Ashleigh Young
Ashleigh Young on fighting the urge to body-shame herself
Every so often, I go through a phase of not liking my body very much. It starts with a feeling of exasperation. One morning I think, “This is ridiculous. I have to carry this thing around with me again?” But I can never tell that I am in one of these phases until I am deep into it. I will be glaring at myself as if I’m a Stop/go sign that refuses to change. And I look around and suddenly where I am is familiar. And I realise I’m back here again, and I will be stuck here for a while, idling, until I get out of the way of myself.
Sometimes I try to trace it back to the beginning. It’s impossible, like trying to pull individual droplets of water out of fog with your hands. But there are some things I go back to. I think about sitting at a picnic table with my friend. We were, maybe, 7 years old and we were comparing our legs, side by side. “They’re so big,” she said about mine, as if marvelling at some Clydesdales in a field. I think of a teenage friend saying, authoritatively, “You’re closer to big than small. It’s all in the arms.” I think of a boyfriend saying, “You’ve definitely put on weight.” I think of the photo of me in my favourite flowery dress — I’m maybe 5 or 6 — and I’m smiling and my stomach is weirdly huge. The hugeness of my stomach was confusing for anyone who looked at the photo. “What’s ... er … under your dress?”’ they would say, and I would tell them I’d just stuffed a cushion under there. I would riff on this a bit and say that I’d thought the appearance of a pot belly made me look grownup, like a man in a suit, the way other kids thought glasses made them look smart. I’m scoffing at all this as I write it. It seems so very close to nothing at all.
Much more than individual moments, what I remember is the ever-presence of the feeling. The feeling of wrongness in my body. Of my body spilling over the boundaries and the points-of-no-return that had been allocated to it. Allocated by who? By myself, of course; I was good at distilling all of the things I saw and read and heard about what a body should be (always, always small, then smaller) into a vicious self-criticism. A person can never be watertight against the feeling of wrongness. Being alive is enough for it, at one time or another, to seep in. The feeling changes a little bit every time it runs through you, so it’s hard to fight it. Sometimes it’s a hot, bright shock, like burning your hand on a stove. Sometimes it’s a sort of buzzing on your skin, like the very air is confused about what shape you are.
I give lectures to myself when I’m in this phase of not liking my body very much. “Right. That’s it. Everyone shut up. We are working on this. Nobody leaves until it’s sorted out for good.” Then I lay out the ground rules. They are to do with kindness, acceptance, and gratitude. I must express these things towards myself at all times. “Oh yes, things are going to change around here,” I say, like a foreman in hi-vis sauntering around pointing at things. I go a bit mad with power. My belt of tools is heavy, so heavy. But I don’t have things under control. The feeling keeps getting in, no matter how much kindness, acceptance and gratitude I try to plug it up with.
It does pass. It weakens. Because this feeling feeds off attention, changing my perspective helps — spending time with friends, going somewhere new. The more I do, the more I get out of my own way. Soon the phase is over. My body goes back to doing what it does best — moving around, getting me from place to place, and sleeping. It’s kind of amazing how, after all that self-flagellation, my body just shrugs and keeps on turning up, day after day.
I feel hopeful when I hear older women say that they don’t care anymore, that they’ve never felt freer, never happier in their skin. But I worry, too; and I worry about younger people. What if it doesn’t happen for us? Will our freedom just be making peace with the fact that this feeling won’t ever go away completely? Will it turn out to be something we have to carry around for the rest of our lives? People often quote the poet Rilke’s line, “No feeling is final.” It’s true — but this one isn’t going to go without a fight.