"I SAID" 08: movement is a privilege
I've been wanting to write this for a while. It has taken me a long time.
content warning: I discuss food, self-image and body dysmorphia in this piece. please take care when reading if this is a difficult subject for you. ❤️
I use she/her pronouns to describe my body for the sake of this piece because it makes sense to me. Thank you for reading. If you hated it, tell me.
I spend enough time talking to myself that my body can sometimes seem separate from my mind. She is another person I talk to and talk about. Sometimes with care and grace, other times with disdain.
It took me a long time to fit into her. I never felt at home with her until recently. When I was a kid, I played soccer, but all the running made me anxious. I was constantly worried about not being as fast as the other girls. I opted to play goalie to avoid playing midfield. I voluntarily chose to throw my body in front of soccer balls, hoping that would be enough to distract the rest of my teammates from the fact that I couldn’t run very fast.
All I could see were the things I didn’t like about myself. I couldn’t run very far, or fast. I had eczema on the back of my knees. A mustache. Dry hands and jagged nails. I remember one day in the early summer, I wore shorts and uggs to school because I didn’t want anyone to see the dark hair on my calves.
I started to feel ugly. I wasn’t blonde or hairless. I had a belly and a cowlick. I did not have clear skin and straight hair.
But my body always helped me move, despite my animosity towards her apperance. I went to swim practice three times a week, participated in dance-a-thons and played boxball on the playground. I never broke a bone or got sick enough where it was debilitating. She was never unkind to me, even when I thought she was ugly and awful.
During the summer after elementary school, my grandma approached me and told me I needed to start lifting weights. She had me doing bicep curls with a five-pounder in her bedroom before my mom finally came upstairs to rescue me. The conversation between them was short lived, but I got the gist. It was there that I, at ten years old, learned that people will talk about what they think about your body. The good, the bad and the ugly. And it never fucking stops.
Everyone comments on appearances. Sure, sometimes it’s well-intentioned, you’re hyping the girlies up. But we all know sometimes it can be majorly vicious. No one is stopping you from talking shit about your own body. People kind of hope that you do. Because somewhere, somehow, it was deemed socially acceptable to talk shit about each others’ bodies and we will all weirdly feel better if we all know that no one likes themselves.
(editor’s note: this clip from mean girls sums it up!! If you don’t hate your body everyone is like omg you should though!! let’s change the narrative PLEASE)
There was a brief period when I started high school where I felt like my body and I were starting to get along, but the constant comparison, locker rooms and coming-of-age stuff was too much. Eventually, I was spending the better half of my time hating her. Obsessing over her. Talking shit about her. It was just what you did. You pitted your body against others in some kind of sick competition. I still was not blonde or hairless. I was not skinny. I was taller than most of the boys I interacted with and felt awkward in my clothes.
Eventually, everyone from my grade started going to the gym. I fucking hated it. This did not help my relationship with my body in any way, shape or form. Expected to join in on the fray of ninety pound high schoolers dancing on the elliptical made me feel like a joke. Just its presence alone made me feel even more awkward and uncoordinated than I already was. Despite being an athlete, despite knowing I was taking care of myself, despite truly believing that going to the gym would be good for me and would not only help my body, but my brain, I so often wanted to evaporate into thin air on the first floor of the Larchmont New York Sports Club that I just stopped going. It was better than the alternative.
I grew older, got acne and dealt with shin splints. I braced myself for impact, for my body to truly rebel against me. She never did. I was healthy by every stretch of the word. I ate steamed broccoli and chicken for dinner most nights. My parents did not keep “junk food” in the house. For ten years, I ate the same exact brown bag lunch every single day. Turkey sandwich on wheat bread, no condiments, a baggie of Snyder’s Pretzels and a fuji apple.
Everything shifted when I got my license. I finally had freedom - and privacy - to go out to lunch and eat a grilled cheese from East Ave or an entire tub of pesto pasta from Cherry Lawn. I’d go to Bradley’s in the morning before school and house an entire chocolate croissant before I even got to the parking lot. I’d eat these things in secret to avoid the commentary. I couldn’t help that I was hungry all the time. It was embarrassing how much I had to eat to feel full.
Everyone around me would skip lunch and barely snack. At seventeen, you notice these things. It was awful. I felt like a monster, always hungry, always scavenging for food. Why does no one else feel this way? Why am I the only one who is hungry? These were questions I never got answers to. It made me feel crazy.
But to my body, this was normal. We woke up at 5AM most days to exercise, went through a full day of school, sometimes had a play rehearsal. We were growing, hormones were shifting around like a storm inside. Obviously, we were going to be hungry. It was not even a question.
In college, she carried me through four years of binge drinking and shitty dining hall food with minimal incident. And no matter how much she did for me, I still resented her.
Whenever someone took a picture of me, my eyes darted to my stomach. Was it protruding? Did I look fat? Could you tell I had a layer of skin that, no matter how many times I pretended I wasn’t hungry, would just not go away? I tried to heal this insecurity with tequila and attention from men, to no avail. Trying on clothes for formals or parties was earth-shattering-ly dramatic. I was still not blonde or hairless. I was a size ten shoe. I did not feel comfortable in my own skin, even when I had my lip waxed or a good outfit on. It was only ever “what does my stomach look like?”
When covid hit, I was out of shape, exhausted, depressed and scared. Eventually, my brother wore me down and convinced me to go running with him. I barely made it to Murray Avenue School from my mom’s house on Ellsworth road before I had to quit. According to google maps, the distance between those places is point seven miles. I gave up and walked home, trying to give myself some grace. Running is hard and it was always hard for me. I can always try again.
I don’t remember if we ever went running again. Three months later, he was FaceTiming me from his ICU bed. Movement seemed impossible for both of us.
I was rotting - not in a hot, fun way. I did not like who I was becoming. My grief was overtaking me and it felt like I would never have the capacity to move forward.
In the aftermath, my body and I sat down with each other. I was living alone and sleeping in the childhood bedroom where I first decided I would hate her. Flashbacks to middle school would pop into my head where I would stare at her in the mirror, stomach puffing out over my American Eagle jeans in a vain attempt to look like everyone else. I hated her then, but in the light of adulthood and age twenty-two, she didn’t seem all that bad anymore. She was not the villain. I was.
It was there that I decided I would try my best to love her back. No matter what I looked like, she could dance around to Death Cab for Cutie in the living room. She could still get up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water. I had to stop picking her apart, trashing her behind her back, talking shit to her face. It was a waste of time, and I needed her support to climb out of the hole. It was a pretty daunting wall to scale all alone.
It was here that I took it almost too far in the opposite direction. I was gifted an Apple watch and immediately fell victim to the rings. I would stretch at 11:30 PM to try in a manic attempt to close my activity circle. I walked seven miles on the last day of June because I was desperate to earn a challenge badge. I would march around the first floor because I got a “reminder to move!” that made me feel like trash. Eventually, I parted ways with my watch - for the better - but I had to work extremely hard to find a healthy relationship with all of these things; food, exercise and mindset. I quit Banza pasta and returned to normal. The goal was just to find some sort of balance.
When I moved to New York, I started to grow with my body instead of against her. Getting out and walking was exciting again, there were things to do and places to go. My legs got me to my apartment on the sixth floor with bags of groceries on each arm. My body rallied for me, she got me back up when I was down, inside the gym, to yoga classes and pickleball courts. She never quit on me, even when I was convinced she would.
Things were improving. Focusing on a happy medium. I always eat real breakfast now, and french fries if they are available (usually at different times, but not always.)
In December of 2024, inspired by the folks who ran the marathon the month prior, I impulsively decided to sign up for the Brooklyn half. I won the lottery and was shocked that I would, in about five months, run further than I ever had. The first run I did of my training plan was 3 miles. I miraculously finished it, lightheaded and terrified for the road ahead.
All of it was hard. The training, the side stitches, the sacrificing of plans, the weather deciding to throw us the coldest spring in history, the bumping into people you do not want to see while you are exercising, the hunger, oh my god, the HUNGER. All of it sucked. But what I have gotten out of this experience is a kind of radical acceptance.
I am still not blonde and hairless. My legs and belly are still soft. My feet are still a size ten. But my body teamed up with me and she took me really fucking far, farther than I ever thought I could go. She never quit on me. And for that, I’m so lucky. This was partially me trying to officially heal my relationship with exercise, partially to prove to myself how capable I am of commitment and partially to remind myself that movement and exercise is a privilege. I will run the half because I live in my body, and I try to remember to be thankful for her every single day for that. Sure, I’m never going to loveeverysinglethingaboutmybody, because I am on the internet, but I am trying reallyfuckinghard to choose love and acceptance over hate and negativity.
I trained for this for eleven weeks and I am running it on Saturday, May 17. If you want to come cheer, hit my line and I’ll send you the info.
Our bodies can take us so far. Be kind to them.
love this love u!