The Body Wound

In college, my friends and I were glued to America’s Next Top Model, a show where they called the thinnest of women overweight. We gathered round the TV and watched every episode. We even perfected the catwalk.

If you came of age in the 90s and early 2000’s, you know how pervasive size 0 culture was. The commercials advertised drinks to lose weight. Even our cereal was tailored to helping us be smaller.

The narrative was that any woman who wasn’t perfect at all times, emanating an impossible beauty standard, and maintaining the tiniest physique, was considered offensive.

We grew up with Disney princesses whose anatomical makeup would surely have left them dead in real life.

But they taught us what beauty was.

And, maybe even worse, what beauty wasn’t.

I had started sucking in my stomach before age 10. By my early twenties I was struggling with disordered eating.

Storylines that were all too popular with my generation.

I did not survive that era, digging deep to find my internal worth, and learning to enjoy pizza again, just for this next era of routine botox, AI beauty standards, and reverting back to diet culture.

The Stages

As an aging woman in modern society, I’ve noticed three stages we are subjected to.

Stage One: Coming of age. The narrative here was to be as small as possible and as beautiful as possible. Be flawless, be desirable. The parameters were near impossible, but my god we tried.

Stage Two: An optional phase, but one I chose, is Motherhood. The narrative around motherhood was to never look like or let on that your body had carried children. Bounce-back culture. It should be a secret miracle how your kids ever materialized onto this earth, certainly don’t gain weight or have stretch marks.

Stage Three: Aging. Just don’t do it. Be forever youthful through any means necessary. If you age, the world will hate you.

I fought hard to play my role in stage one. I learned to survive on as little food as possible, I straightened my otherwise untamable curls religiously, and I scoured Seventeen magazine to learn all the tips to achieve beauty.

I crawled my way into motherhood, terrified of what it would do to my body and my desirability.

And then I birthed daughters.

And a fire ignited within me, a rage oh so deep, I just wanted to scream “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!”

I wanted to burn it all down, because WTF are we doing?

It became so obvious.

I actually got out a calculator and crunched the numbers on how many hours turned days turned weeks I spent straightening my hair. It added up to over a year.

A YEAR of my one life on this earth.

I was wasting my time and energy trying to shrink myself and fit into a beauty standard that had been decided by some men.

There was no way I was letting any of this infiltrate my daughter’s sense of worth and inherent magic.

The Cost

What do impossible beauty standards and patriarchal messaging really do, though? Besides just being difficult to achieve, they keep us disconnected from our true power, from our intuition, but especially, from our bodies.

We’ve been taught to hate our body, using all our energy and resources to fight it and change it.

There are billion dollar industries that THRIVE on us never feeling good enough.

Our legs are too short, our nose is too big, our butt is too small, our hair is all wrong. And so we spend our precious time, money, and energy trying to fix ourselves.

But our body is our connection to what it means to be alive.

Our skin protects us and helps regulate our temperature. Our bones support us and protect our organs. Our muscles help us move and aid the functioning of the body. Our senses take in the world around us (seen and unseen). Our features tell a story of our ancestors and where we came from.

Our body is alive.

It’s magic.

Yet we’ve learned to treat it as if it’s this horrifying thing to change.

A problem to fix.

A timer to stop.

But it’s our partner in this life. It was our first tool for exploring this world, and our surroundings.

We’ve been sold a lie.

This lie keeps us spending our precious time, money, and energy trying to change, to fix, to alter. All our focus becomes on picking ourselves apart instead of connecting to the magic of having a body and what it means to be alive.

We have become disconnected from the body’s wisdom.

I call this The Body Wound.

It is one of four core wounds I believe have impacted us as women and sensitive souls, disconnecting us from our inner magic. The other three wounds being: the Sensitivity Wound, The Connection Wound, and The Witch Wound — we’ll save those for another day.

It’s not just impossible beauty standards that have impacted our bodies, though.

It’s how we were taught to sit still as kids when our bodies wanted to move. It’s the subtle ways we were told to dismiss our menstrual pain and power through. It’s anything along the way that caused a divide in the connection to the body’s magic.

One way I’ve been healing of this wound in myself is by untangling from patriarchal beauty standards and letting myself be exactly as I am.

Which now includes my grey hair and wrinkles.

Is it uncomfortable some days? Absolutely.

I look in the mirror and catch myself saying “I look old.” Do I look old? Maybe. I certainly don’t look like a teenager, or an AI rendition of what a 41 year old might look like.

But I look alive.

I look like me. I have my Dad’s ears and my Mom’s nose. My hair is the kind of wild that my spirit yearns to be.

And in this ever growing age of perfectionism, where there aren’t even typos anymore, the most freeing thing I am doing is un-editing myself.

Showing up more real, more imperfect, than ever before.

Closing Thoughts

I will always be on the side of uplifting and supporting women. And I believe we should be allowed to do whatever we want with our bodies, including deciding what makes us feel beautiful.

But I can’t help but wonder where some of those beliefs about beauty originate… and why.

If you are also on a journey of coming home to yourself and to your body, here are some things to reflect on:

• What comments have others made about your appearance that you might have internalized. How did these words affect your self-image and relationship with your body?

• Explore times when you felt your body, or your appearance, wasn’t good enough. Where do these feelings originate?

• Consider what influence, if any, diet culture has had in your life. What beliefs about food, weight, or body shape have you internalized?

If you’re interested in reading more about The Body Wound, and the three other wounds, checkout my book You Already Know, which comes out in July.