i ran 15 miles last night. i felt invincible, unstoppable. i love the way that running makes me feel proud of what my body can accomplish. i just wish i’d always been able to feel this way.
like a lot of women (probably even most women), i’ve hated my body for much of my life. as a kid i was involved in tons of sports (soccer, ballet, swimming), yet i distinctly remember sitting against the wall in the gym during gymnastics at the age of 9, in my shiny blue leotard, hating that my thighs were thicker than those of the kids sitting to either side of me. it wasn’t just a passing observation – it was a burgeoning feeling of shame. even now, it’s painful to think about that sad little girl who hated her thighs. i wish i could go back to that time and try to protect her from what she would eventually do to herself later on in life, in the name of thinner thighs, as that sense of shame buried itself even deeper, growing like a cancer.
where does that kind of internalised self-loathing come from? certainly not my parents, who always instilled the healthiest of messages. who as medical professionals told us everything we ever wanted to know about our bodies, who brought me up on a steady diet of “free to be you and me”, along with plenty of fresh air, exercise and milk. it didn’t come from being overweight. i put on about 15 extra pounds in my last year of high school, because much of the socialising in my circle of friends revolved around pizza, but that’s the chunkiest i’ve ever been. so i’ve never had an actual weight problem – but that hasn’t kept me from suffering the full spectrum of distorted body image issues.
so i spent much of my teen years being embarrassed to wear shorts, but active eating disorders first reared their ugly head in the autumn of my first year of university, when i became severely depressed. as a side effect of that, i starved myself. i lived on egg whites, dry salad and cheerios, day in, day out, and nobody even questioned it. i often deliberately slept through one or more meals, waking long after the cafeteria had closed, and resorting to the box of cereal and coffeemaker i kept stashed in my room. i would take a small paper cup of granola from the yogurt section, and dissect it in my room for hours, painstakingly sorting through the seeds and berries, making it last until lunch time. i dropped 30 pounds without even trying over the course of 6 months. nobody questioned it. i had friends who were working out for hours a day, measuring their body fat at 3% with a set of calipers, obsessing over meals. in the background of that context, my quiet little disorder went unnoticed. i was miserable for a whole host of reasons, and i was taking it out on myself by depriving my body. mercifully, at the end of the school year the depression lifted, and with it my need to count out saltine crackers for dinner began to evaporate with the black haze that had invaded my brain. the following summer i fell in love, started eating properly again, and the world righted itself for a while. and for a long time, i thought of that experience as an aberration, a blip. the fucked up thinking of a fucked up mind, and something i could safely see receding in the rearview mirror.
but i fell into the disorder trap again, when i least expected it. shortly after completing my last marathon back when i was turning 30, i began purging. and purging, of course, is just a polite way of saying i made myself vomit. it wasn’t even even something i consciously started doing – i remember the first time was almost accidental- but before i knew it i was doing it every day, sometimes several times a day. i would try to wait until my stomach was growling with hunger to eat, then eventually lose control and eat voraciously. i’d feel disgusted with myself for being such a pig, then vomit, then feel even more disgusted with myself for doing that. yet for nearly a year and a half, i couldn’t seem to stop. it’s humiliating to admit that. it was revolting and painful and i hated myself more and more intensely every single time i found myself in front of a toilet bowl. hated what i was doing to myself, hated myself if i didn’t do it. i could almost see myself as an observer might – like an out-of-body experience. i’m convinced there is nothing more deliberately physically punishing or degrading than forcing yourself to vomit, and i am convinced that, had i continued, i would have ended up someplace bad relatively soon. i was scared out of my wits at what was happening to my mind and my body, my inability to end the cycle. i tried, unsuccessfully, to stop every single day. yet the day of my first date with jonno was the last day i ever put a finger down my throat. i think i somehow knew that i couldn’t have a relationship with him if i carried on hurting myself, and that finally flipped a switch in my brain. even now, years later, i consider that a miracle.
those are also two periods of my life that most of my family and friends have never known about. i never told them, and i don’t believe they ever guessed. and i write about them now, not as some sort of shock confessional or catharsis, but because it’s important to recognise just how dangerous and slippery and insidious these issues are. my parents did everything right, and instead of feeling proud and strong within my body, i spent years hating it and wanting to harm it. i am wildly envious of people who’ve always felt comfortable in their own skin, who treat themselves well – with care and respect. and i am sad for all the years i wasted feeling repulsed every time i looked in the mirror. truth be told, it’s something i still struggle with in my head – feeling good about yourself shouldn’t be that hard. running is my reminder that i can be a healthy, happy, and capable being, no matter what i look like.
i have young nieces who will grow up surrounded by messages that equate their self-worth with their looks, and even more directly with their weight. raised in the shadow of media that take more photos of people the skinnier they are. industries that make make millions off of women who torture themselves. i would give absolutely anything to protect them from feeling the way i felt, or falling into the habits i did. the problem is, of course, that you can’t. it can’t be externally imposed. it’s scary to know that you have so little influence or control.
it’s difficult to talk about. if it’s hard for me, how much harder for others?
but going home on the tube one evening, one of the free rags had a 3×3 closeup photo of jennifer lopez’s buttock, and the caption pointed out that even she, one of the world’s most celebrated bodies, had cellulite. i admit to feeling some sense of vindication – joy in photographic evidence that perfection doesn’t exist, and never has. it’s all just an illusion after all, this idea that if we just exercise enough self-abnegation… if we just work out long enough, and eat nothing but cabbage, and whiten our teeth and wax our bikini and wear enough makeup and the right clothes… if only, we too can be perfect. yet i’d still rather live in a world where the myth isn’t perpetrated to begin with – where we don’t have to build “perfect” up, just to savagely tear it down.
a world where little 9 year old girls don’t hate their thighs.
knapsack – less than
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