I spent my whole life wishing my body was different, and now that I’m trapped in my apartment during what feels like End Times, I still wish my body was different. The fact that I’m not overflowing with body positivity reveals two things, my age and body dysmorphia. I’m a Xennial who grew up when there was an editorial trend called “heroin chic.” Models were so skinny they looked sick. There was also a version of heroin chic where a rail-thin model had breast implants, making it look like somebody plonked a pair of fake boobs into a child ghost. It was an unrealistic beauty standard I was simultaneously trying to attain and hating myself for not attaining. The need to be skinny crept into my brainspace early and really lodged itself in there like one of those parasitic worms that turns insects into zombies.
Here’s the thing about body dysmorphia, it doesn’t follow logic. It turns every reflective surface into a bad funhouse mirror. It doesn’t listen to opinions of friends, family, or therapists. It disregards scales, photographs, and even measuring tape. It bends the truth like a con artist who’s always one step ahead. It’s a mental disorder that behaves a lot like herpes, it hangs out dormant but loves showing up uninvited during times of heightened stress.
Before I knew anything about supermodels or movie stars, I didn’t like my body for a different reason. I’m the second of four girls, so I wore hand-me downs from my older sister. In a fun twist of genetics, by the time I was five and my next youngest sister was three, she was taller than me. My parents saw the opportunity to expand my wardrobe in the most embarrassing way — by giving me the clothes my little sister grew out of. I hated my body for being so puny I had to wear hand-me-downs from someone who still wore nighttime diapers. I spent a lot of time hanging from things because I heard it made you grow. It doesn’t.
Fourth grade was the year I switched from hating my body for being small to hating it for not being small enough. Even though my parents restricted our tv watching to an asymptote approaching zero, the idea of thinness as a status symbol still crept in. Since I had no concept of my parents’ financial struggles, I was always begging them to buy me clothes that weren’t semi-ruined by my stupid tall sisters. I was allowed two outfits per school year. My mom would take me to J.C. Penny during their back-to-school sale where I’d get two monochrome sets that included a sweatshirt, a turtleneck and jeans. Apparently I was normcore. I always got one in bright green and the other in light blue, and I wore them until they disintegrated. I wore the “slim” of whatever jeans size I was that year. But in fourth grade when I went into the JC Penny’s dressing room, the “slims’’ didn’t fit. I had a complete breakdown. If I couldn’t wear a slim, it meant I was so fat they’d send me to a camp where you only eat vegetables and have very loose bowels. That’s when I came up with a genius idea: I’d get the “slim” pants, then lose weight so they’d fit! I was ten. Looking back, I realize this was insane, but I also see a child with severe body dysmorphia and a lowkey eating disorder. I left the dressing room, told my mom “everything fits perfectly!” then came home, stared at my new pants and cried. I ended up breaking the buttons trying to stretch them out and wearing broken pants for the rest of the school year. I was ashamed that my body wouldn’t change its form upon my command like a shapeshifter.
I have a distinct memory of being in fifth grade Language Arts class and sitting across from my friend Tessa Hunter. Our teacher paired everyone off, and each partner would take turns writing lines of a story. I stared at Tessa’s skinny legs, jealous. All my lines of the story were probably about an obese squirrel whose forest friends made it go on a diet. Later that day, I took the floppy plastic ruler from the back of my trapper keeper, measured the distance across my hips, and decided they should never get any bigger. I was eleven, so that was about as likely as catching a tiny flying pig in a butterfly net who grants you three wishes. Spoiler alert: my hips got bigger.
The next year, my body insecurity was confirmed by an outside source. I was at my grandparents’ house in New Jersey. My grandmother got high on bargain-hunting, so when a local kids store went out of business, she snatched up a bunch of super-discounted clothes. I was very excited to see a pair of plaid pants. I didn’t even like plaid, but they’d never been worn by a member of my family so that’s all that mattered. I yanked ’em on over my neon splatter bike shorts. When I buttoned them, the waistline squished my kid gut. It made my skin pouf over the top of the pants almost like, oh I don’t know, a hot fresh muffin. My grandmother said, “they’re too tight, you should wear a girdle.” A girdle is olden-times Spanx. It’s what women wore to smooth out any imperfections on their cellulite ridden figures so it looked like their bodies were hard yet bendable like a Barbie leg. I told my grandmother to return the pants because I would not be wearing a girdle. Then I cried in her bathroom. Unfortunately, one off-handed comment from a woman with her own disordered eating confirmed what I’d suspected: I was fat.
I was thirteen when my older sister got a subscription to Seventeen magazine. She’d give it to me when she was done carefully cutting out all photos of Jared Leto to tape on her closet door. I’d go back and forth between staring at one of the models in Seventeen and looking in the mirror. I thought that if I concentrated hard enough, I could will my body to look like the model. When I asked my mom, “how do I get those line thingies on my stomach like Cameron Diaz?” she said, “sit-ups.” I spent two weeks doing five hundred sit-ups a day. Seriously. Five hundred. No lines appeared on my stomach, so I gave up and decided it must be a genetic mutation that only appears in humans with perfect bone structure. Nobody told me that A) it took longer than a fortnight to form abs; or B) I should probably forego my daily ritual of eating half a box of Lucky Charms as a pre-dinner snack. I seriously thought cereal was a healthy snack because in the 90s, the corn lobby made everyone believe sugar was good and fat was bad, and now a jort-load of Americans have Diabetes Dos because of it. But more importantly, it meant I didn’t have ripped abs.
Almost all the models in the teen mags and Delia’s catalog were bone thin, but when it came to forming an opinion about how my body should look, Victoria’s Secret was by far the worst. Long before I hit Bra Age, I’d see my mom’s Victoria’s Secret catalog and wonder when I’d look like that. It wasn’t an “if,” but a “when.” I was sure that one day I’d wake up with an even tan, no body fat, medium-sized round breasts, and apparently an entirely different face. When I was fourteen, I ordered a swimsuit from Victoria’s Secret, a rite of passage for 90s teens. I was more excited about the arrival of the bikini than I was about my crush Josh Cantwell returning my feelings. (He never did, but he’s now happily married to a man so I’ve forgiven him for turning me down). When the bikini arrived, I ran to my room and put it on. I was so upset I burst into tears. I must’ve believed buying a Victoria’s Secret swimsuit involved witchcraft, and it would transform my body to look exactly like the model. I sent the suit back and entered a new phase of hating my body as much as was puber-terically possible. I hated it more than the idea of Phys Ed and the SATs merged together into a nightmare test you had to take in front of the whole class in your underwear.
I spent all of high school “on a diet.” The diet consisted of the following steps:
- wake up and hate my belly fat
- try not to eat for as long as I could
- get hungry in the afternoon and scarf a sugary snack
- give up on the diet and tell myself I’d start it again the next day
This diet is completely bonkers. Sometimes I’d make it a couple days without eating, or eating very little, but it’d all come crashing down and I’d bake and consume a tray of brownies with cream cheese icing. I was jealous of my friend Joselyn who was anorexic (which is SO f*cked up), because she had the self-control to not eat, whereas I broke my fasts by mainlining Cheez-its, Gushers and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Always “being on a diet” but never losing any weight is a recipe for self loathing, of which I had so much I could’ve bottled and sold it as a sadness-inducing biochemical that dictators use to control the masses.
In college, I added alcohol and birth control into the mix of my non-diet diet. The birth control made me immediately gain ten pounds, but only in my chest and belly. Alcohol made me think my body was great, but only while I was drunk. Then, I’d double-hate by body the next day when I was hungover. I looked forward to being drunk and liking myself more than I looked forward to an existence where I didn’t share a bedroom with two strangers. Needless to say, I was drunk a lot in college. Thankfully, having an academic scholarship kept me studying, had to keep my grades up to get the ca$h. When I graduated, I remember being focused on how the gown made me look fat. Also, I was super hungover.
Entering the workforce forced me to curb my clear liquor consumption, but it amped up my bodily contempt. I started going on long walks because if I was walking, I wasn’t inhaling Baked Lay’s and Haribo gummies. I was too afraid to run because I thought people would “stare at the fat girl running.” Another absurd asumption, since New Yorkers don’t give a fuck about anyone unless they’re physically blocking their way, and even this it’s more of a mild annoyance, like a fruit fly.
At my older sister’s encouragement, I finally started running. There was an awesome side-effect: if I ran fast enough to be out of breath, I couldn’t think about anything else! That meant if I was running, I couldn’t be trash-talking my body. My body was too busy keeping me upright. It worked. I couldn’t believe it, I’d found a distraction that wasn’t sending me down the path to be featured on an episode of “Intervention.” Another thing that helped my sanity was cancelling my subscriptions to Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and W. I loved the artistry of high fashion, but I couldn’t look at them without spiraling into a self-disgust K-hole, squeezing my fatparts in frustration.
As I settled into running, I found a new body type to idolize: Runner Women. A Runner Woman has firm abs, Michelle Obama arms, and boobs that don’t smack them in the chin if they wear the wrong sports bra. I wanted to be smaller and harder. I thought that if I was small and hard like the rose quartz my psychic friend keeps in her bra, then I’d like myself. Right???
As I entered my 30s, where I currently reside, a wave of body positivity flooded the market. Models with stretch marks. Models with cellulite. Plus-sized actors. Hot people who were not skinny. It was a new phenomenon. I loved that people were embracing their bodies, and yet I still could not. It was awesome that Gen-Z came of age with the phrase “body positivity” instead of “heroin chic.” They were happy and free and loved themselves! Meanwhile I couldn’t shake that parasitic worm nestled into my brain telling me my body was bad.
Alongside the rise of body positivity, a new body type also became popular. I hate that sentence. Why is any body type popular? It doesn’t even make sense. UGH. Anyway, the popular body type I’m talking about is the Extreme Hourglass. Impossibly tiny waistlines, zero belly fat, and beautifully round bottom-halves. AKA “influencer body.” Seeing these hourglass figures spun my self-hatred: I went from not being small enough, to not being small in the right places. I would never be thin or thicc in the exact right way. This is how I felt about myself before COVID-19.
OK, now we’re in the present. I’ve been stuck indoors since March 16th . It feels like the absurdly long first act of an apocalyptic movie. This should be the time to say “fuck it” and decide my body is a good, nice, fine body. Maybe I should even love it. But I don’t. I do sit-ups sometimes. I run when it’s cloudy or raining like a good lil’ social distancer. I even look in the mirror and say “you look great!” But I can’t make myself believe it. It’s the medium-end of the world and I still do not like the shape of my skinsack. I don’t want to spend the end of the world not liking myself, I want to spend it twirling around the kitchen in a bikini, scream-singing along to Kate Bush! What I’ve realized is that learning to hate one’s body is like learning another language. When it happens at a young age, it’s just a part of who you are. I really wish I learned Spanish instead.
