I have a body
“The most powerful thing anyone can say to us is what we say to ourselves.” Christine D’Ercole
When I was in seventh grade, my boyfriend of a couple of weeks broke up with me after we slow-danced at a party in the basement of my friend’s house on a cool Saturday night. It was the early 90s and we had all just finished doing the line dance (different than line dancing) to Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby.”
As we danced closely to “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” by Bryan Adams, I was nervous but excited and although my right armpit was definitely sweaty, Debbie Gibson’s Electric Youth perfume was masking the smell and probably everything else in the house.
On Monday, he told my friend to tell me it was over. The reason? Not the sweaty armpit. He said our stomachs touched. And by touched, he meant that mine touched his. It was the last time I slow-danced with a boy until I danced with my husband on my wedding day.
On the last Saturday in October, on an unusually warm day – even for the deep south – I walked into a boutique in Natchez, Miss., and saw the most beautiful tapestry hanging on a wall above a rack of headbands and socks.
It was placed over a window, with the sunlight shining through it, and I stood there, mesmerized by its message.
It was called, “Rules for Being Human.” It listed 10 simple rules, and the first one said, “You will receive a body. You may love it or hate it, but it will be yours for the duration of your life on Earth.”
I stood there, covered in goosebumps, and as I finished reading the other nine rules and snapped a picture of that tapestry, I thought about my 12-year-old self and how I spent decades hating the body I had been given.
In less than a month, just about the time our kids go back to school and life is less about the holidays and more about the every-days, we are going to be inundated with experts selling us solutions to fix our sagging, lagging and jagging bodies. They are going to tell us all the things that are wrong and offer us shiny solutions. January 1 is the day that the gyms are packed, the points are counted, bread is abundant on every shelf while absent in every shopping cart and we are back to fighting with our bodies.
I got off that hamster wheel in March 2022, when I joined a coaching program that sold me the one thing I was missing.
Me.
During the last two years, I have heard an incredible smart and insightful woman say the same thing repeatedly, “What if we don’t assign any meaning to our bodies? What if we simply say, ‘I have a body.’” Cue the amazing tapestry above.
Both her wisdom and the words on that tapestry made me think about how we, as women, are always thinking about our bodies. We compare them, criticize them and fight against them, ultimately in a desire to change them. The messages we receive on loop are that our bodies aren’t thin enough, ripped enough, tall enough. Our butts aren’t tight enough and our boobs aren’t perky enough. We are never enough.
Why is it so hard to accept the bodies we have without assigning shame, blame or self-hatred? When we were little, we just lived in them, played in them, bathed in them and danced in them. We didn’t hide or worry about what others thought. It has taken me 30 years to get to the point in my life where I can say: I am not my body. I have a body.
I have a body that is strong. I have a body that is capable. I have a body that carries me through each day of this beautiful (and sometimes scary and sad) life. I have a body that curls up to process pain when life gets so sad and so hard that being upright is too much. And I have a body that wakes up the next day, takes a giant breath and knows that all will be OK.
I have a body that carried my children. And fed my children. And read to my children. And let them ride on my back and my shoulders. I have a body that gets stronger every day so I can continue to live the life I want to live. I have gratitude for my body that swims with my kids, walks with my husband and dog, carries bags of groceries and moves furniture. My body gets out of bed every morning and shows up and is flexible and strong. It dances and stretches and breathes and only asks to be loved and nourished. Last week, it carried me to the top of a mountain to look into the clouds. It doesn’t look like an Instagram body and that’s OK. It’s mine, and it serves me well.
I am a work in progress. When there’s something I want to improve in my body, I look at the data and think about what it needs. I give my body sleep, movement, nourishment and water. And sometimes I give it junk food, and it lets me know what it thinks about that, the next day. And sometimes the day after that, too.
Why is it so hard to accept the bodies we have without assigning shame, blame or self-hatred?
When we were little, we just lived in them, played in them, bathed in them and danced in them. We didn’t hide or worry about what others thought. It has taken me 30 years to get to the point in my life where I can say — I am not my body. I have a body.
When I got home from Natchez, I found the tapestry online. I bought it and hung it in my bedroom. Before I go to sleep each night, I read the rules for being human, and when I wake up, I read them again. The first one will always be my favorite.
If you’re not ready to love the body you’re in, that’s OK. Start small. Look at yourself in the mirror and simply say, “I have a body.”
December 5, 2024