Body Story ~ Virginia
Categories : Body Stories
Body Story ~ Sirius
My body is a library of memory, a living archive of survival, love, and legacy.
Body stories are largely missing from the zeitgeist of our time. We are often reluctant to dive into our body stories because we believe they are too taboo to share or too boring to be of interest or value.
In Reclaiming Body Trust, we shared body stories of those who have defied the standard narrative of body apology, instead demanding care and deep respect. These stories, once unearthed, encouraged others to share theirs, too.
Here is Virginia’s Story.
“I was born to a mother who never really wanted to have children, or at least, when I was in my early 30s and asked her if she would do it over again given the chance, she was silent and responded : I don’t know. I’m always partly satisfied, when my mom, always performing, tells me her real truth, even though it typically hurts.
My body was pathologized early on by my doctor, at age 5. It’s a memory I don’t have but that my parents recounted for me once I began the work I do now as an eating disorder dietitian. Luckily for me, my mom resisted that recommendation, but I was not saved from the scars of her body hatred or the ways that health replaced thinness in my home and we engaged in all the same dieting behaviors in the name of “health”.
I don’t have many memories from my childhood. I remember loneliness.
It was around the time of the doctor’s recommendation that I was being abused by the pastor of our church’s daughter. I don’t remember that, it came to me in a traumatic recall when I was old enough to understand that 13 year olds don’t think of sexual abuse on their own; she was likely experiencing it herself in the house across the road from my church where the pastor and his family lived.
My body was wrong and unsafe. This message still lives inside of me but alongside a lot more care and gentleness and it takes up a lot less space.
It was a few years before my first sexual abuse, age 2, when I went to live with my dad’s parents, my sister went to stay with my mom’s parents, while my mom was hospitalized and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. My dad, of course, kept working. I remember her recounting that it was the most peace she had felt, and I always think of that- my mom feeling more peaceful in a hospital psych ward than our home, because she was being taken care of and had a chance to be heard and understood.
I tried in vain in my 20s, with a dose of good therapy in me and understanding signs and symptoms of depression, to get my mom to go to therapy. Her line was always the same, she was good- she had done therapy- it was so hard but she healed. She had arrived! I talked to her earlier this year, age 42, encouraging her to get some help for her drinking, and she explained to me that she had started drinking again because she felt sad (another proud moment when my mom says what’s real). That she probably should have gotten some medication to support her mental health. When I encouraged her to again ask for medications as we were preparing her for her doctor’s appointment to address her memory loss, she said that she didn’t want to gain weight, that she was happy with her weight now.
So my mom will keep drinking so that she can stay thin. I guess it’s truly not about health anymore.
Even though I hated my body most of my life, I could perform liberation in it. Most of my friends admired the way I was with my body and food. And I resisted too much dieting until the burden of adulthood become too big and real and my body gave out from the weight of holding the trauma stories and lineages of my past- and it was my back injury at 25 that began my eating disorder struggle with orthorexia. I was farming at the time, and the sustainable agriculture movement is a ripe place for healthism (the idea that it is a moral pursuit to strive for physical health), unfortunately. My righteousness, combined with ongoing pain and disability from my injury, and a visit to a doctor that didn’t consider anything but his own ego and agenda- flamed my eating disorder- in the name of health! I live down the road from that doctor now.
The weight came off at first because I couldn’t eat- I’d lost my appetite in the pain, the bewilderment of my 25 year old life taking a new form- doctor’s appointments, money stress, and an unknown future. Compliments and attention from men came my way as I struggled to eat enough and navigated my new life territory, mostly alone; re-inforcing that most people’s automatic bias is that thinness is desirable, “hot”, and morally correct, no matter what else is going on.
The on and off anxiety and depression I had struggled with my whole life was tamed by the way that my orthorexia took over everything. I was praised for making my ketchup from scratch and for the gobs of vegetables I was always busy preparing. My zealousness for health could walk the forefront while deep down I was elated that I had finally found the elusive “it”: The way that I could keep my body thin. So, I kept going. It felt so easy to hide in the admiring gaze of everyone around me and my own ego’s contentment at my “success”. To hide from the reality that I wasn’t really there. In any of that. It still felt like my childhood: Lonely.
I still had anxiety, back pain, insomnia, and enormous self doubt and hatred, but all I needed to do was parade around the ways I performed health and it felt Okay- until it didn’t.
Luckily, my way out was gentle- it was a beckoning. It only took a year at a status quo dietitian job that was rife with orthorexic tendencies for me to call BS on the ways things were done, on how everything was just being repackaged so that people could pursue thinness, stay disconnected, stay small. The flimsiness of the ways we all pretend were starting to show around me. At the same time I was spending more time learning from people about body trust, and to witness two women (most of my young adult life I was looking for a mom substitute to show me how to be strong and love myself) that lived out embodiment was all I needed to heal in that direction.
The unraveling was ROUGH. But there was no question about it for me. I was tired of pretending to be liberated, I wanted to feel what it was actually like. I left jobs, a partner, a home, my family for some time. I cried, and cried and cried and cried, I cried every day for a whole year and then some. Then came the anger that threatened to drown me.
At some point I began to build something new. It started with boundaries, and then a pleasure exploration. Then it became treating myself well, eating things that I actually liked instead of thought were the healthiest, buying myself clothes that fit and felt good and that pushed back at the inner critic in my head, echoes of my mom’s, sister’s, grandma’s voices telling me to stay small. Alongside of this I was developing a spiritual practice that helped me to stay grounded in the midst of a world that didn’t make sense to me increasingly day by day. I was learning to trust myself and the decisions I made and the ways I took care of myself. And I started to dream, about a life that I could lead, that wasn’t pretending, and I started to dream about how it would feel and who would be in it and how we would take care of each other. I was learning to trust and listen to my body with food, and that lead to other things. The indecision that I often grappled with started to fade away.
My body grew and with it people’s judgement, friends, family- the internalized anti-fatness that lives within all of us became apparent again. I was healing, coming alive, coming to know my true self for the first time and what people saw was: failure. It’s a fucking dystopian warp that I know reverberates beyond me and my story: this hurts all of us, but some of us the most- and that needs to matter more because: it matters. All we have is each other.
Today I’m living with a partner that affirms me and loves me so deeply and sweetly and our two cats who bring us so much joy. It’s a home that I feel safe in, surrounded by trees with a creek, owls and coyotes. Across the street I lean into community with the soil and the people who tend it and share what is grown from it. There is a woman down the street who gives away free flowers in a bucket, leftovers from her job.
I didn’t believe that I was worthy of such care and abundance, but because I decided to stop the body project, the performing and pretending, I was able to build something that surrounds me with deep truth and wisdom and realness. It is the only container I need to weather what’s ahead.”
~Virginia
What is the story of your body?
Collectively, we need to hear more body stories of others in order to feel less alone in our own. If you’re open to sharing your body story, we invite you explore our body story prompts and submit your own story here.
Your story has the power to change how we regard all bodies. Thank you for telling it.