Body Talk

The other night, my mom sent me a picture of myself from my 21st birthday weekend. It was a photo of me in my bikini on a weekend we took in Palm Springs to celebrate. I found myself honestly, rattled. The last handful of years, it seems like I’ve had some body image issues sneak up on me. Now, to be totally candid, I grew up dancing ballet in Orange County, CA, if there was someone who was primed to have body image issues - I was definitely in the right demographic.

I really thought I dodged that bullet through. I didn’t manically document everything I ate, I didn’t obsess over a set of numbers, I never fixated on the size of my clothes throughout my teenage years. I enjoyed bouncing around on my high school’s cheer and dance teams essentially eating and drinking (sorry Mom) whatever I felt like. Not until much later in my 20s did I see a big shift in how I ate and how my body image impacted my daily life.

I think there were a couple of important factors to consider about my youth and where my body image and self-esteem might cross paths. I’m an only child of divorced parents, neither of which ever remarried. So, I managed to have essentially the undivided attention of both parents, a great self-esteem builder as a kid. My parents convinced me I was made up of pure sunshine and excellence. As your world grows larger and includes more than just your immediate family it brings more and more opinions to consider. Growing up, I also danced ballet, dedicating hours on par with a full-time job each week to my training. My weight didn’t fluctuate much in my teen years. I didn’t hit 100 pounds until junior year of high school, I was a peanut. I never experienced that adjustment period where I saw my sizes change or had to replace clothes.

That is until I joined the corporate world. I graduated college at 21, and joined a commercial real estate firm. I was absolutely miserable. I was on an entry level salary and absolutely drowning in student loan debt. I turned to my favorite vice, red wine, in copious amounts, to get through the week and leaned on company sponsored happy hours to cover my bar tab. That was the year that picture came from. I was so thin, but I was struggling inside, I was stressed, I had no money and I was watching my credit rating implode. Nothing humbles you quite like telling the person on the other end of the line at the cable company you know they have a script to get through but you’re canceling because you legitimately cannot afford your internet service. After that year, I joined my current talent acquisition firm, moved back home to California and felt myself regain some ground.

I still saw new changes, secretive eating patterns, a complete lack of understanding my body’s hunger and satiety cues, and a tendency to power through any stress thrown my way. I lived in ongoing internal chaos, often not eating all day and then feeling no control when it came to food. Looking back I see the pattern of my inability to actually care for myself. I was digging myself out of my lost puppy phase during my early twenties. I doubled down on anything I through would bring me financial and career success and everything else I really just let happen. Jumping forward about five years, I was on much firmer ground, my career was established and rewarding, I was starting a new chapter in a new city - I felt safe for the first time in my own adult life. I still didn’t really know how to care for myself with food.

My new city was Chicago, and it is an incredible town for eating and drinking, two things I very much enjoy. Chicago also has winter. As I curated a wardrobe that included four seasons for the first time (I’ve lived in California and Texas for my whole life, your girl had no fall or winter clothes to speak of) I felt so much gratitude for the nice things I could afford and feel stylish in. I began to feel rooted in how I liked to look and dress, affording nice things made me feel like I’d achieved a status level I’d longed for (we’ll get into my background on another day). However, after a couple of winters, things started to feel, well, tight. Everything felt constricting, a reminder of all the food mistakes I’d made. This foreboding feeling that I wasn’t in control, that I was no longer that healthy fit ballet dancer.

I started having emotional reactions to things I’d never imagined myself reacting to - I’d become the dramatic over the top girl who cried when things didn’t fit (thank you for being patient with me Ben). I felt so lost, I felt trapped by the clothes I’d once celebrated as tokens of my success. I’d focused on making financial gains, getting out of debt, looking put together and polished. I forgot about how being well dressed doesn’t really matter much when you’re depressed. All I wanted when I was younger was to be perfect, perfect grades, perfect bun for ballet class, perfect outfit as the career woman I envisioned myself to be, but perfect is hard. Perfect is unforgiving. Perfect is grueling. And I am far from perfect.

I started sharing my thoughts around my body with my therapist, I shared how caught off guard I was by the reactions I was having, because I hadn’t grown up with these negative body thoughts. They were new, but they were ingrained, lurking just below the surface and a slight tip caused by overindulging, and hunkering down for winter for the first time, left me completely reeling. Women are told essentially since day one to stay as thin and young as we possibly can, for as long as we possibly can. When I responded to my mom about the picture, she’d sent me, she followed up with another one of her, from when she was around 40. She was struggling through a deeply painful divorce, raising a wild little girl and thin. When I lamented about being 21 again, she responded to me with “Oh, to be 40 again!” And we can joke about it now, but for both of us – those were deeply painful ages. Why would we ever want to go back there?

I shared this exchange with one of my girlfriends and she immediately helped me reframe my thought process. She encouraged me to think about who I was then, not what I looked like. How did I feel? What did my life look like? And then to remind myself how I’ve grown and look at the life I’ve built today. When I look at the essentials of my life – my purpose is to continue to grow into the best version of myself. I find opportunities day after day to elevate and learn how to care for myself and others around me. I owe it to the version of myself who spent so long chasing perfection, to chase my innate strength just as hard.

I’m learning about myself as a body, what sensations mean I’m hungry and need fuel, what sensations make me feel I’m my healthiest. I love movement, I always have. I’m gravitating toward the fuel, activities and eating experiences that make me feel most aligned with how I want to feel. I’ve leveraged the resources I have around me, my therapist, my dietician friend as an educator and all the fun remote workouts I can get my hands on to start to distance myself and my value from my image. Listen, I won’t pretend I’m not still critical of how I look, I’m counting down the seconds in quarantine until I can get my hair colored and Botox redone but I’m feeling less tied to only my appearance. I am learning how to be more kind to myself and learning how to take care of my body so that she can help me advance my purpose for as long as she’ll let me.