Love the body you have.

C.W. Gortner
Jul 22, 2017 · 5 min read

Growing up gay, I learned men’s bodies come in all shapes and sizes, but we classify them via a strict strata of attractiveness. In gay culture, we have muscle queens. Jocks. Twinks. Bears. This isn’t unique to us, though I’d argue gay culture can be one of the most ruthless after the horrific inequity of body image pressure implanted in young women.

Human beings are diverse; it’s one of our most appealing aspects. We’re tall or short, lean or full, angular or round-faced, skinny or plump, hairy or not, and all the infinite shades in between. Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder — but our society at large can be a merciless beholder. Every time we see a flawless celebrity on a magazine cover or a model with abs we could crush pomegranates against, the message it sends is that we’re not attractive unless we look like them. In other words, we’re not beautiful as we are.

When I was younger, I despaired over my thin build. I have a very fast metabolism, which has been both my gift and my bane. Putting on weight has always been a near-impossible task, especially in my mid-20s, when Calvin Klein was touting out advertisements for underwear, featuring men who resembled Greek statues. Suddenly, the pressure to look a certain way — muscular enough to compete in the Olympics — became an obsession that sent thousands of boys like me racing to the nearest gym. Futile, it turns out, at least in my case. As defined as I could get, and I could, because I had no extra fat to impede my musculature from showing, I remained a skinny lad whose belly sloshed like a 747 fuel tank, from the countless lumpy protein shakes I downed in a desperate bid to gain a semblance of the ideal. It got so bad that I considered using steroids but I chickened out because the needle scared me. Still, I never wore shorts or tank-tops in public because I thought my legs and arms were like toothpicks. I developed intermittent sciatica after all the squats at the gym yanked a nerve. I tore a shoulder muscle from relentless bicep curls. I had painful shin splints from running on concrete through city streets and bicycling for hours. Basically, my quest to resemble something I was not turned me into the Tin Man.

Fortunately, just as I avoided the pitfalls of steroid use, I never developed an eating disorder as many young women do, because if I wasn’t shoveling hundreds of extra calories down my gullet every day, I feared I’d disappear in the mirror. But looking back, I now realize that I did develop a type of body dysmorphia. Because I hated how my body looked, even if what I saw in my reflection didn’t always coincide with what others saw. If someone told me I was attractive, I didn’t believe them. But if someone callously remarked, “God, you’re skin and bones,” I took them at their word. It cost me years, well into my 30s, to come to terms with it. I started losing my hair, which oddly enough didn’t bother me. Or at least, not much. I accepted the receding of my mane with equanimity, as I thought bald men were sexy. That’s when it hit me. Something as catastrophic as losing my hair, which many men do battle against as if their very lives depend on it, didn’t faze me. WHY wasn’t I approaching my body in the same way?

By this time, I’d had a rocky, if somewhat successful, career in fashion and was a successful grant writer; my first novel wouldn’t be published for another decade, but I was writing fiction in my spare time. I felt fulfilled in my life, yet my distorted body image lingered. My sciatica returned with a vengeance after I hit the gym in another of my addictive cycles to convert sinew into bulging muscle; I ignored the creeping pain and shooting flares down my left thigh until my foot went numb. As I submitted to prescription pain pills — never to excess, but more than I should — and acupuncture treatments, icing my leg every night while I slept sitting up because lying down hurt too much, I still went to the gym. It wasn’t until I was facing the possibility of surgery and the far more appalling realization that I couldn’t wear my fancy high-priced shoes anymore because I was in such pain that I finally stopped my torture sessions at the gym. But then I faced a new and terrifying dilemma: how would I keep my body from reverting to its natural string-bean shape, after years of pummeling it toward my ideal?

It was then that I discovered yoga. Not gentle yoga. Hatha yoga. Thirty minutes of heart-quenching, heat-inducing sun salutations done in rapid succession, followed by 50 minutes of intense poses held for up to 40 seconds, designed to increase flexibility, strength, and balance. Yoga is never defined as a physique-building exercise; it focuses on getting the body, mind, and spirit into sync. I doubted yoga’s efficacy, at first. Until a steady two years of 90-minute yoga sessions at the studio three days a week accomplished what nothing else had: it erased my sciatica. In fact, in the fifteen years since I started yoga, I’ve never suffered from sciatica again. And in the process, yoga subdued my body hatred. I began to like what I what in the mirror, as yoga sculpted me into the shape I’m meant to be. I’m still very lean — some might say too much so, but there we have it — but for a 53-year-old man, I’m in excellent physical shape. No middle-aged spread. Defined, while modest, musculature. Still skinny legs, but hey, I’m not Marlene Dietrich and no one is offering me stocking advertisements.

Along the way, I’ve accepted that yes, our bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and mine is just one of the variety. I still struggle on occasion with disliking my body, but never with the intensity of my youth. I look back at that skinny unhappy boy I was, whom I sometimes still catch a glimpse of in the mirror, and I feel such empathy for him, because no one could tell him any differently. He had to learn it the hard way. Love the body you have. Take care of it. Be grateful for it. You can’t be what you are not. Work hard for your goals, but be gentle with your expectations. And never let anyone, especially your own mind, take away your self-esteem. I have so much compassion, too, for women, who every single day endure a barrage of damaging messages and images that convey an ideal that’s not only unhealthy for some, but lethal for others. We don’t celebrate diversity in our world. We celebrate perfection, and perfection is impossible.

Because in the end, we’re only human.