How much have I talked here about weight and size, about eating and eating disorders? How much time have I spent in front of the mirror forcing myself to look and hating what I see? How many times have I woken in a fearful cold sweat because my husband has his arm around me and his hand on my midriff? Too many times. Too fucking many.
And it has to stop. It has stopped. All this obsessing and hating and fearing has turned me into someone who lives for an as-yet undetermined point in the future when I will finally be the right size. The problem is, I will never be the right size. I have been many sizes in the past and none of them have ever felt right.
I will write something positive soon, something celebratory and fabulous, probably involving phobia-busting photos. I will jump right on that self-acceptance train and take on the world, inspired and strong, full steam ahead. But right now I need to pay my respects, one last time, to the people I’ve been and the wildly unrealistic expectations that I have allowed to govern my perception of myself for as long as I can remember. Yes, it’s self-obsessed. Yes, it’s cathartic. No, you probably won’t care to read it but yes, it needs to be written.
I remember being 7 and getting changed for P.E. in the corner of the room, desperately embarrassed about my ‘fat’ body, trying to hide so that no-one would see anything. I was not fat. I was normal and 7. I started to diet in secret, not eating unless I absolutely had to, unless the act would be witnessed. This became normal. Normality is fluid and changeable.
There was the teenage body that, years later, I accept looked fantastic and wonderful. I am annoyed with myself for doing what so many people do and not appreciating how amazing it was to have a body that could suffer so much so often and bounce back so admirably. I had new curves which, in the space of a couple of years, went from being the terrible thing that made me too self-conscious to do gymnastics to the blessing and curse that made people look at me. Then various things happened which left me feeling it was better not to be looked at. And I decided to disappear.
I disappeared with exercise, with chemicals, with a delicately crafted veneer of confidence which because increasingly further from the reality of the person hiding underneath. Determined not to be the anoretic cliche, I always aimed to reach a goal weight and be happy and say “Now I shall stop losing weight and enjoy my body the way it is” and stop starving myself. I never got there. I got to the goal weight, then to another goal weight, one after another, on and on and less and less. But I was never happy. I was always too much and not enough.
Then came love and with it a recovery of sorts, a choice to get better, to be healthy (whatever that meant). And I did, sort of. I started eating again, going to the gym to stay fit, working with animals (which is the most psychologically healing job I have ever had), going for long walks at 2am with D, talking about the future and hope and desire and ambition. I said at the start, when I was in therapy, that I feared I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the healthy behaviour if I put on ‘too much’ weight. This turned out to be true, but not yet.
Then came limbo, once we had decided to move but before we actually did. The laying of plans, the leaving of jobs, the goodbyes to friends, the room full of our belongings in my parents’ house while we whispered in bed about all the things were would do once we finally escaped the country we hated. I don’t remember feeling anything about my body then. I suppose I must have had an opinion about it but I don’t remember. I had an escape to focus on, and escape is always so much more beautiful and magnetic than anything else in life. Another way to disappear.
Then came Scotland and the apartment by the sea and the mountain biking and exploring and pushing boundaries and seeking new limits to surpass and the most delicious feeling of freedom I have ever felt. I was doing a boring office job and although it wasn’t somewhere I wanted to stay forever I felt like it was a necessary stepping stone and things ticked over until I got a flu that wouldn’t go away and then I woke up one day and couldn’t move.
Doctors and blood tests and fear then M.E. and low blood pressure and low blood sugar and the metabolism of a corpse and weight gain and the inability to do anything about it. I coped with the actualisation of one of my greatest fears - loss of control over my body - because it paled in comparison to the actualisation of one of an even greater fear - complete loss of control over my life, over work, over my mind. It felt like punishment.
College and early mornings and diet pills purchased online not for weight-loss reasons but to make it possible to get up in the morning and get through a day of classes and shoots. Of the two years I spent at college, my entire memory bank adds up to about 3 days. I was on a roller coaster. I wasn’t even on it. I was hanging off the back of it trying desperately not to let go while I smiled and wrote “I am fine I am fine I am fine” a hundred times on the chalkboard in my head.
College finished. Self-employment. Some clients best forgotten, others inspirational. Those best forgotten are long-gone but the inspirational ones have stuck around and continue to inspire. I do what I do and I love it. For the first time in my life, I feel that I’m in the right place and headed in the right direction.
New medication. Proper sleep for the first time in years. Pain management on a level I never thought possible. Exercise. The feeling of walking, of just being able to put one foot in front of the other, so intensely beautiful that I walked in the pouring rain, face turned upwards, smiling. And I lost weight. I remember D saying “You look like a different person every two weeks”. Always supportive, reminding me to ‘be careful and take it easy’. I was putting my book together and arranging an exhibition so I didn’t arrange too many shoots for a couple of months which made it possible for me to build my days around going out for those blissful walks.
Then the move into the studio last year and so much work and not enough time. I over-did things, as I tend to do, and I didn’t really recover. It has taken 6 months to get back to the way I felt last summer. Almost. Part of me thinks that perhaps last summer was a one-off, just a beautiful little gift to remind me how amazing life could be at a time when I desperately needed a reminder.
The the progesterone coil, then quitting smoking. Over the winter, I put weight back on. Not all of it, not everything I’d lost. Not even an amount that anyone else could see. But enough that I was aware of it and it terrified me. I tried to exercise but couldn’t seem to manage doing that and working. Work comes first. Work always comes first. Maybe one day I’ll be rich and work can take it’s place at the back of the queue.
Yesterday. Like I decided when I was 10 years old that I would live in Edinburgh one day, like I decided to marry a man who had only been my boyfriend for a matter of weeks, like I made a decision in the queue in at the pharmacy that I was going to quit smoking there and then, I had a moment of clarity and decided to simply NOT have a problem with my body any more. Not to live life as an arrow pulled back against a bow string waiting for precisely the right conditions to allow perfect flight, but to simply fly.
My body had found it’s way back to what I assume is the size it wants to be right now. I eat healthily and I exercise when I can. As D keeps reminding me, weight is not a permanent thing. He has a point. Bodies find their way to a natural and comfortable size and sometimes it’s not worth fighting them on that.
I look back at my life as a series of fast and firm decisions which have led to amazing experiences, a succession of spur-of-the-moment choices made based on what felt best at any given moment and therefore always leading to the right place. For so long I leaned on the crutch of the security of controlling my body, of being the perpetual work in progress, of the warm glow of secrecy that no-one could take away. And in one moment, I let it go. I let it all go.
The weight of years has been lifted and flight is truly beautiful.
