Let Me Tell You about this Amazing Body
hi everyone
my name is phoebe chartock i’m 18 years
old and a senior in high school
and i’d like to share with you some of
the things that i think about on the
daily
because they range from like good
smelling soap to politics
to wondering if i should go blonde to
trying to remember to water my plants i
usually forget
and like most people i’m thinking about
my body
the way it looks and the way it and i
are perceived
and among that myriad of different
topics that is the one that has been by
far the most obsessively consistent
throughout my life
and my first memory of that real
fixation happened when i was just seven
and see when i think about this all i
can think about are my seven-year-old
cousins
and the fact that i’ve been a camp
counselor for kids that age who barely
came up past my waist
all the while knowing that at that age i
sat worried in a bathtub
about the lack of space between my
thighs
and this breaks my heart knowing that at
that age i began to build for myself the
foundation
of a body hating mindset with life
experience only as far as second grade
and following that several years later
when i was about eight or nine
i was given a book and this book as i’ve
discovered in recent years serves as
something of a unifying experience for
many many young pre-teen girls
and it is the american girl care and
keeping a view
and in this book among its delightful
caricatures and graphics
i learned about periods cup and band
sizes body odor and toxic shock syndrome
and moving on from that particular page
slightly scarred and promising myself i
would never go near tampon in my life
i happened upon a page and learned for
the first time in my
life about eating disorders and about a
really specific kind of dialogue
i would come to encounter again and
again throughout my life
that i would grow to think of as the
abcs of eating disorders
it’s the dialogue that tells you about
anorexia
about bulimia and that there are clinics
and crisis lines available
the emotional component doesn’t get
discussed nor does the fact
all eating disorders fit the
descriptions firmly of those two
the book described an eating disorder as
reaching an extent
to which a skinny girl could look in the
mirror and still see someone fat
and it really shocks me the amount of
reductive language we allow to be a part
of this narrative
introduced at such a young age we now
know that less than six percent of
people diagnosed with eating disorders
have been medically diagnosed as
underweight but we’ve pushed to
ourselves a really specific image of
what someone with an eating disorder
looks like
and we have to understand that
statistically that simply isn’t true
and that disordered eating occurs in the
widest varieties of identities and of
people
but if you look up that image on the
internet you’ll find that the images are
dominated by and catered to women
and more specifically dominated by thin
white women
the narrative we have about eating
disorders doesn’t do
its part to recognize or be inclusive to
the entire community of people
especially considering the increased way
that black and indigenous people of
color
members the lgbtq community and people
with disabilities are impacted by
disordered eating
and it was this lack of information that
got reinforced for me
time and time again throughout my life
and specifically an instance around
seven years after i first read this book
in my freshman year health class i
encountered that dialogue again
and those two terms and then they were
quickly moved on from for the sake of
furthering our nutrition unit
wherein i was handed a calorie counter
app
and in the hands of an insecure 15 year
old trying to learn to grow into her
body
that was one of the most dangerous tools
i’ve ever been handed
and one of the most vivid times in my
life i can recall being the most
disappointed
and comfortable and the education system
my classmates and i were cycling through
and this represented a turning point for
me at the time of reading the american
girl book
i was uncomfortably conscious of my body
but my young brain hadn’t yet
established the connection between my
body image
and my ability to have a healthy
relationship with food
the concepts were co-existing in my mind
without a strong impact on each other
and of course throughout growing those
pieces fused
i learned in a very real way when
quarantine began last spring
about the difference between hunger and
appetite the body’s physical biological
need for sustenance
as opposed to the psychological desire
for food
i very quickly forgot what it was like
to have an appetite
and without that emotional want for food
being hungry just felt
painful and weakening which drove the
cycle forward
and what really shocked me was how easy
it was to fall into that place
during the first month of quarantine my
grandfather was dying
and i remember the morning after he had
gone trying to force myself to eat any
kind of anything
but that behavior was what grew to be my
habit force-feeding myself
and a lot of people told me that that
was a good thing because i was keeping a
pattern and establishing a rhythm
but it hurt knowing that the only way
during that time period i knew how to
coexist with food
was by forcing it and then there were
the days that i couldn’t bring myself to
force it
where i forgot what it was like to enjoy
taste or that it had ever been something
that i craved
and i want to add a disclaimer i am not
qualified to talk about how to have a
healthy relationship with food
or the concrete steps that you can take
to get there
i’m not a psychologist i don’t have a
medical degree
and i’m not a nutritionist or a
specialist of any kind
i don’t even have a high school diploma
but i do know that the only way i
started to climb out of that hole i felt
myself
falling down was by talking about it
and by letting people in and by trusting
much more than it was my instinct to do
so
and very very slowly i started to regain
that control
i had lost over my relationship with
food
and it’s something i’m still struggling
with and going through
and in the midst of the hardest months
my friend asked me
how much i thought that struggle had to
do with my body image
and at the time i lacked a concrete
answer
but i have realized so much in
reflection about the way that
cat calls and slut-shaming and
photoshopped images of celebrities
and diet culture and calorie counter
apps and simply existing
in a world that will always tell you
that you don’t measure up and that you
are not enough
had led me to think obsessively about
the way my body was perceived every hour
of every day
and that connection between our body
image and our ability to have healthy
relationships with food
is so real and not one that we can
ignore the lasting impacts of
a couple of weeks ago my best friend
asked me if i ate lunch
knowing that it was something i was
having a hard time bringing myself to do
and i told him yes and he goes i’m proud
of you
and the initial complete shame in that
moment that i felt
hearing those words made me want to
crawl out of my skin
and i didn’t tell him how bad it made me
feel
having someone be proud of me for
something i had accomplished years upon
years when i was a child
without any complication or need for
encouragement
for something that should have been as
instinctual as seeing or as breathing
but it occurred to me a little while
after that
that some people wear glasses
and that some people use inhalers and
some people use
oxygen tanks and then if i wanted i
could compare eating as being as
instinctual
as hearing or as crying or as laughing
but for every single one of those things
some of us struggle because that
in its essence is exactly what it is to
be human
and that is not to say the eating
disorders or that damaged relationships
with food
should be casualized or romanticized in
any sense
it is only to say that we are unified in
the sense that we are struggling
that we have fallen short that nothing
is more human than failing and falling
but learning to heal again
and ultimately that we are powerful
bodies and that
instinctual is not equated for everyone
a therapist i talked to told me that
someday
after all this failing and falling and
hating and crying and growing and loving
that i will do in my lifetime
and that every one of you will do too
i’m going to be able to look in the
mirror
at my gray hair and loose skin and at
the wrinkles around my eyes and be able
to say let me tell you
about this amazing body and i don’t know
why those words were so powerful for me
to hear but they were
so all i can do for myself is claim them
now
and offer them to you to claim for
yourself let me tell you what this body
can do
how far it has carried me how many more
times it’s going to heal itself
how many more meals it’s going to eat
and enjoy
and until then we’re learning together
how to have healthy relationships with
food and our body image
how to advance that conversation and the
dialogue and the inclusivity that we
need
and the key word in that is together
people of all body shapes and types
across
all ages identities and abilities all
united
solely by humanity and by beauty
so let me tell you about this amazing
body
because right now it’s just grateful to
be a person here
existing trying to figure it all out as
well
thank you
you