Notes on Corporeality

My first memories of being conscious that I wasn’t in an ‘ideal body’ are my parents dancing around it. I was a kid that got his clothes from the “husky boys” catalog as opposed to Mervyn’s, and my parents would stand just over my shoulder pantomiming their concern to one another as I thumbed through it. I knew husky had some fixed meaning outside of my understanding, one that I didn’t feel very good about. But my only frame of reference for “husky” at the time were beautiful salt & pepper dogs that pulled sleds.

It was my brother that really made me understand. He made it his mission to understand. He made comments about my appearance a lot, but the one that really sticks with me I can, incredibly, peg to an approximate date. Pointing to a heavyset couple I didn’t recognize in a magazine, he said something to the effect of “you are fat and disgusting, and you are gonna look like this when you grow up!” pressing hisindex finger so hard against the photo that it bent at the first knuckle. A few weeks later I caught myself, horrified when I saw the same couple chuckling their way through dinner on the premiere of Roseanne, in the fall of 1988. I would have been 9 years old.

From that point on, I always felt my body. There was never a moment of my adolescence where I felt like my personality or humor or kindness superceded the gravity of my physical existence. The fat acceptance movement, if it existed in the mid 90’s, was distant enough from me that I didn’t know it existed. So I went days without eating. I had tiny panic attacks around eating in front of other people. I binged and purged. I read studies around how fat people make less money, and how hard it is to lose weight and keep it off. My parents sent me to an after school camp for kids who struggled with their weight, which I’m sure was meant as a kind and supportive gesture, but only compounded my shame.

As devastating as all of that was, I feel like the real trauma of being fat in a world that reviles fatness was when I finally understood that not everyone has this anxiety. That there are people who can eat and drink without worrying about having too much or to little or compulsively returning to certain foods over and over again. Similarly devastating have been those fleeting moments in my life in which I have not felt fat — my first semester of college, where I was so depressed I cried every day and ate like one calzone a week to survive; the depressive episode that followed my manic episode, where I could barely muster the energy to move, much less to eat; the one time I actually lost weight without an excess of disordered eating (because it’s always present), after a terrible bike accident that sidelined me for months and I became bound and determined to feel healthy again by dieting and exercising. And every time my weight fluctuated downward because of some deep psychological episode or because I really got into a groove with my disordered eating, I would feel this queasy excitement cut through my sadness and say “well at least you won’t feel your body all the time.”

I can always tell when I’m gaining weight well before I have to loosen my belt a loop or go wear looser fitting pants. There are weird signs that only I notice, like my shirt riding up while I sleep, or the way my sides feel against a sweater. But generally it is this kind of subcutaneous, all-encompassing feeling of being aware of my body again. The feeling of self-consciousness and self-loathing sinched against my chest. I feel the hot sting of shame about the way I look, and then a second wave of shame over the fact that I shouldn’t feel this shame. That I look fine. But I still try to avoid catching myself in the mirror, especially naked.

I’m writing this because the feeling is back. I’ve gained probably 10-15 pounds in the past couple months (part of my contract with myself to combat my unhealthy relationship with food is to not use a scale unless I absollutely have to), and suddenly I’m aware again of my body in a way that makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable. It’s probably a result of normal sedentary sadness of winter, your garden vareity depression depression, trying to find a new job and so on and so forth. I’ve been going to the gym, but I am doing the thing where I exercise for a few minutes and spend the rest of the time stretching and laying around on a yoga mat, quietly congratulating myself for having gone at all.

I just wanted to put this out in the world instead of hold it in this time. To just vocalize this shame as a way of minimizing or defeating it. To push back against the internal monologue that there is anything wrong with me. To maybe give some other people feeling this weird isolating self loathing some company. As ever, I have a terrible time capping these posts, because they are less essays with a fixed end point, and more primal screams. But I’m here and I’m feeling and I’m ok and I’m miserable. Ok bye