When I was a little girl, I began to dance. Well, maybe it was just more like swaying, jumping, and twirling around. But I loved how it felt. It wasn’t really in conjunction with any music, but I just loved to move my body in expressive ways. It felt, to me, magical. But I definitely didn’t stay that way forever.
As I got older it became clear to me that my body was something to be embarrassed about and hide. I began wearing baggy clothing that hid my figure, and tried not to look beautiful. I grew into an adversarial relationship with food, and I definitely never danced.
Picking up shame
I got these guilt-ridden conclusions from all over the place. Some from my church, school, parents, peers. Overall, it just seemed like a general consensus. My body was something that should not be shown off, taken care of, or acknowledged at all.
I think that there were many layers to this conclusion. I was afraid of getting used, or worse, seriously hurt, just because someone wanted access to my body. I was warned by a lot of adults that this could be the case and I needed to be careful as I grew up to guard myself from “boys who only wanted one thing.”
But not only that, it seemed that my body just existing as it was, was a major offense to some people, if it were to be noticed in any appreciable way. I wasn’t supposed to talk about needing bras or feminine hygiene products with the wrong company, because that was disgusting and un-ladylike. And if I were to go a day without concealing the natural contours of my figure, it seemed that there were no shortage of adults to point it out.
I think it was a mix of fear and shame that kept me in line, as I expect a lot of people have experienced too. Fear that someone might see me as desirable, and ruin my life because of it. But shame because if expressing myself with my body was bad and offensive to others but I still wanted to do it, then I must be bad. There must be something wrong with me.
Cover ups and solutions
And so I warred within myself constantly. I wanted to make more stylistic fashion choices. I wanted to be able to express myself on the outside with my personal internal style. But what if someone were to get offended or take advantage of me? So I threw on a large hoodie and called it good.
Except it wasn’t good. I felt terrible inside! Terrible about myself, for having these “worldly desires”, and terrible about life. Because obviously everyone around me were just uncontrollable perverts who couldn’t see a bit of cleavage without falling deep into savage emotional and sometimes physical violence. It was a horrible paradigm to navigate. If I had known that there were other ways of seeing the world, I would have flocked to them. But that’s all I was taught, and no one tried to contradict it.
Eating Disorder: a symptom
I had gotten so used to punishing and blaming my body for everyone else’s misconduct that I literally started ruining it. I was embarrassed to be curvy and losing my curves seemed like a good solution. But most of all, I felt that if I were skinny then that would mean I was perfect. Nobody would be sexualizing me so there wouldn’t be as much to fear there. I would be triumphing over my unfortunate desires (which in this case, included the need to eat). It seemed like the best option was to obsessively pursue thinness. But as my unhealthy relationship with food started to progress, I started to see how much of a problem I really had.
Now obviously, at some point you just can’t keep losing weight. You get unhealthy and if you keep going, you die. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the eating disorder doesn’t start when someone is in dangerous health standings. It starts when they begin aligning with the problematic perspectives that will get them down that road. And I have to say, I didn’t realize how many of my unhealthy behaviors came from seemingly normal negative and unhealthy thoughts. (If you want to hear more about eating disorders, you can go and read my post about eating disorder misconceptions.)
I couldn’t keep blaming my body for a conceptual problem, because honestly, all it’s ever done to me is try its best to keep me alive. So I knew that I had to duck out of these thought and behavior loops. Or else, the professionals I saw made it very clear, eventually, I would die.
Pushing past comfort to health
When recovery became the purpose and goal in my life, I realized just how much circular thinking can really help and hurt you. At some point, I decided I should lose weight, and so I focused all of my brainpower on achieving that. But it became something of a gospel to me, and soon everything became evidence for why I shouldn’t eat. Or why I should get those calories out of my system through any means possible. Luckily, however, when I accepted recovery as my ultimate goal, I was able to see reasons I needed to improve, everywhere.
My trigger to skip meals when I was overwhelmed became, “wouldn’t you rather be able to eat when you have something important going on, instead of battling your problem with hunger-induced brain fog or exhaustion?” In each relapse I saw another small piece of the puzzle for how and why I might recover. And thank goodness I did, because it led to me still being alive today.
But the more I stripped away my self-destructive habits, the more I was faced with my limiting thoughts and negative beliefs about myself and the world around me. When you don’t have chaotic outbursts, your inner war beneath them becomes loud. Almost deafening. It seemed for a while like I wasn’t getting better, but worse. I was outwardly unhappier much of the time, and inwardly, I was a mess. It was like cutting wires of all the mental pathways I had built up over the years. I was left with a room full of broken wires and very little connections.
In the next post, I talk more about how I slowly got out of this shame of my body that so many of us are trained in from the very beginning, and how that lent itself to greater understanding, care and expression of my genuine self. I promise you, the second half of the story is much happier than the first, so to read on, click here.
