What a Shame

Today I want to talk about shame, specifically about body shame. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a woman say, “Oh, I just need to loose ten more pounds.” I’ve worked retail, covering the dressing room and it drives me to frustration hearing these beautiful women putting themselves down. I want to grab them by their shoulders, shake them and say, “Stop doing this to yourselves! You are beautiful just the way you are!”

At this point some of you will no doubt be thinking, “That’s all very well and good, Emily, but what do you know about body image issues. You’re tall and skinny.”

Well, folks, I know lots, because for all my mother raised me to be strong and self-confident, my mother was not the only woman in my life. I’ve been told that I should eat more, (an impossibility, seeing as I eat about as much as a teenage boy). I’ve been told that I can’t gain a single pound, because then my clothes wouldn’t fit. I’ve been told that my shorts or my skirt were too short because I have long legs and long arms and shorts look even shorter on me than on other people. I can’t wear skinny jeans because my calves are too big. My ankles are too thick, my feet are too big, my teeth aren’t perfectly straight…

I could start picking myself apart piece by piece, naming all the little parts of myself that I have at some point in my life felt ashamed of.

Well, I sick of being ashamed. I’m sick of deflecting compliments. And I am sick of being silent while other women are made to feel ashamed of their bodies when they have no reason to be.

So, I’m going to tell you a story.

I have this black cocktail dress that I absolutely love. It has a high, dramatic collar and the hemline hits my leg just perfectly. It’s gorgeous, body hugging, but not so tight that it shows off everything. When I bought it, the dress fit like a glove and my grandmother said, “Now, you can’t gain any weight, or that dress will show your tummy.” Every time I wore that dress her words niggled in the back of my mind. I’d examine myself from all sides in the mirror, “Is my tummy showing? Is the dress too tight? Does it still look good?”

As it happens, I did gain a little weight. Not much. Not enough to change dress-sizes, but enough so that when I wore the dress there was that little bit of a round bulge. And all I could think was, “what would my grandmother say?”

When I went to college, I did the reverse Freshman Fifteen. I lost fifteen pounds. This was not intentional, nor was it the result of an eating disorder. I was sick, so sick that it was rare that I actually made it to the dining hall. I survived on peanut butter and ramen noodles. I didn’t really notice this for a while. My roommate expressed her concern about how thin I was, but I didn’t really think anything of it at the time.

And then, I put on that black cocktail dress with it’s high dramatic collar and it’s perfect hem length and it hung from my bones like a sack. I was appalled. I remember, through a haze of fever, looking at myself in the mirror and seeing the fabric billowing out from skeletal hips, concave belly, sunken bust. I saw for the first time that all fat has fallen from my face, that my cheeks were sunken and my eyes lost in dark shadows and I thought to myself, “How ugly.” And I thought back to when the dress had clung to my every curve and I regretted being ashamed of my little tummy, because I would rather have a little extra meat on my bones, than waste away to bone.

I’ve since gained those fifteen pounds back. I’ve returned to health and whenever I start to nitpick the parts of my body that I don’t like, I remember looking into that mirror and seeing that wasted girl and I count myself blessed to have a healthy and full functioning body.

And so, I leave you with a challenge: Love your body as it is. Do not pick yourself apart, for you are not your parts, but a great and beautiful whole.

Thank you for reading and be well.