I was a teenager when I started to hate my body and it began with the thief of joy and peace: comparison. I became conscious that my body did not look like that of the other girls: The girls on TV, the girls in the magazines and the girls at school.
As an adult, I think of how hard I was on my young self, expecting me to look like Gisele Bündchen and I laugh. How unrealistic! The early 2000s were a tough time for those of us exposed to Western media.
I felt disconnected from my body and I didn’t know what my face looked like. When I saw my body in a mirror or visualised it in my mind, I saw myself in fragments and never as a whole physical being. My head was detached from my torso and my legs. When I'd try to imagine myself in certain situations while daydreaming, I could not see my face, I always saw the back of my head. I truly did not know what I looked like. There was a time when I hated my legs because it wasn’t straight like a supermodel's and times when I shaved all of the hair on my body. After all, I thought having a hairy body was not sexy, feminine or attractive.
I picked at my body. Constantly poking at what I thought was wrong with it. I wanted a flat stomach with abs and thigh gaps. I was thin, unhappy and unhealthy, and I couldn’t even see it. It is more obvious to me when I compare images from back then with how I look now. I could not see it then because I had convinced myself that if I did not have those features that were signifiers of what an attractive body should look like, I was overweight, unattractive and ugly.
I didn’t like my body or understand my body, and even worse was that I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know how to style it, how to care for it or how to live in it. For the most part, I thought I looked odd and that my features were put together in a disorganised manner. I was flat-chested and flat-bummed, and when I wore dresses, I felt like I looked like a man in them. This feeling was deepened by people constantly asking if I was a man or a woman even when I wore skirts, earrings and lipstick, and my insecurity around my body worsened because I allowed so-called “friends”, ex-lovers and strangers on social media to tease me about my body proportions. When they made jokes about my ears on Facebook or about my A cups on Twitter, I laughed with them because, you know, laughing at yourself when others laughed at you was cooler than being “offended” about it.
Being in the body of a woman can be the most confusing place to be. To the Western media, I was overweight; to my community, I was underweight and to me, I didn't even know who or what I was.
A few months ago, I visited a dear friend who was reading a book I had loaned her. I read this book during my early days of figuring out womanhood and walking myself out of severe depression, “Succulent, Wild Woman by SARK” and I highly recommend it.
I read the words I had jotted down atop a page of the book where I had written about how I felt ugly in dresses and because of that, I did not want to go to weddings. I wrote that I wanted people to find me attractive but I was confused about why they did when they did. As I read those words, I felt so far away from that girl and I was happy about it.
It felt good to see that my efforts at healing my perception of and relationship with my body had worked out. I see myself as a whole being and not severed pieces floating around in space. I like my body. We are friends now. We get along quite well and I know how to take care of her so that she can take care of me and help me manifest my dreams. I no longer need to punish my body to prove my worth. I am attractive not only because other people find me attractive but because I find myself attractive. I workout now to be strong and toned, not for thigh gaps and I still want a flat belly but not at the expense of a nice plate of amala. I sit with my naked body in front of a mirror to admire her, searching for beauty and not problems.
Learning to love my body required regular words of affirmation, encouragement and validation. It took the words of a few women and sitting with myself to redefine the meaning of certain words and experiences to get me out of that rut.
One of these women was Diana Vreeland and these were some of her words that resonated with me:
“You gotta have style. It helps you get down the stairs. It helps you get up in the morning. It’s a way of life. Without it, you’re nobody. I’m not talking about lots of clothes.”
“You don't have to be born beautiful to be wildly attractive”
And one of the most life-changing words were from the writer and fashion aficionado Erin McKean:
“You don’t have to be pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.
I made it a point to ask myself some difficult questions and to seek answers to them such as:
Who am I?
What does health mean to me and what does a healthy version of me look like?
What is the purpose of the exercise in my life?
What does a healthy lifestyle look like for me?
What does a healthy meal look like and what has my relationship with food been like?
What does it mean to be beautiful, cool, attractive?
Last year, I learned to celebrate non-scale victories. These were victories that had nothing to do with what I weighed or how my body looked. I am happy about my core strength and the things I can lift. I am happy about walking upstairs without dying from lack of breath and finally figuring out and committing to a workout routine that fits into my lifestyle.
It is not always as easy as this reads because just last year October, I was going ham with the negative self-talk directed towards my body but I am thankful to have recognised that when I start to attack my body, the problem isn’t my body. It usually is an emotional challenge that I feel helpless towards and I take it out on this beautiful sack of meat that I have been blessed with.
As the new year rolls in and you make a promise to care for your body and health again, my dear companion, I encourage you to look at the words, images and expectations that have come to define how you think of, speak of and look at your body.
Thank you to those who already shared their responses when I asked this question in chat last year. I look forward to reading your comments as I ask again: tell me about your body image.
With love,
A.