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This is Thirty


As Jennifer Lawrence cried perfect, beautiful tears of rage onscreen, her home in ash and rubble around her, my gaze settled lower down on something inside the theater: my legs.  Tessa and I were sitting in the prime seats in the front row of the back section at the AMC, our feet propped up on the bar in front of us, and for the first time I could remember I had a moment of positive revelation; my legs are normal-sized, I thought, with so much surprise that the moment was instantly notable.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt abnormally large.  For much of my life, reality was at least mostly in line with this self-assessment – I was larger than average, or at least larger than any person I knew.  Later, as I got smaller, I still felt massive.  It took me years to force myself to believe that my idea of my body was out of proportion to how ‘freakish’ I actually was.  And even then, reality was often on the side of my negative perspective, proving to me with every group shopping trip or road trip backseat squeeze that while I may not have been abnormally huge anymore, I was still the largest person I knew.

My sense of my own acceptability moved downwards, starting with my face, which had been at least ‘attractive enough’ for my whole life.  Next were my arms and shoulders, which, after a hundred-pound weight loss and one plastic surgery, were small enough to fit into a size Medium and looked fine (great, even, if I was on an exercise kick).  Then my waist, which was always acceptable in proportion to my hips, became good enough on its own; even my wide hips, after years of struggle, made it into the ‘normal’ category, more an indication of my shape than my size or heft.  But the acceptance of my own normalcy stopped at my legs and refused to budge.  Until that moment in the dark movie theater, watching The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 with Tessa, when I stared at the completely normal pair of legs, clad in black skinny jeans and propped in front of me, and understood that, yes, those legs belonged to me.

I actually missed the next five minutes of the movie, so mesmerized was I by the suddenly unremarkable size of the same thighs that had been hauling me around for thirty years.  I had become so blasé about my self-image, responding to people’s concern with “it is what it is” for so long that I had finally internalized the truth of the statement.  I had convinced myself that I would likely never ‘love my body’, but that that was okay as long as I treated it well and didn’t let my personal issues with it stop me from enjoying life.  I still wore a swimsuit on vacation, still went out on dates, even had sex, and just ignored the nagging voice in the back of my head that told me I should be hiding myself away because I was too disgusting to be seen. 

A funny thing had begun to happen, though.  Since my break-up, whether because I was dating new people or because I was experiencing the emotional invincibility of having a completely shattered heart or because I was in therapy and working on my sense of self or as a result of all the yoga or simply because I was getting older – for one or more of these reasons I had begun to…sort of…like myself.  And not just my personality.  I would walk past the bathroom mirror in my undies in the middle of the night and think damn, I look good, with zero irony or caveats.  I would get ready to go out and have a dance party in my room and feel the sway of my hips and the jiggle of my ass as sexy things, rather than movements I wished away as I had always done before. 

Still, it wasn’t until a month ago, when I looked at my legs and felt a sublime lack of emotion about them, that I felt like a true transformation had taken place.  I was no longer at war with my body.  I no longer hate it, but neither do I feel the need to fake-love it in defiance of the hatred that lived in me for so long. 

I remember when I first tried yoga, years ago, from a DVD in my living room in London, and I had to stop because every time I did a downward facing dog, the view of my thigh flesh hanging from my inverted legs was too disgusting for me to either look away from or bear for the duration of the program.  Now I go through an hour and fifteen minutes of yoga without more than the odd thought about whether my belly is showing because my shirt has ridden up.  I mean, sure, if I look down at my stomach in pigeon pose I see how it hangs over the waistband of my pants and looks kind of freakish, but then I look around and see how the bellies of almost all the other women in the class, whose bodies I think are gorgeous, do the same damn thing.  And then I look away and focus on breathing through the ache in my hip.  And pigeon is literally the only pose in which I worry about a specific part of my body looking bad – every other pose is all about the whole, the breathing, and how I feel.  It’s excellent.

Again, I don’t know what the reason is (or reasons are) for this change, but I don’t really care.  If this is what people were talking about when they told me their thirties were way better than their twenties, I finally believe it.  I feel better about my body than I ever have, regardless of my weight.  I’m finally settling into this body of mine, and it’s more than a truce: I think we might actually be finally becoming friends.  Who knows, maybe true love is next, but even if it stays like this I think I’ll be happy.

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