My body and I are best friends, but even best friends fight. Our origin story would be best tagged as “enemies to friends to lovers” in an AO3 search string. I wasted so much of my adolescence battling my changing body, criticizing it the mirror, obsessing over the number on my jeans and always being able to say “small” when asked for my t-shirt size.
My inner and outer perceptions of myself were all tangled up in one another. Few of us know who we are at fifteen or twenty-two, but I thought I knew who I wanted to be. I looked in the mirror and saw a twenty-four-year-old, divorced, sad girl whose ex stopped touching her because of how she looked. I didn’t want to be that girl.
But I didn’t want to be enemies with myself anymore. I learned that to be on your own (to live alone, to make a life alone) you need to be on your own side. You can’t be at odds with the girl on other side of the mirror. That external validation I craved about my body wasn’t there. It might not ever be. So I had to choose to fight it out with myself, or give my body what it wanted: love and acceptance.
I choose the latter most often. Before I started exercising seriously again or eating more mindfully, I wrapped my arms around my body and said “I love you” until I meant it. I needed to believe in my heart what my intellect knew all along: that my body does not determine my worthiness for love, that it deserves love whether fat or slender or weak or strong.
Eventually, believing in that worthiness did lead to me taking better care of myself. My body is changing again but I feel in partnership with it. We are building each other up instead of punishing each other.
Yet we still have our days. Days where my old narratives come up and I get an idea about how I want to look and angry at the reality. Like jean shopping at Target last night. I was tired. Feeling frumpy. Fixating on my belly fat and cellulite. Never mind that I was shopping because all the jeans I own are too big and I was fitting into a jean size I hadn’t worn in years. I finally found a pair that worked and left to go to my kickboxing cardio class. I was early for the class so I walked on the treadmill until I saw them put a sign up on the door two minutes before: cancelled. What a relief. I felt like my body and I were in the aftermath of an argument, we both wanted to go home and be quiet with each other.
The truth is I probably just needed some more sleep. It’s my body telling me that it needs rest days, more than I give lately, and if I don’t give them freely it will take away my choice. Loving my body means listening to my body.
To love my body is a decision, one made with intention every day. I need to defend it from the untruths as vehemently as I would for my best friend, even if my own mind is playing the bully. So I repeat and repeat and repeat: I love you, I got you, I’m on your side, I love you, I love you.
With Love,
Natalie