Body/Struggle
October 2017
I acknowledge one hundred percent of my bad decisions before, while, and after making them. Is this how accountability looks, or can I chalk it up to being trash in a scented garbage bag? Coming to terms with the fact that I am full of contradictions is a part of integrating my shadows. Over the past few months, I have been considering my relationship to my physical body. I made a Facebook status a few days ago where I acknowledged my plan to smoke a Black & Mild and eat food that would make it even harder to breathe. A friend who's known me since I was a fake-deep teenage caricature of myself commented with a thought-provoking question: if you don't die a little, did you really live? Despite knowing all of the ways that I can treat my physical body well and attempting to do so periodically, I continue to engage in self-sabotaging habits, knowing that I'll come away feeling much worse than I would had I decided to make different choices than the ones to which I feel myself so attached.
I feel self-loathing every time I bring a black or certain kinds of food, particularly meat, to my lips. It lingers well past the completion of the smoke break or the meal. I feel it in my chest and my stomach most of all. Inhales become labored, exhales are accompanied by sharp pains, and my digestive organs feel like they're twisting around themselves. I'll lay in my bed at night, having had my last meal, smoke, or both, contemplating the physical discomfort that I have brought upon myself. I'll call out to the Universe, asking for some relief, promising to treat myself better tomorrow. I might get up and have a cup of detox tea in an attempt to launch tomorrow's "better me." There's nothing quite like waking up the next morning and feeling clear. Breathing is no longer labored, and I don't feel my belly folding over itself. I'll stand in front of the mirror admiring my morning body, wishing that it could look and feel so light all day.
That's where it all starts– in the mirror, looking at my body, either approving of what I see or regarding it with disgust. When I started smoking incessantly, I got skinny. I was dancing a lot too, so I told people that dancing was responsible for the weight loss, but I knew it was really because of my smoking and eating habits. For a large portion of undergrad, I spent most days fueled by coffee and blacks, saving my appetite for a dinner time binge right before bed or late into the night while finishing assignments. I was also infatuated with a new man, nervous and picking over salads and roasted potatoes as if I didn't want to devour a few slices of pizza or tear into some saucy chicken wings. I ate daintily and smoked perpetually.
As I became smaller, I noticed that my leggings were getting roomier, but the extent of the weight loss wasn't apparent to me until I realized that I could shop in Forever 21 or H&M and actually find a pair of shorts that would fit my thighs. When I visited home one holiday season, I listened to my family telling me I was too small, that I didn't look like myself, jokingly (or not) making sure I put an adequate amount of food on my plate and constantly trying to feed me. Their preoccupation with my body called to mind the way that they talked about my mother many years earlier when she became smaller. It called to mind how they ridiculed one of my cousins, always behind her back, about her weight gain over the past few years.
It brought up years of feeling too big, because “big” is the word people like to use when a woman is tall and not model thin. It made me think about that one time in fourth grade when I tried to stop eating and obsessively did crunches in my grandma's living room. It reminded me of high school and weight gain and my mom standing in my doorway to ask if I was pregnant. On another day, I decided to stay at home and sleep and cry, rather than attending a couple of social outings, because I believed that my stomach was too big for a yellow shirt. Now, at my "normal" size, my family still feels the need to point out my hips and thighs as if I don't carry them around every day.
No body of mine is safe from discussion. No body of mine is safe from my own mind chatter. And even so, I felt a strange sense of triumph. Finally being skinny by other people's standards meant having permission to eat and always eat and always talk about how much I loved food. I'm pretty sure the D in depression stands for "delicious," because feelings taste good. I constantly devoured chicken wings and cheeseburgers, pizza and pasta, Chinese takeout and pad thai galore. French fries were my favorite vegetable and ranch the most important condiment. Tear-and-bake chocolate chip cookies and moose tracks ice cream were a match made in heaven, and cinnamon rolls with bacon (yes, bacon) were just a casual movie snack. Always followed by a black. Always. Because in my mind, the black melted away whatever fat I had just consumed. And more often than not, I would wait until I was alone to really eat. I was still picking over food in public, trying to look cute, trying to match this small person that still felt huge, as I talked about how much I loved food in between small, cute bites.
I had intermittent periods of not smoking and eating well. The non-smoking periods would last a few months, the eating well a few days. Despite how physically well I would feel during those periods, it's never been enough to keep me away from my bad habits for good. I try to make excuses, that I'm enjoying life, being twenty-something with a body in good enough health and an active enough lifestyle that I can be trash sometimes as long as I work out or dance later. But what's really real when the heart palpitations start, when the taste and smell emanating from my respiratory organs in the middle of the night makes me feel disgusted with myself, or when every burger, chicken wing, and plate of spaghetti is accompanied by an internal voice telling me I'm not shit? Is it worth the $700 hospital bill I received in the mail because I thought I was on my way to a heart attack after smoking about five, maybe six blacks in one day, then doing a cardio workout, then eating a whole entire wings and things from Zaxby's by myself, and thinking I could just lay down, and it would be all good? It's hard to chalk it up to having a good time when I am, in fact, not having a good time.
After that dreadful hospital visit, one where my mom sacrificed hours of sleep to sit with me despite her having to be awake at five in the morning for her job, I swore off smoking. After one night of eating fried pork chop and having a dream about being in a room where I couldn't cover the signs of a girl's suicide no matter how many times I tried painting the walls, I swore off meat. And during that time, my physical body felt well. Until it didn't. Because during that time, I felt like I was getting fatter. During that time, I took a step back from my fitness routine, and my mind spiraled into the deep, dark abyss that is self-deprecation. Although my face looked nicer, because it always does about two or three weeks after not smoking, I couldn't get past my body.
So I would spend minutes in the mirror before and after showering and in the middle of the night when I would get up to use the bathroom, twisting and contorting in different ways, trying to find the places where I could love myself. Thick thighs are nice until sobering shopping trips that make you feel like you won't be able to wear shorts all summer. A little pudge is okay until you decide that it's only acceptable to wear a crop top if the bottoms are high-waisted. But then all of your high-waisted bottoms from last year now constrict your breathing because your waist isn't as small this season.
I spent maybe two or three months following a vegan diet, less than that not smoking. I would try to smoke periodically, and finding that my lungs and heart were not ready to smoke again, I would throw over half of a black out the car window, silently vowing to never buy another one, breaking the vow at the next urge. I probably repeated this process every couple weeks or so. The urge to smoke never goes away. I think it's the act that I enjoy as opposed to the actual substance, and the same can be said for eating all the wrong things.
On a Thursday, I said that I would never eat animal products again until I was traveling internationally. On that Friday, I ate pizza and ice cream. On Saturday, I spent the entire day back and forth between my bed and the bathroom. On Sunday, I fell face first into some buffalo wings, fried hard, bleu cheese on the side. On Monday, I spent all day in bed, sick to my stomach, sadder than ever, hating myself for succumbing to the insufferable urge to eat meat. Then, on Tuesday, I bought chicken wings again right after emailing my dad to explain why I thought veganism made sense.
It is quite interesting for me to consider this behavior, these cycles of doing the thing, hating the thing, hating myself for doing the thing, then doing the thing again. The cycle of setting expectations for myself to "do better" and failing to meet those expectation, thereby hurling myself into obsessive thoughts of being a hypocrite, a phony, and my most favorite pejorative, trash. One night, as I sat on the trunk of my car smoking a black, I began ruminating over my relationship to the notion of struggle, to the idea that things are hard, that life is hard, inevitably so, and what implications chaining myself to that story has on my physical body and the way I treat it and regard it.
I still have issues with my mental health at times. Social anxiety continues to influence how I navigate the world, how much I drink when I'm in the world trying to be social, and how much sleep I miss from spending most of the night worrying about the next day's interactions and activities. Sometimes I get stuck on my couch or in my bed, too overwhelmed or unmotivated and lacking the amount of optimism I need to start and/or finish my day.
However, at a point in my life where I feel better, mentally and spiritually, than I have ever felt before in my adult life, do I feel so uncomfortable with ease and flow, so unaccustomed to not watching every day pass by in bleak, gray frames, that I feel the need to create physical discomfort in my body because it makes the notion of struggle real? Because it gives me a reason to continue the pattern of not loving myself, when I do, in fact, like myself now more than I ever have? Because clinging to a familiar story is far more comfortable, even in all of the physical discomfort and self-deprecation, than venturing into the possibility of joy and balance and really facing the world like I know I have a light that I won't allow to be extinguished?
My struggle with my body is one of my shadows. It's a part of me. It has shaped who I am and how small I have tried to make myself at various points in my life. And while I can point to bodily expectations that the world has imposed on women, I can't ignore how I myself have been the main player in creating the story that my body is one that I cannot love. And this is a story that I can no longer tell myself.
Tomorrow, I'll probably smoke a black. As a matter of fact, as soon as I finish writing this, I'm going outside to smoke. And next week, I might eat a cheeseburger. And tonight, before I get in the shower, I'll probably stare at my body for awhile and tell myself that I really need to get back into my workout routine. But that can't be the entire story anymore. I am a spirit using this particular body at this particular time to navigate this world and contribute my light to it, and while knowing this hasn't curbed my self-sabotaging habits for good, it is a reminder that struggle is only one of infinite possibilities, and hating my body does not have to be my reality.