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moonshinemornings · 4 years

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in my skin

i’ve been thinking about writing this for a long time, and I think I’m at a place where, more so than being comfortable talking about it, putting my thoughts down might help me continue to chip away at my complex.

I want to preface this by saying that my fixation on how my body looks is infuriating to even me. this is for 3 reasons:

1) there is an endless list of more important, broader existential crises to be concerned with instead of how I look (what am I heading towards? am I genuinely happy pursuing a capitalistic, societal definition of success? what is purpose or value in my life???)

2) even on an individual level, so many other aspects of a human make up their person and make them interesting other than how they look and its stupid to be so concerned with this one thing that means so little if anything at all

3) I’m not even that stupidly far away from societal beauty standards anyway wtf like stfu

regardless, I think my thoughts about my body are reflective of how I think about myself relative to the world in general. I’ve also found that the relationship I have with my body is often a symptom about how I am feeling about my self worth at a certain point in time, and also manifests in how I see and treat the people around me. for these reasons I think it can be valuable to unpack these feelings even though they may seem asinine.

the first time I became conscious of my body was in my primary school dance club, when we had to get measured for our costumes. most of my friends were generally skinny and I wasn’t significantly larger than any of them. but the nature of (chinese) dance and the kind of girls that joined it made the general impression that it was better to be lithe and delicate - the moves just looked better that way. the revelation that I wasn’t as thin as I could be was not groundbreaking. it didn’t trigger any immediately toxic thoughts either. it was just a thought I hadn’t had before, that my body wasn’t perfect. It also didn’t affect me much because I had a lot of good stuff going on in school; I had great friends, I did well in school, everything looked good on paper and in real life (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I peaked in primary school). so it wasn’t a huge trigger for anything, just a planting of a seed, I guess? dormant.

as I grew into my teens my body was often too busy serving its intended purposes for me to be concerned with how it looked. I played sports all the time, I woke up early and went to bed early (when possible). I ate well and I was active. It wasn’t difficult to be relatively fit, so I wasn’t really that concerned with how “good” my body looked. like all teens, I did become more concerned with standards of attractiveness and whether or not I conformed to them. I noticed how people’s bodies differed and what people liked. I was aware that I was not on the top of my teenage male acquaintance’s who-would-you-bang list, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. I wasn’t super pleased with my body but I definitely wasn’t unhappy with it. and frankly speaking, I didn’t think I was unattractive lah like ya I might not be hot shit but I was definitely not ugly and I was pretty confident with what I had to offer. this was probably also due to the fact that I did well in school and extra-curriculars, so I found my validation elsewhere.

for a short time between high school and college I had a body goal I wanted to work towards, time on my hands and a motivated support system, so I started working out for an aesthetic. It wasn’t super serious and there were no hard and fast rules, plus it was genuinely fun to work my body. I had been an athlete for several years at this point and I knew I felt good when my body was well-worked and maintained, so it was never difficult to bring myself to work out. the results were a happy bonus. looking back that was probably the time when I had the healthiest relationship with my body. I liked using it and spending time on it for the sake of doing it, I liked how it made me look but never to the extent that it became my main motivation for working on my body. if I had the luxury of unadulterated, stressless time, I could probably do it again. when I started college I was healthy, I looked good and I didn’t even care (we’ll come back to this).

when I started college things started to fall apart. my time in university was, overall, pretty shitty for my mental health. it was great in a lot of other aspects, and I can say with little doubt that it’s helped me grow into a person I not only want to be but am comfortable with. but the process was a shit show to put it lightly. when it comes to my relationship with how I look in particular, I think my years in London have unfortunately left me with a considerable amount of trauma. to make a long story short, I had an ideal of what I wanted my college experience to be like, but half a year into it I found myself severely unsatisfied with every aspect of my life. I wasn’t doing well in school, I felt like I was underperforming socially, I was conscious about the difference in affluence between me and the people around me and I was generally unhappy with the space I took up in my own and other people’s narratives. amidst all this, I put on some weight because (1) I wasn’t working out anywhere as much as I used to (2) the weather, my mental wellbeing and the food readily available made me eat a lot of junk. but instead of acknowledging and focusing on the underlying inferiority complexes that were eating away at me, I sought alternative validation through things I could seemingly control i.e. how I looked. it became the case that it was no longer that I looked a certain way because I worked out, but that I worked out because I wanted to look a certain way. and when I didn’t look a certain way because I was eating shit or going out or because it just plainly was not realistic given my living situation, the lack of validation would further aggravate the inferiority complexes and unhappiness with my person that started this toxicity to begin with. i ended first year treating the people around me like shit, not having anything to show for the hours of studying i put in, and a lot heavier than when I started it. family and friends pointed it out and i was pretty chill about it whenever it happened. i honestly thought i wasn’t that affected by it (again, brushing under the carpet the problems I had with the expectations I set for myself), and that i could lose the weight if i put my mind to it.

then in second year i developed an eating disorder. a couple months into second year I hadn’t made much progress with either my mental or physical health. I often ate till I was physically uncomfortable because I had a general problem with self control (I had none, in fact I didn’t want any, but that’s a story for another time). One night after eating too much, I went to brush my teeth and I was so full that when I gagged lightly from brushing my tongue, I involuntarily threw up the food that was filled up to my gullet. A normal person would’ve registered this as a cue that they should be more conscious about how much they’re eating. I saw it as an opportunity to eat as much as I wanted (for what?) and still be (or at least feel like I am) in control of how much weight I put on. and so I developed bulimia. the bulimia was closely followed by a binge eating disorder - seeing that now there was a mechanism to keep my intake in check, I could let my eating habits, which were in fact reflective of my control problems unravelling, go crazy. I told a couple friends about it because I thought maybe I needed help, but I never really told them how bad it could get. some nights I would go down into the kitchen in the middle of the night twice. thrice. seven times. I would look for anything I could inhale. cashews dipped in peanut butter. seaweed with a cup of yogurt. three packets of chips and a large slice of cake. instant noodles and jam straight out from the jar. it didn’t matter. it all ended up coming back out of my mouth and into the toilet bowl anyway. I would go out for meals with my friends and we would over-order. the paiseh pieces would be left on the plate and if no one wanted them, i would eat them. immediately afterwards I’d go to the restaurant washroom and throw it up. and all this time while I treated both food and my digestive tract like they were toys, my fixation on how I looked grew. spoiler: i did not lose weight from being bulimic. but I very much did lie to myself about it in order to keep at what was actually a coping mechanism for the rest of my life that was falling apart around me. I threw up everything I ate today, do I look different? I didn’t throw lunch up, but I worked out, so it should cancel out, does it show? I ate a salad but because for dinner we had baked rice I threw half of it up, it didn’t make me bloat did it?

towards the end of second year I had a rude awakening that forced me to drag myself out of the shit hole of a mindset I had casted myself into to address the personal issues and the lazy, irresponsible, selfish attitude that had gotten me to this point. luckily, when I dealt with the underlying dissatisfaction I felt towards myself, my problems with food disappeared along with it. right now I don’t have an unhealthy relationship with food. if i were being generous, I’d say it could even be considered pretty healthy. my relationship with my physical body is also pretty good. I eat balanced meals, I sleep well, I work out when I want to and lay in bed and eat junk when I want to. I don’t force myself to get activity in, I don’t force myself to eat more or eat less. in fact, I think I am really inching towards getting the intuitive eating and living thing down. I’ve lost some weight and I definitely don’t hate how I look anymore. so I think I am in a good place for the most part.

my relationship with body image and the validation I feel from how I look however, has been (permanently?) affected. as it stands, I am scared about two things.

first. I like the person I am right now. my life is not super in check, but I’m holding it down pretty well. but in the past two years, when i had nothing under control, the way I looked was the only measure with which i valued my worth. do I only place less emphasis on how I look right now because, like when I was in high school, I have other things going for me? if, come one day, life happens and the going gets tough, will I once again come down on myself because I don’t look perfect, even though I don’t look shit? will how I see my body and how I feel about it be affected every time something else in my life causes anxiety or unhappiness, and if that happens is there a risk of it starting a vicious circle of self-toxicity?

second. like I said, I don’t hate how I look right now. but I also don’t love it. since coming back home, after a shower or when I’m changing or whenever I’m deciding what to wear, I stand in front of the mirror, and I look into it for what I can tell is longer than I would like. I don’t give myself shit for how I look or dislike what I see. but why am I looking anyways? am i checking to see if i like my body any more or less today? why do I care? why should it matter how close or far I am to society and my own definition of an ideal body?

recently I watched a video that said despite the positive intentions of the body positivity movement, a better approach would be radical body acceptance. body positive says that even though I’m fatter or shorter or flatter or whatever-er than the beauty standard, I am still beautiful. radical body acceptance argues that words like fat or thin or flat or short or thin should just be neutral words. there is no good or bad linked to them and there is no good or bad body type. bodies are not “beautiful however they may look”. they are just bodies. I’m trying to strive towards this idea of body perception, to go back to a place of not caring how I look in and of itself or relative to anything else. how I look will just be how I look. to be clear, I don’t think this mindset is the best one that should be universally promoted. I do however think it is the best method for me. this is because I’ve found that ever since developing a fixation on my body and how it looks, sometimes when I see other people the things I take notice of most are their bodies as well. I don’t think I go as far as to assign worth to their person or character because of how their body looks, but I can tell that I’m developing a fixation on other people’s bodies (even if I don’t compare it to mine) and I feel like it subconsciously blocks a clear, genuine perception of them as people. and, of course, it feeds into my obsession about how I look. the more I care, the more I care. so I want to focus on caring less, and eventually not caring.

I would like for a day to come where I can put on clothes and not feel the need to change out of it because I don’t like how I look in something before leaving the house. I would like even more if I didn’t feel the need to look in the mirror before leaving to begin with. I would like to be able to not feel badly if someone points out I gained weight, but I would like even more to not feel happy because someone says I’ve lost weight. I would like to stalk fewer girls on instagram to see what their bodies look like in different photos. I would like to stop being concerned about how my body looks in different photos. I would like for a day to come where, whenever I’m not actively thinking about it, I forget how I look. slowly but surely, I will take steps to make this happen. it took a while to rebuild a healthy relationship with food, and then a healthy relationship with my physical body. surely it will take longer to rebuild the relationship with the image and idea of my body in my mind. I think the moment I forget the image exists will be the day I manage to do so.

#hello

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