Since starting this blog I knew there would come a time when I felt called to write this particular piece. But each time I began to type my motivation soon disappeared as fear and anxiety washed over me. What if I wasn’t ready? What if the world wasn’t ready? What if no one cared? Or what if it did me more harm to share than to keep it inside? But after years of sharing aspects of this part of myself with loved ones, I finally feel the time is right to speak frankly about how I’ve gotten to know myself, but more specifically my own body.
This piece isn’t about sympathy, attention or even bravery. If anything, in writing this piece I hope to finally begin to set myself free.
Memories of becoming first aware of my body date back to my elementary school days. It wasn’t my own curiosity of how I grew and how my being took shape that prompted me to take notice, but instead the comments of those around me.
“You’re so skinny, you should model”
A phrase I heard consistently in paraphrased form. From then I began to associate being skinny with beauty, a slippery slope that I quickly fell down the older I got. Soon these comments began to be associated with warnings that instilled fear in my young heart.
“You need to watch what you eat, how much you eat…”
Relatives and those I trusted most began to draw attention to what entered my body making me question whether I could trust my own desires and instincts about who I was and what I liked. I don’t mean to say that your parents shouldn’t remind you to eat your veggies and that thoughts of eating healthy should be thrown out completely, but constantly cautioning a child about eating an extra hot dog at the family BBQ really does a lot to your psyche.
As I began puberty and my body continued to develop so did the notice others took on my body. I grew tall quickly, a stick-like string bean unsure and uncomfortable with what felt like enormously long legs. As I outgrew my older sister, the person whose wardrobe I sought to emanate, I began uncertain in what clothes to wear. I could never seem to find pants that covered my ankles, and every pair of shorts that I liked I was constantly berated for them being too short.
“You’re too big, your ass is eating those shorts.”
Thinking back to my pre-associated relationship between being small and being beautiful, in my eyes I was perhaps the ugliest 14-year-old that ever existed. Things around me only worsened as I entered high school, perhaps the most difficult time of my life. I was slower than most of my classmates to develop and as people began dating and talking more about sexuality, I started to feel like maybe I was being left behind.
“No titty Ray-Ray”
A nickname I was saddled with. Though I laughed it off inside it was devastating. I wanted to be noticed by boys and admired by the girls. With confusing thoughts of my own sexuality swirling in my mind, I often wished I could shed my skin and be anybody else. As body dysmorphia became a regularity, my mental health worsened though I didn’t possess the language to describe what I was feeling, not that anywhere felt safe to disclose.
I would look back at pictures from family vacations and hate how I looked, critiquing how I could do better, be better, look better. I recall there was one summer that I felt so insecure about my feet that I refused to wear sandals and instead opted for hot sneakers just so that I could hide a small part of my shame from the outside world. It wasn’t until much later in life that I realized that while I was being jested by people I considered friends, harassed by classmates who disliked me and critiqued by family, the biggest bully in my life happened to be myself.
When I moved away for university an interesting newfound confidence came over me. I’d had boyfriends at that point so I felt cute, not quite beautiful though, but what I was working with would do. My dreadlocks had grown significantly at this point, giving me the long hair I desired, not realizing that the shame I felt with my short natural hair came from deeply rooted systemic racism and anti-Blackness and had no bearing on my perceived beauty. Within a short time of living in residence, I noticed I began to get a lot of attention, mostly from upper-year men. So much so that they gave me a nickname:
“Retro-Anna”
The name rang out through the halls to the point where certain people just downright stopped using my actual name. They said it was because of my style, but it later dawned on me that this was most likely because my ethnic name was too different for the white majority. Around this time the app My Fitness Pal began to gain popularity. On it, you could track your daily calorie and vitamin intake, as well as your weight. Fearing the foolish notion of the “Freshman Fifteen” and loving the attention I was receiving, my goal with this app was clear: to stay as small as possible.
Now something that’s important for you to know about me is that I have exceptional difficulty finding foods I like. Maybe it’s a a happenstance of my neurodivergence, or maybe I’m just a picky eater, either way, a lot of the foods I’m drawn to are fried, carb-based, and more often than not take out. My Fitness Pal was a great space to track what I was consuming and to let me know when I’d had enough. Daily calories of 2,000? Not a problem, I could survive on one takeout burger a day. Worse than that, bonus points if I was under my calorie goal or managed to skip a day of eating.
From my initial deluded goal of maintaining my size, my new task became to lose weight. I’m even ashamed to admit that there was a long period during this time where all I wanted was to be considered underweight. This was at first easy enough to hide, but soon friends became concerned when I would ask to borrow their scale almost daily, and began to notice I was skipping more meals than not. Now, I know the notation of three square meals a day is inherently colonial (I won’t get into it, look it up), so it’s not to say you have to eat as much as is “advised.” But I know what I was doing was dangerous.
The more I pushed through pangs of hunger and went longer intervals without eating, the more pride I felt. While my friends expressed concerns about my eating habits and began to check in more regularly, I was also met with resistance when I expressed disdain for my body.
“You’re smaller than I am, you’re not fat”
Perhaps meant to be helpful, or put things in perspective these comparative remarks only further filled me with shame and a desire to hide the now out-of-control eating disorder that had become my norm. I know that I’m not fat, I understand fatphobia exists and I cannot begin to comprehend what it feels like to experience that form of bias and downright oppression. I don’t claim to know what others are going through in their own skin and so I can’t fault people for the disdain they may have felt for my own deluded perceptions of myself. But, what I can say is that we are so conditioned, especially femme folks, that our worth is rooted in our bodies. And so, there is a lot of internalized self-body shaming and fatphobia that exists. I’m not proud of it, but I’m still working to combat this in myself to this day.
I eventually was convinced to delete My Fitness Pal, though it sometimes crosses my mind and I have fleeting considerations about reengaging with it. Over the years I continued to experience and witness many harmful interactions of body shaming. I continued my battle with my body in silence and drew more inward, continuing to develop horrible eating habits. When the pandemic rolled around in 2020 I once again hit a very difficult bump in this journey. I began living with a partner of mine and around the same time began to come into my queerness and feminist beliefs.
Coupled with depression, I experienced weight gain like many folks during this time, gaining somewhere between 15-20 lbs., making me the heaviest I’ve been in my life. My partner at the time had a chronic illness wherein they needed to weigh themselves regularly to make sure they weren’t having a flair-up. Once again I had access to a scale, so whenever they would weigh themselves I would too. Throughout university, I had many shorter friends who often would take it upon themselves to comment on my size.
“You’re a giant, an Amazonian”
Short cis women love to talk about how small and petite they are, and in my experience enjoy pointing out how not small others are. So by the time I began seeing this person, who was shorter than I, I already had a complex and fear about dating shorter and smaller people. When my partner would weigh themselves and observe they had lost weight, just a happenstance of their illness, I would feel a horrible disdain that they felt my beauty fading as I did. It was around this point that to affirm my existence I stopped shaving my legs and armpits. Though my partner assured me they didn’t care, deep down I felt otherwise.
After a terrible break up I fell into a spell of intense depressive anorexia, losing all my COVID weight and then some. Though my heart was broken my confidence soared as I prepared to re-enter the world of dating. What I wasn’t prepared for was the backlash by cis straight men.
“How tied to that no-leg-shaving policy of yours are you?”
Men who initially found me attractive would falter when they saw my body hair, some even going as far as asking me to shave or expressing how their typical sexual routine would be altered because of it. They didn’t care, but they liked it better when my legs were smooth. They were cool with it but didn’t want to be intimate in certain ways as a result. Beyond the realm of dating, though most of my friends were quite receptive, it’s been admittedly difficult to get my family members to understand. As jokes about body hair continue to be shared, it sometimes feels impossible to express how those curly little hairs make me feel affirmed in my body.
So now what? Well, as I write this I am on a plane ride home from the most wonderful trip in Mexico with my family. We had some downs, but mostly ups, one of them being several folks' recognition and affirmation of my gender queerness. Initially, I was afraid of how my body may be perceived, not having the flat stomach I desire, and not being as hairless as has become forced upon femme folks. But, after looking at myself in the mirror with the warmest tan against my new neon bathing suit, I think I’m finally ready to listen to the way of my body.
My body ebbs and flows like the warm waters I swam, and I need to allow it to do so. Sure societal norms may tell me otherwise and seek to make me feel uncomfortable in my skin, but why fight what it needs? Bodies are meant to grow hair, sometimes in weird and new places. I embrace it. Bodies gain and lose weight, but our worth does not hinge on that. I embrace it. Bodies make smells and sounds that can’t always be controlled. I embrace it. And in embracing what my body wants to be, I embrace what it needs. Some days that’s hot dogs for breakfast and cake for dinner. Some days that’s sleeping way too late, or not at all. Some days it’s receiving physical or emotional love, intimacy and connection. And to that, I say, I embrace it all.
This isn’t to say that some days I won’t still struggle, I know this isn’t a linear journey. But, at least I can and will accept what I feel within myself as it arrives each day. My body may not be perfect in the eyes of the world, but it’s perfect for me and for the life I’m meant to live. And I embrace it all.
Stay zesty,
Ra’anaa
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