Holding Up The Universe - Talking Body.

"Everyone in my life is a stranger, and that includes me."

- Holding Up the Universe, Jennifer Niven

Trigger Warning: 
This blog post discusses body dysmorphia and disordered eating. If you are someone who is triggered by detailed narratives of dysmorphia, please click out now. This post is meant to be insightful, but it may not be the most comfortable read.

7:19pm, 

I don’t know what I look like. 

I live in my head, for the most part. 

In my childhood and preteens, my body wasn’t something I thought about, unless it was to understand how others perceived me. Which, again, wasn't at the top of my priorities for a long time. I was the removed kid, who spent a lot of time trying to understand the world, instead of actually living in it. 

Everything I knew about my appearance, therefore, I knew based on what I would hear people say. When I was born, an uncle had apparently commented on my eyes, something about wit. At three, I had tight, messy curls which made me look ‘mischievous’. At five, I had cropped hair and a pointed jaw, ‘split image of your father, you'd make a good boy.’ At eight I was ‘a little on the chubby side, but she’s tall noh?' At ten, the pictures tell me I had a round face and long limbs. 

Everything I ever ‘knew’ about what I looked like, in retrospect, I didn’t really 'know'. 

Because the mirror, and photographs, never showed me a concrete image and I’d always chalk what I saw up to lighting/clothes/context. In my head, there were bigger things to worry about than what I looked like. 

That is, until, all I ever heard were backhanded compliments:

1. At thirteen, “You’re tall, for a girl.” - am I? Or are you just, not used to being around people taller than you? 

2. “How will you find a man?” - because at the ripe age of fourteen, marriage was somehow at the top of the list of things I had to do. 

3. “You’re so thin it makes you look taller. That’s kinda unhealthy.”- at seventeen, this one stung. Because I had grown so used to standing out that anything I could do to fit in, I would. 

Maybe, if I had rounder arms, a torso that wasn’t as lean, maybe then I’d be considered healthy? 

Still, with the stress of having to keep up with life, being a 'gifted' child who was tethering on burn-out, I didn't really have the time to hit 'pause' and revisit those 'compliments'. Life was ahead of me and my head had forgotten my body once again. 

But people could still see me. and people saw change. people feel the need to comment on change, because it's what people do. Maybe it's an itch. Maybe it's all they know. 

Nevertheless, my body was changing and I hardly realized. I was living in my head, miles away from my body. Perhaps, more removed than I had been when I was much younger. 

On the day of my graduation, my grandmother jokingly commented on how I looked like a 'lady'. and I wondered for the rest of the day, if that would be my new identity. No more the 'tall girl', but a 'lady'? 

A day after, an extended member of my family felt the urge to let my mum know I looked like a skeleton wrapped in silk. Something about sunken eyes and sunken cheeks. I watched them from across the hospital room, sick brother holding my hand and I thought about it. I pulled my phone out and looked at the same picture. Yesterday, I saw a lady in a blue and gold saree. Today, she was dead. 

My mother, perplexed, but worried more so, decided that I needed change. Could skeletons grow flesh if they had breakfast everyday? Still, I tried. Years of not having a proper breakfast had left me feeling queasy in the mornings, but for my mother and my weathered appearance, I'd scoff down toasted bread and an egg, near religiously for months. I built a routine out of it - breakfast of bread and eggs, a cup of tea. Lunch and dinner, not so much. I couldn't help but refuse change. 

And life wanted nothing but change for me. 

April, 2020. I write about this time very often but it barely scratches the surface of what my family and I went through. In fact, I think that sentence applies to every single moment that has lead me here. 

I don't see anyone. I don't feel the need to think of my body. My head is floating again. 

Breakfast becomes Brunch, Dinner becomes midnight snacks. 

Everyday blurs into the next. My anxiety peaks, the insomnia I'd been diagnosed with at 15 comes back around in full force - Insomnia Pro Max, if you will. Along with it, the migraines. So I go back to pills, stronger ones this time, because life was getting ahead of me. 

But these were things people didn't, couldn't see. When I was in front of them, all they saw was my body and how it had changed. They couldn't see inside my head. Couldn't see me from within, or how out of desperation, I was scotch-taping the seams to keep it all in. 

Naturally, the comments took a different turn: 

1. "You've let yourself go. It doesn't look nice." - to let myself go would mean I once had it all in, under control. But I didn't. I don't think I ever have. 

2. "This is too much noh?" - believe me I wish I knew where the bar was, because I can never seem to reach it. 

3. and the final blow came around when the same family member, who two years prior had killed me before my eyes, decided I had to know that "You've become shapeless. You should go on a diet." 

Ah. the sacred words I'd seen flashing on billboards and magazines. 

By definition, a diet refers to a prescribed pattern of eating. 

If so, isn't everyone on a diet? 

Still, it stung. 

Because suddenly, the mirror reflected a mismatched array of lumps. 

In grief counseling, they tell you that at the core of some grief is guilt. Guilt because we couldn't be more, do more. because we couldn't save them. because we can't live up to their legacy. because we might one day forget them. because we might have to, inevitably, move on from them. 

My head processed things differently at the time. All my anxiety and grief, all the sadness I ever felt, and all this anger I had for people who couldn't see past skin, all of it manifested into a chilling spiral of self-loathing. 

My body became my head's target: everything about it was wrong. Calves too tough, arms too round, torso too short, limbs too long. 

Yet at its core was guilt. 

Guilt that I had 'let' myself 'become' this. Guilt my head harbored for refusing to think of my body the same way others did. Guilt, that should not have been there to begin with. 

I couldn't walk in public without feeling the eyes on me and recoil. I remember walking through the mall, feeling too big, too tall, too much. I remember locking myself in the fit-on room because I was tired of feeling fabric against my skin, a painful reminder of my body being awfully real.

I won't go into detail about the awful things I put my body through because: 1. It is an awful, inhumane thing to make another person feel less than or too much, 2. the weight of your deeds are the ones measured on the Last Day, not the weight of your mortal body. 

I will, however, tell you what brings me to write this rather vulnerable post. 

Because of my unhealthy relationship with my body and food, I've always experienced discomfort, both psychological and physical, when eating. and any discomfort I felt while my body was begging to be fed, I was proud of. I shouldn't have been. My body has been irreversibly tainted by my inability to perceive it. 

Last week, at the doctors, I was told to "eat when you're hungry, not when you think you deserve it. sleep when you're tired, even if you think you don't need to. be kind to your body if you want to continue living in it," because I have developed allergies to several types of food as a result of my negligence. Every meal I've had for the past week was accompanied by a handful of pills. There's a near-permanent lump in my throat and my stomach twists in pain every few hours, despite the medication. 

Dada, my sweet, wonderful father with his bountiful well of wisdom, despite the things he's been through, decided to sit me down and remind me, one evening this week, that my biggest strength has always been in using my head. "Everything you've ever thought you could do, you've done, haven't you? Don't ever doubt what you know because of what you hear, especially not from those who barely even know you." and I think, I'd like you to know that too. 

As I hiccup ( a not-so-cool new side effect of acute gastritis) my way through this new diagnosis and try to navigate my body towards a positive relationship with food and identity, I'd like to remind you to be kind. to others, because while you may believe your words come from a place a love, they may not be in need of it, and most importantly, to yourself because only you ever know the places and people you've been. 

I've come to realize that this inability to view people as 'bodies' extends beyond myself. I may joke about my friends' heights but a part of me has never considered them to be anything but incredible souls. I wouldn't say I've never commented on someone else's appearance, but I can for certain tell you that I never have, and never will, feel entitled to do so, because those words may only leave my tongue once, but they will echo in the other person's mind for eons. 

So yes, I'm in my head again, but this time I'm also aware of the body that carries it. I listen to it as closely as I can. When the lightheadedness comes around, I've learnt to associate it with hunger than with a sense of pride. When I feel the lump in my throat tighten, I've learnt to stop eating and give my body the time to relax instead of letting the guilt take over. 

We were not sent down to this earth to be a certain shape, a certain shade or even a certain race. Everything we've ever done has boiled down to the choices we made, from the moment we decided we wanted to be better than angels to right now, my choice to share this with you, and your choice to read until the very end. 

So please, choose to be kind. to your body, to your mind. to the people in your life and the people passing by. because one kind word can undo years and years of unkind thoughts. 

Thank you for reading. 

All my love, 

always, 

N x.