To The Woman Who Commented on My Body
Trigger warning: disordered eating
It had been some time since I’d been compelled to punish my body simply for existing as it was meant to.
I hadn’t stepped on a scale in over a year. I no longer counted calories or meticulously weighed my food in an effort to consciously restrict. I ate when I was hungry and without judgment. I didn’t spend hours over the toilet bowl or agonize about the best place to hide my stash of laxatives.
In short, I had reached a place of body acceptance — and occasionally admiration — for the way that my body had persevered through a decade of self-inflicted harm.
I had come to recognise that my weight is not a metric of success, worth, or even health.
Truth be told, my body looked relatively the same as it had for the past 10 years, even after calling a cease-fire on the voice in my head that willed me to do all those things.
In a way, that made recovery easier, but I remained cognizant of the fact that being thin was still at the core of my identity and that I should continue to fight to separate the two.
This, I knew, was the only way to protect my future self from spiralling when my body inevitably did change.
