I’m thinking today about body image. My body image, to be specific, and the way I feel when suddenly confronted with photographs of myself taken by other people, showing my whole body.

The experience is one of immediate shock, often followed by a weird cognitive dissonance. My body doesn’t Look Right. Because apparently there is a Right Way for bodies to look, and whatever I’ve constructed in my head as that Right Way sure as hell has nothing in common with the photographic evidence of my squat, round, rather sticky-outy body.

Bodies, in my head, are supposed to be straight up-and-down, to have clean, spare lines and angles. The head should be a particular size in proportion to the rest of the body — not too large, or, in my case, too small. The feet should not be too long in comparison to the length of the legs; the shape from the front of the thigh to the back of the calf not such a dramatic S-shape.

And, for the love of all that’s holy, the whole thing should not be so damn big.

After the emotional reaction, I have to start thinking rationally again. That’s when I realize: hardly anyone spends much of their time daily considering images of themselves, especially not full-body images. Hardly any of us are constantly taking full-body self-portraits, or are surrounded by full-length mirrors. We don’t spend a few hours here and there watching video of ourselves.

We are too busy being in our bodies daily to spend more than a few minutes confronting how we actually look in them.

Then it occurs to me that all those articles decrying the apparent fat-person curse of Being In Denial of One’s Fatness are actually just restating the obvious: when you’re not spending all day staring at yourself, but do spend a considerable portion of your day observing media depictions of bodies that are not much like yourself, isn’t it natural that the part of your brain dedicated to constructing the Platonic composite of How Bodies Look will be mostly filled with images of sparse, clean lines, slenderness, and a particular head-to-body ratio?

Won’t you go through your day, in your body, almost implicitly assuming that it looks more-or-less like the definition of Body you have mentally constructed, based on the images and people you’re constantly surrounded by?

And won’t you then experience a cognitive dissonance when confronted with an image of a body that breaks all those Platonic rules — especially when you realize that it belongs to you, that it is, in fact, you?

Of course. Of course you will. Not because you are a stupid fat person in denial about your fatness, but because the culture we live in has erased fatness (and other forms of physical variation) from most of its artwork and entertainment.

If you’re like me, and fatter than about 97% of the population, you’re also not going to see a whole lot of other people like yourself in daily life. Most people you see, even the relatively fat ones, are going to be a bit less sticky-outy, have proportionally-larger heads, etc. You will also incorporate those impressions into your little Platonic file cabinet, along with the much thinner media impressions.

And your first reaction on seeing a photograph of your body will be one of shock, possibly horror, and an indefinable sense that Your Body is Wrong.

The secret, of course, is that there is no Right Body, no matter how hard our culture tries to define one. There is no Platonic Body floating in indisputable ether — only real bodies that exist in the real world, available in an extravagant assortment of shapes, colours, sizes, and conformations. None of them wrong or right. All of them just are.

And now I can understand that the experience of cognitive dissonance and disgust with how my body looks is an artifact of my cultural training, not a Real and Inescapable Truth About Me, requiring a dramatic gesture of repentant food restriction and mortification of the flesh through exercise.

If anything, the dissonance is a reminder that, because my body is different and even somewhat rare in this world, I must take special care to fill my Platonic File Cabinet with images that make sense to me, that I can identify with. That my own indisputable body shall now be the starting point for my definition of Body, and that I can spend a few minutes daily filling the file cabinet with pictures of me.

But it recently occurred to me that I have been in a long, gradual process of saying goodbye to my waist. I’ll explain.

As a teenager, I was never thin. I passed for mostly normal (with a big butt), and was always “overweight” by BMI standards. Needless to say, I pretty much hated myself, since that’s par for the course as a teenage girl in this culture. Frankly, I thought I was gross.

(Despite many helpful men in trucks loudly assuring me I was not.)

My one redeeming feature, it seemed to me, was that on top of my wide hips sat a comparatively narrow waist. And I fixated on it. It was, at times, the only thing that kept me from abandoning myself to the despair of total self-hatred, odd as that sounds. It was the one part of me that I felt was, for certain, socially acceptable.

Not my big nose, not my oily skin, not the cellulite on my thighs, not my fat ankles. My waist, and only my waist.

Over the next ten or so years, I would gain a hundred pounds. I would go from being a curvy-but-basically-normal teenager to a frankly fat woman.

For much of that time, through my twenties, my body shape itself did not change much. I looked the same, comparatively small waist and all, just…wider.

But in the last couple of years, as I’ve approached and then passed 30, that has changed. I’ve been watching with interest (and a little anxiety) as my body ages and does the things that it’s programmed to do: tiny surface creases have appeared around the outer edges of my eyes when I smile. Silvery-grey hairs are appearing with more vigour along my temples. My fingers are plumper, the skin on my hands more creased.

And I’ve grown a belly.

I denied it for the first couple of years. I resisted so strongly, in fact, that I wore corset-style bras just to feel normal in my body, so I would look the way I was accustomed to look in clothes.

I look back on it now as a transitional stage I had to go through — and I still keep a waist-nipper on hand in case of sartorial emergency — but I got rid of the corsets not long ago, and began to comfortably wear my clothes without them.

A friend I’ve been close with since the sixth grade came to visit me in the summer. We were at a someone’s house, talking, and I’m sure the topic turned to weight and body image. My old friend has always had a remarkably different body type than mine — long and slender instead of squat and pear-shaped, but with just a hint of belly. We’ve both admitted to having envied the other’s body shape through the interminable torture of adolescence.

Anyhow, on this evening, I stood up to walk into the kitchen, our conversation about bodies trailing off, and I heard her say, quietly, “…you always had such a tiny waist.”

I looked down at myself and had my first conscious thought that that was no longer the case. The body I had mentally defined myself with for so many years was gone, replaced by another I was still getting to know.

Even during all the corset-wearing and fretting about keeping my waist looking slender in clothes, I hadn’t really admitted to myself what it meant. It was just something I had to do to feel normal, and I tried not to think too much about it. Probably for fear of what I’d have to face, which are the things we all face — growing older, changing, losing the easy social acceptability of youth.

But when the realization hit — that I was, indeed, losing my waist — it came with another realization, totally unexpected: I really don’t mind very much. I actually kind of like my new body. And I can look back on old pictures of myself and appreciate what I thought was so hideous at the time, but still feel happy to have what I’ve got now.

If you know me personally, you know that I don’t wear much jewelry, aside from my watch and wedding ring. Nothing on me is pierced, including my ears, and I’ve never really owned a necklace or bracelet as an adult.

If you follow my inane ramblings on Twitter, you’ll also know that I got pearls for Christmas. Or, rather, that I strong-armed them out of my mom (thanks again, Mom!) because I’m an insistent brat who suddenly takes a fancy to something and cannot let it go.

When I turned 17, my mom gave me another piece of jewelry as a gift — another thing I’d suddenly and inexplicably fixated on: a shell cameo brooch, carved in the typical profile of feminine youth. I wore it constantly on a velvet ribbon around my neck, and then put it away when I got married. It’s not surprising that I strongly associate that shell cameo with youth. In my mind, it’s become a token of that period of my life.

And, subsequently, I think the reason I got those pearls, why I wanted them so intensely, was that they signified something about passing from youth into maturity. It was an assertion that there is as much beauty in maturity as in youth — even though it’s rarely admitted by our culture.

I decided I wanted to cultivate that, to appreciate it, after having spent much of my twenties stealthily avoiding cameras, wishing I could reinhabit my teenaged body, and absolutely dreading the thought that I was aging and would soon end up on some kind of social refuse-heap of oldness.

When I got them, I took the shell cameo out of storage. It now lives pinned on the lapel of my coat, like a merit badge of something accomplished, an adolescence survived. I wear the pearls daily, in the cameo’s former place, as an acceptance of finally feeling like a Real Adult, and as a way of showing how pleased I am with it.

The same goes for my belly. When I got rid of the corsets, it took a while to get comfortable wearing my belly so openly. Now it doesn’t faze me, and for the first time in my life, I can look at recent pictures of myself without cringing in horror. When I get up in the morning, and take my usual pains in getting dressed, I actually like how I look in a way I haven’t since early childhood.

I can’t help but think how funny it is that, in the end, gaining a hundred pounds and losing my waist really hasn’t turned out to be so bad. Actually rather nice.

My struggle with chemistry continues. It’s actually really fucking embarrassing, but I want to be up-front about it, mostly with myself.

Here’s the ironic thing: I actually like chemistry. Because I like learning. I like science. I like philosophy, and I see all the natural sciences as offshoots of philosophy.

I’m intimidated by math, but the part of my brain that does math actually works pretty well, when I’m not feeling intimidated by it. I can do long-division in my head in those few moments of twilight consciousness when I’m falling asleep.

I have a good brain.

But chemistry terrifies me. It seems to be the space where I have concentrated all of my fears and negative associations with school. I was harassed to the point of assault in school when I was younger. I only recently started dealing with those memories explicitly, and it’s stirred up a lot of emotional sediment.

I also have a mental illness that often, for lack of a better way to phrase it, kills people dead. I have learned, for better or worse, to live with it. I am still struggling to learn to live better with it, but I have thus far learned to survive. And that is good.

So here’s the rub — I’m scared to disappoint people. I am scared to not be loved. This fear manages to overshadow and spoil a lot of my natural curiosity and passion for school, because it feels like a manipulation: in order to be loved, you must do X, Y, and Z.

How do I respond to manipulation? Fuck X, Y, and Z.

And I get angry at school. I’m a resentful student, and I blame school. But the problem — as fucked-up as I know the carrot/stick school system is — is actually my own fear of being unloved. Of disappointing and therefore losing the love of people who now love me.

The problem is my belief that love is conditional. And that if I don’t pass chemistry, I will not be loved, and thus not deserve to live.

Inside of me, there is some kind of psychological pillar that stands there like a stone regent. This regent has one, ultimate power: to refuse. To say no. To stop all motion, to freeze time. To stand in place and be utterly unmoved.

I run up against this regent when I have been pushed to the limits of my emotional capacity. The regent, in practice, can ruin my fucking life and all my plans, but it is actually there to protect me. Because I am so terrified, as a human being, of saying no, of respecting my limits and protecting myself, of asking to be loved anyway — because, in short, I am incapable of handling my sovereignty as a human — The Regent takes over for me, as regents do.

The Regent says no for me by pinning me in one place and refusing to move. The Regent says I can’t do this for me by refusing to do anything at all.

Right now, The Regent is saying you must love me and I have reached my fucking limit and I have been battered by the world and need time to recover … by refusing to study chemistry.

In order to reascend my chair, as someone who likes and wants to learn chemistry, I probably need to start saying these things for myself.

That’s when it occurred to me — I was having a feeling.

It was a sad feeling. And I didn’t like that, not at all.

It seemed I was sad because of chemistry. Not my internal chemistry, but chemistry, the pure science course they make you take in undergrad. Which I have never been good at. It’s not one of those topics (you know, like biochemistry or organic chemistry or microbiology or clinical nutrition, apparently) that you can pass by cramming for at the last possible second.

And I’ve been so distracted this term — by travelling, by being sick as a fucking dog, by travelling again, and then continuing to be sick as a fucking dog, and then being injured on top of it — that I haven’t really studied. And I’m scared.

I’m tired, and I’m in pain, I’m hopped up on prescriptions, I’ve been sleeping insane hours, and I’m just scared.

I recently learned this weird habit of talking to my fear. Yeah, it’s kind of a hippy-dippy thing to do, but when you’ve got hippy-dippy emotional problems, you’ll try just about anything.

So, while drifting in and out of sleep this morning, I attempted to talk to my fear of chemistry.

Why is it so scary for me? Haven’t I taken lots harder courses and passed them? Haven’t I done surprisingly well at this whole “science” thing, given that I basically identified as “artsy” from the time I was an itty-bitty kid?

Well, yeah. But that didn’t stop the scared.

So, the scared started talking back to me a little. And it said, “I’m scared of chemistry because, when it’s over, the person I was is gone.”

Now, that streak of “artsy” — it’s a hyper-rational, pragmatic, no-bullshit kind of artsy. Symbolic, psychological woo-woo is not my usual thing. But, like I said, with the emotional problems and all, I’m willing to go with it.

I thought about it. And, weirdly, chemistry seems to represent something for me. It seems, for reasons I don’t understand at all, to mean saying goodbye to myself as I once was.

And I don’t want to. Even though I’m really not that person. Even though I haven’t been for quite a while.

From where I stand now, I can look at that girl — who detested herself so much, who wore her skin like a hair shirt — and see that she was lovely, even in her imperfectness. I can like her, smile at her awkwardness, endear her ignorance, sympathize with her (many, many) sadnesses, admire her ambitions.

And I can know with certainty that, because I never fulfilled those ambitions, because her future never materialized, because I went left when she pointed right, we two are not the same anymore.

And finishing chemistry will be the stamp on the postcard that says, “Wish you were here.”

This post represents one (of what is sure to become many) in which I talk to myself. Feel free to read or to skip. Comments on these posts are closed.