For a very long while, there were only a few ways I could have any kind of relationship with my body. I connected with my body through my ill health (of which I have written extensively and will no doubt continue to write reams, just not today), my weight and what I wore.
As a kid, I was naturally skinny. I didn’t have many nicknames growing up, but my grandad used to call me ‘tin ribs’ for a while. That’s how skinny I was. The grown ups didn’t like it when I sat on their knees because I was too bony for comfort. I didn’t do anything to be skinny. I just was. I got a lot of praise for something I had absolutely no control over. It was one of the only things about me that grown ups seemed envious about. I did a huge amount of things wrong. I was almost always in trouble for something, but I was really, really good at being skinny. There was a lot of envy when I would wallop down all the food I liked and not put on a pound. I learned that it was a good thing.
I was a bit confused about it, but I didn’t knock it. Apart from being good at reading and writing, I didn’t have much else on my side, so I accepted it. It is so fucking weird that until recently, it never occurred to me that I had taken those values to heart and that they had shaped so much of my life going forward. They were so deeply embedded in my psyche, I didn’t even think they were a thing. They were and are very much a thing.
I did learn not to talk about it much, because after a few years, there was less praise and a lot more envy and that was also confusing. I just learned to kind of shrug it off. When quizzed on why I was so ‘lucky,’ I put it down to being so highly strung that I burned calories through anxiety and the sheer, hard work of being completely mental all the time. After a while, I really began to believe this.
This of course, was a very bad thing, psychologically speaking. To be thin was prized above almost all else, and if I had to be mental to be thin, then so be it. It wasn’t that simple, obviously, because I’d have sawn my arm off to be able to live peacefully in my own head, but it was a comfort on those nights where I rocked purgatorial in the twilight, me and Wilfred Owen. ‘Oh, we may be as mad as a box of frogs, but we can still squeeze into a size ten dress.’ Cold comfort, but at least it was some comfort. Of course, it was shoring up all kinds of damaging, toxic shit, but as is the way of these things, I didn’t know that then.
It wasn’t all glamorous, heroin chic madness. I was not a pretty girl and I wasn’t comfortable in my skin. I had terrible glasses, terrible haircuts and a terribly loud mouth. I didn’t fit myself or anywhere else and I stood out for all kinds of reasons. The next way I learned to have a relationship with my body was to hide it. I learned to dress it.
For all kinds of reasons, I didn’t have fashionable clothes. I really, really wanted them but it wasn’t going to happen. I don’t think I wanted them so that I could be fashionable. I think I wanted them because I thought that if I dressed like everyone else, maybe something magical would happen and I would either a) become like everyone else in every other way, or b) be able to keep my head down and then there would be less bullying. I know now that neither of these things would have happened, even if I had suddenly been given the keys to fashion’s kingdom. I’d have just felt weirder and and even more out of place than I already did.
I decided that if I couldn’t fit in, I would fit out. I haunted jumble sales and junk shops. I scavenged through other people’s cast offs, no matter their size, age or sex. I put outfits together with a fine and flamboyant disregard for anything other than my own satisfaction. I wore whatever I liked, whenever I liked, however I liked. It was the most powerful feeling I had experienced in my own body since forever. It was the moment I started to grow up for myself. After that, I devoutly believed in the talismanic and transformative power of clothing.
I learned what so many animals knew all along, that you could make yourself bigger, bolder, brighter and more dangerous by what you displayed on the outside. Even if on the inside you were a timid mouse, you could dress up as a Gila monster and most people would be significantly less inclined to fuck with you. There was always the exception to that rule, but as I had gone through my entire school life perpetually hounded by bullies, I was used to that. What was interesting to me was that as I got louder with my clothing, the bullies got less up in my face. I think they could see that if I was willing to go out looking like that, I was clearly not that bothered about what people might say after all.
Later in life, I got heavier. It’s what happens. The problem was that I was supposed to be naturally gifted at being thin. It was something people liked about me. I wanted to stay being naturally thin and eating what I liked so that people would still like me. It had become an important measure of my own self worth by this stage. It was clear that being thin was serious currency both for me and the world around me. But the sum that I had been effortlessly able to do all my life had stopped adding up to the right number and I was in a dilemma.
Times had changed. It was no longer cool to be on a perpetual diet. It didn’t stop people being on them, but there was a whole shame vibe around them that wasn’t there in the Seventies and Eighties. Dieting was like a professional sport when I was growing up. Nobody acknowledged how fucked up it was to drink nothing but cabbage soup until your bowels fell out of your arse. It was celebrated. When I got round to it in the early 2000’s, things were very different. That’s a good thing, because diet culture is toxic, dangerous and diminishing in all the worst ways, but it didn’t help me at the time.
I didn’t want to buy into the whole diet thing and I knew they didn’t work. But what I was doing didn’t work either and if I wanted to build up my self worth, I felt a driving need to do something. And I did want to be worthy. I wanted to be worthy so very badly, and being thin was a way to achieve that. How sad is it that I believed for so long that I was worth more if I could demonstrate to the world how easy it was for me to disappear? The absolutely bonkers thing about it is that I knew it was a lie, even then. I didn’t and haven’t ever loved someone more because they got thinner. I’ve never loved anyone because they looked great in a pair of Alexander McQueen bumsters, or because of their ability to slide between the railings in the park. Even the most fucked up love affairs I’ve had, and I’ve had my share, were never predicated on poundage. I would abhor anyone who suggested that skinniness was a good thing, but I applied it to myself with the sort of rigorous discipline lacking in almost every other area of my life.
This was the start of a battle that I waged with myself for about twenty years. I did diets that weren’t diets. I didn’t do them all the time. I hated them and I hated myself when I was doing them. They were unsustainable for all the reasons any diet is unsustainable and a whole load of other, more personal reasons. Because of course, I had the added dilemma of having to eat what I liked and still be thin, which was a whole bunch of fucked up squaring of circles. The payoff however, was always terrific. Goal weight felt like being at the head of a ticker tape parade.
Just like attempting to write a book about my messed up relationship with my body in a wider context, I would, in my old life as a blogger, write about my relationship with food from time to time. Looking back now I see that it was all about the squaring of that circle. Sometimes I would write to justify my choices. Sometimes I would get closer to the truth and write around the edges of all this craziness. I was able to reconcile it for the most part because I had rules. I mostly did eat exactly what I wanted. Although I had also started to notice that I was beginning to eat when I didn’t want to sometimes, because people got weird if I said I wasn’t hungry. I was known for always being hungry. What I realised recently was that at some point I started eating to please other people. I also sometimes allowed people to use me as their proxy. They wouldn’t eat, but I could eat for them. That’s pretty fucked up by anyone’s standards.
I justified the weirdness that I recognised. I never lost weight to a dangerous level. I just wanted the clothes I had to fit and keep fitting me. It was never particularly punishing in the grand scheme of things. Except of course, it was particularly punishing. I don’t live in the grand scheme of things. I live in this body, which I was treating like a doll rather than something living that needed properly caring for, instead of the pretend caring that so much diet culture masquerades as.
Just like I had stopped growing up emotionally when I broke down, I had stopped my body growing up, too. My ideal body shape was fixed at me aged seventeen, when I was skinny through exhaustion, stress and craziness, but I looked fucking great. I spent the next few decades trying to halt time in all kinds of ways. I stopped everything at peak mental and wonder why it has been so hard for me to get sane.
Clothes were my camouflage. I hid in plain sight. I whisked different personas on and off with gay abandon. I fixed on the outside what I could not fix on the inside. Clothes gave me the pleasure I could no longer feel in my body, because by this point, I had left my body entirely and was living somewhere else. Somewhere safe and undemandingly numb.
Then my daughter got diagnosed with anorexia and my world fell apart. I thought I had done a good job of building a healthy relationship between my kids and food, but I clearly had not. This, of course, is very reductive. I am not about to discuss my daughter’s complex and highly personal relationship with food here, that’s her business. But I felt hugely ashamed that her whole life she had watched me normalising my own fucked up relationship with food. I was not a good role model and I had lied to myself that I was.
Nursing someone through an eating disorder is brutal. It strips away any illusions you may harbour about your own relationship with food, about the diet industry and about any kind of eating based, wellness bullshit. As anorexia shrinks your world and your body, there is nowhere to hide for the person suffering or the person caring.
I realised then that I needed to change my relationship with food and my body, as I sat for hours watching my beautiful, perfect baby, who didn’t need to change a damn thing about herself ‘successfully’ do what I thought deep down, had always been a good idea. I didn’t know how to do that for myself and I didn’t have time to find out. I was too busy trying to stop someone I love beyond all reason disappearing into nothingness.
The thing they don’t really tell you about anorexia is that it isn’t just about the dwindling of the body. You watch as the dis-ease takes every messy, glorious, beautiful, creative and wonderful thing about a person away first. It’s a starvation of the soul. The body goes last. The space they inhabit shrinks, inch by painful inch and the hole they leave behind is so much bigger than the physical. Watching someone in the grip of anorexia wakes you up to what is important. What is important is never, ever how good you look in that dress, or how big or small your belly is. What is important is the laughter, the joy, the fierce, life spirit of a person that fills every room to the brim when they step into it. What is important is the love that you watch turning with the sourness of milk into something violently other. That is what you miss, viscerally and insistently as they slowly slip out of view.
My beautiful girl recovered. In her illness and her recovery, she has taught me so much. I am humbled by what she has shown me over and over again about what it is to be truly alive. She works hard to live with and through the body she saved and she fills it to the brim with all that is brightest and best in the world. She reminds me every day that I can do and be better.
For a long while after her illness I just gave up on my body completely. I absolutely knew that I could not go back to the dieting/not dieting. I was and am haunted by what happened to my girl. I threw the scales away and apart from the odd lapse here and there, I haven’t weighed myself since. I still didn’t know what to do other than resist, so I have done nothing at all except sporadically get into yoga to stop my menopausal bones snapping in half.
After she got better, everyone else got worse. Trauma followed trauma and eventually, at some point last year, I not only gave up on my body, I gave up caring about clothes too. I thought at the time that I had done this because I had reached a level of acceptance that meant I no longer needed to try on different methods of camouflage. I remember a moment when I decided that I would be navy blue. I was too old for black, so I would just mostly dress in navy blue and fade into the background and old age. I stopped wearing make-up. I stopped doing my hair. I wore the same three outfits on repeat for months. I decided it was easier this way. I thought I had found a life hack.
I had not. Almost certainly I am the only person who has been surprised by this revelation.
What I had done was surrender. I was exhausted by so many things that I stopped everything that wasn’t about survival. And now I am learning that I can choose better than survival. Now I can live.
I am choosing to inhabit my fifty-two year old body as it is now. I am choosing to work towards accepting myself now, with my fat and my lines, my scars and the skin that tears easily, that wrinkles and dimples. I am learning to be ok with my glasses that save me from dying hundreds of times a day, but which I used to be so ashamed of. I want to embrace my wobble and swell, the proportions of a woman who has lived a tumultuous, rich and crazy life. I want to learn to celebrate my now body and not waste time yearning for the body I might one day inhabit or the body I had when I was seventeen.
It is frightening and challenging and so very, bloody difficult. But my daughter has shown me what is possible and I owe her so much. I owe her for what I showed her a woman’s body was for and worth. I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for choosing to stay here and to build a healthy relationship with her body and with me. It’s a debt I will never finish repaying and I am glad of it.
Mostly though, I owe it to myself. I do not love myself like I want to (I won’t use the word should. It’s fucking disgraceful). I barely tolerate myself most days, but I will get there. I will learn to look myself in the eye. I won’t say again, because I never did. I used to look, but all I could see was what was missing and what was wrong. Now I want to see everything as it is, because I need to keep reminding myself that I am not just enough. I am everything.
I am an overweight 52 year old woman wrapping myself in shades of navy and grey. Maybe this is just my cocoon and later I will emerge as a butterfly radiant in colour (but right now I'm still too tired). Be gloriously yourself, in whatever form that takes. Hugs and love. ❤️
My fat, starting in my teens and into adulthood, was my shield from the predatory male gaze. Twice in my life I dropped a bunch of weight, only to see it creep back into my body.
Caregiving for my mother nearly did me in, as I wound up eating my emotions for nearly five years. Now, some two and a half years since she entered skilled nursing, I've dropped the stress weight (but not all at once this time!) and my blood pressure has returned to normal.
As I move further into my 50's, I'm much more inclined to let my eccentricities show through, have become much more comfortable in my own skin (after a lot of Shadow work for sure!), and my IDGAF is taking hold in certain areas of my life. It's possible and it's doable, and you can hold my hand at anytime. (stretches hand across the Atlantic)