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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