirling insane metaphysical mess on the physical mess our culture tells us our bodies already are. The ant under the magnifying glass.

Because hating my body yesterday has little, maybe nothing, to do with how I look. A couple of weeks ago, I was pretty happy with my body. Perhaps not loving that a pair of pants I've had for four or five years - my baggy jeans - are now pretty tight, but okay with the general state of things.

Then the holidays.

Three days of shrinking myself smaller and smaller inside my skin, three days of sitting to make my joints and muscles stiff, a new year to point out how much I haven't gotten done, as well as frustration that I just can't buckle down; that I am seemingly unable write more than one non-blog related piece a year; of realizing that you know what, fuck, I don't want to be single, but fucking fuck, I become miserably clingy and needy when I'm coupled and so yes, I am just going to have to damn well get used to this uncomfortable internal in between push-pull frustration that means. I don't know. Probably something very meaningful. And single.

Then winter making it hard for me to push myself outside and into exercise. I worry a bit about it, the exercise, that my push is sometimes too hard. The amount I exercise could easily turn into yet another way to punish myself.

I watch that pretty closely, used to be careful to take at least a day or two off a week.

But over the past month, the day or two has turned into two or three, has turned into three or four. Has turned into nothing, last week. I haven't been out for another snowshoe, I haven't been out for a run.

It's brutal for me, missing that time outside, the moments of exhilaration. The black branches limned by an orange sunset down the icy runnel of Gilmour; the cove made by the evergreen branches on Queen Elizabeth, its snow cover sparkling down behind me when I tap the branches just above my head; or, when I'm lucky, the water, the water, and the thick wind off it.

Jokingly, a few weeks ago, I said to someone (Jennifer? Shelley? Paul?) that running was my medicine. Except I wasn't really joking. Going from 4 or 5 days of exercise a week to none gives me a panicky off-my-meds feeling.

Not too surprising, since it's pretty well known that exercise helps your brain as well as your body. They don't know how, exactly, but I don't really care exactly, so long as I don't look down at my stomach and feel like clawing four red streaks across it.

But blah blah blah.

I'm feeling better. Mostly. I still wish my old jeans fit.

But I had a good yoga class this morning, followed by a delicious lunch with Shelley, who then helped me buy a scandalously slinky dress to wear tomorrow night. Then a fast cold invigorating walk home, a low waning moon cupping the darkening sky, some bright planet, unblinking, to its left and up. That cleared out a lot of the cobwebs. Then pad thai and beer with Jennifer and Shy Dog.

Now home, in my lovely home, my cold feet tucked under me, half way through a pot of tea. Joie de vivre, indeed.

What would be nice would be to go swimming this summer. I would like to take a book, wrap up some food, pour some white wine sangria into a juice bottle, bike to Britannia under the sun and wind. Once there, I would like to sit under a tree and read, runnning off into the water for a paddle and float whene'er the mood struck.

Before last night, I had two bathing suits with which to do this.

One from six years ago: bright yellow bottoms and a black sports bra. I associate it strongly with falling in love with Mike. The yellow is a terrible colour for my skin, and I must have been in a very thin phase when I bought that bra, because now when I wear it my cleavage gets uncomfortably and unsexily hot.

The other suit is a crazy 1950s number with nice shorts and a waistline that suits me, but a ginormous boob cavern that does not. Not that this matters particularly, since the suit is structured such that it stands up on its own. It feels weird to wear a bathing suit that moves a half second after you do.

The Committee of Necessity deemed a new suit an acceptable purchase. Those two are both in the thrift store pile.

I made a date with Shelley to hit the mall.

++

Our first stop was American Apparel. As I was picking suits out, it hit me that I'm over my post-gain body malaise.

"What are you looking for?" Shelley said. I'd practically begged her to come shopping with me, making half-jokes about needing someone to pass tissues over the door when I started to cry. "A one-piece?"

"Nah. A two-piece."
"Like with a tank top? Boy cuts?"
"Nope, bikini top. Boy cuts, preferably, but regular bottoms if there aren't any ones I like."

She raised her eyebrows a bit at me. "A bikini, then?"

"Yes, a bikini."

Rather a brave choice for someone professed to be worried about bursting into tears in the change room.

But there it was. That's what I wanted.

Shelley and I were in and out of a whack of change rooms, bottoms and tops slithering over benches and chairs and floors. Normally I am scrupulous about re-hanging clothes neatly. But these bits were all so fussy and complicated I didn't have the patience. I'd just gather them all up in the crook of my arm and dump them on the nearest flat object, feeling guilty about the clerks' work as I did so.

I did find a bikini, with sequins and hibiscus and little ties at the side. That one I handed over neatly for the clerk to put aside.

Why you should take a friend bathing suit shopping? Because not only might she say "Right now, that ass can do no wrong," she might also keep you from spending too long in front of the mirror. I wanted to look at a lot of different options. So each time it was on with the suit, look over the shoulder, straight on, to the side, oops, don't do that again, back to the front, another over the shoulder, "is it okay? the colour? how does my ass look? i like that it doesn't bite in here. are you sure it looks okay?"

Every time I spent more than a few minutes in a single suit, twisting from angle to angle, I started picking out my flaws. I could catalogue those for you too quickly, but repeating them would only make them more true.

When there's someone else around, that kind of self-hatred becomes self-indulgent real fast.

I start in with the nits and the picking. Shelley might wander back from the front of the store, or I'd become conscious that I'd been staring at myself for too long and I'd snap out of my hateful fugue and say "No." or "This one's a maybe." or, eventually, "That brown one's the best."

The body-comfort still feels new. Dragging Shelley around allowed me to keep it alive, since it's still too weak to breathe on its own.

++

Late last summer, you might remember that Eric and I had some kind of stomach disgruntlement whilst on vacation. I lost probably 7 or 8 pounds, dropping me under 120.

I spent last fall mildly unhappy, tightly wound, and very worried that my boyfriend was falling out of love with me. When I'm that wound and worried, I can't gain weight, no matter how much oil I cook with, no matter the cookies I stuff into my maw. I didn't lose much more weight, but by the time Eric and I broke up, I was down to about 116.

I've said it before, and will probably have reason to say it again: when I'm that thin, I'm not at my healthiest; when I'm that thin, I'm not at my most attractive; when I'm that thin, I get a lot of societal approval for being that thin.

The approval comes in subtle clues I won't take the time to catalogue here. It comes from pop culture, from friends, acquaintances. It's pervasive and deep-seated.

When I start gaining weight, when I get happy, when the amount of food I've been eating to maintain my thin weight stretches my skin out to its big size overnight, I always have a period of mourning: the loss of my old skinny jeans; having a body something like what people are told they want. Even if they don't actually want it, even if they find it's thinness unattractive.

Each time I've gained weight - this time about 12 or 14 lbs, depending on the time of day - I go through this dissatisfaction. It's crazy, because I look at the bodies that I'm attracted to, and while some of them are very thin, some of them are not. Some of them are round and luscious and belly-lovely. So why I mourn the loss of something that was thrust upon me by random bacteria and sadness is hard to fathom.

Each time, the layer of dissatisfaction peels off and I come out feeling not just heavier. Weightier. More connected; more here; more willing to be here. Happy to take up the space my well-being needs.