Reflections on Body Image at the GSB
Trigger warning: Eating disorders
I spent the last 15 years not talking about how much I loathe my body.
I grew up watching my mom drape long dupattas over herself because the steroids she took to cope with her arthritis made her gain weight. She wanted everyone to see her for the brilliant ads, song lyrics, and TV dramas she wrote — not the shape of her belly. She went to work everyday in loose clothes, pitching characters and scenes, pulling poetry, dialogues, resilience from thin air like a magician. I was proud of my mother, but I wasn’t sure I could be as brave. So I chose to be smaller instead.
I started drinking copious amounts of water before meals so I’d eat less, staying up late to jog around my room in circles, and in my worst moments, forcing myself to throw back up whatever I’d eaten. From age 12 to 26, I was constantly in dialogue with myself, trying to understand my revulsion for my own body. But I never talked to others about it.
I never told anyone how much time I spent turning sideways before mirrors looking for bulges in my silhouette, pinching fat between my fingers and imagining a blade that would lop it all off. I didn’t ever say that I alternate only between feeling hungry or feeling guilty that I’m full, that I can only eat too little or too much, that I hate looking at pictures of myself, that I hate clothing store fitting rooms with their harsh lights and arbitrary dress sizes.
Then, a few months after coming to the GSB, I buckled. I turned to a group of female friends, and told them about the sticky note on my wall where I track my weight every single day. And I began to realize, with a mix of horror and gratitude, that I wasn’t alone. A startling amount of the women around me were uneasy with their bodies, and many felt that being on campus had roused internal demons they had fought long and hard.
This past week, I talked to seven first-year GSB women — women with vastly different backgrounds, with a wide spectrum of professional experiences and interests, with a diversity of body types, hair textures and general habits. Yet, despite our wealth of differences, all of us struggle with properly occupying, acknowledging, appreciating our bodies. And all of us feel that being at the GSB has reinforced a litany of negative thoughts and behaviors from years passed.
“I have a history of eating disorders — but for the last few years I thought I felt okay. I would still feel some body shame, still deal with those thoughts occasionally. But being at the GSB made everything stronger again,” one person said. Another shared, “I fought an eating disorder as a teenager and used to think of myself as someone who had mostly recovered. But being at the GSB has invoked a strange déjà vu for me. I am once again caught up in the insecurities of being a college freshman, of wanting to be pretty and skinny and liked.”
Even those without a longer history of body image issues expressed similar feelings. “I don’t know exactly how much I weigh, and this came as a surprise to many of my female friends at the GSB. It shocked them that I don’t want to step onto a scale. Whatever female-dominant space I’m in — in-person, over WhatsApp, on Zoom dinners — the conversation turns to how many pounds people have gained or lost. It makes me sad that we feel this constant pressure, and I’ve been asking myself why that is.”
Together, we wondered if our heightened body anxiety was connected to the general loss of day-to-day agency many of us experienced after returning to school. “Strictly monitoring what I eat and how much I exercise feels like one way of retaining agency in an environment where my time, my schedule, my slate of daily activities, my plans, the impression I make on others, all feel beyond my control,” said a student. “I eat a lot and I exercise a lot and this is my way of being in control,” said another. “Except I feel more and more these days that it’s all slipping away from me.”
For many of us, the desire to be in better control of our lives is accompanied by an undercurrent of social anxiety. As one student explained, “This is such an accomplished group that I feel constant pressure to justify my place within it. I doubt I can be one of the smartest people, or one of the most successful. I don’t know if I’m one of the people that parties the most or the one that speaks up in class the most. So instead, I find myself latching on to fitness. Maybe I can try to be one of the sportiest, the one who exercises the most.”
Another student picked up the thread: “When I first arrived at the GSB, I looked around and everyone was smart, beautiful and high-achieving. I started to think more about how I look because I was thinking more about how people perceive me. For the first few weeks, every time I’d meet someone, I’d wonder what they thought of me and how I stacked up versus their good looks, especially when it was another woman of color. ”
Connections between our bodies and our identities came up time and again. “In your message, where you asked for us to anonymously share our experiences with body image, you spoke of how women have worked hard to carve out space at places like the GSB,” said one student to me. “Except sometimes it feels like the space that’s been carved out can only fit a woman who is skinny and fair, with straight hair.” Another student added: “Both at the GSB and in the professional world, if you’re brown or black, if your hair is frizzy or curly, if you’re a different dress size, you’re always aware that you stand out and you feel pressured to try and change something about yourself.”
We found ourselves asking whether these unspoken standards were mostly just in our heads. Were we imagining these rankings and hierarchies? One person shared an anecdote that indicated otherwise.
“My most alienating moment on campus happened a few months into the fall, when a mixed-gender group of students started discussing who the prettiest girl at the GSB was. Someone pulled up Slack, and people started scrolling through thumbnails of pictures, making comments about how that person had nice eyes but a strange nose, this person was exotic but couldn’t be called beautiful, comments I knew were so obviously sexist and racist. I remember getting up abruptly and leaving, and asking myself — how did I end up in this conversation? Why were we talking about each other like this? When did we revert back to high school behavior, reducing accomplished women to the ranks of most to least beautiful?”
My list of interviewees was all female, because I personally believe women bear disproportionate pressure to be polished, fit, presentable in order to earn their place at the GSB. But some of us felt that our anxieties might be familiar to a few GSB men. “The Succulent Calendar that was sent around [with male students’ bare bodies posed beside succulents and cacti] right at the beginning of this academic year presented a fairly narrow definition of what counts as male good looks,” one person recalled.
In each of these conversations, I had to stop myself from disputing my classmates’ misgivings about their body shapes, hair textures, social aptitude and intellectual ability. I wanted so badly to tell each of them how lovely I thought they look. I wanted to point to times in the classroom that I’d admired an insightful comment they had made. I wanted to tell them I thought the world of them, their intellect, their outfits, their social panache. But as one student put it, “You could tell me that my body is great, that I should eat without feeling anxious, that I look and sound fine, that I’m doing okay, but it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Talking about these fears doesn’t help me progress towards recovery.”
So what does help, I asked. What does recovery look like? And what would you say to another GSB student who, like each one of us, struggles to accept how they look and feel in the context of this community?
“Cut yourself some slack, and consider seeking help via therapy if its available to you,” one person answered. “I’m a bit of a hypocrite to say this because heaven knows I don’t tell this enough to myself. But it’s really okay to not be okay, and to ask for help.”
“Start where you are,” another person offered. “Even if things feel awfully dark and hopeless and you feel unsure about everything, take one small step towards feeling better. Start where you are because it’s enough to just be where you are.”
After a week of talking to other students, I asked myself the same questions. What does recovery look like for me?
Recovery, I believe, is accepting that nothing about my relationship with my body is normal. Recovery is putting away the scale, and running without worrying about how fast I can go or how many calories I can burn. Recovery is talking to other women — other people — about difficult things. Recovery is looking in the mirror and shrugging in acceptance.
Recovery is also recognizing that no matter how hard I work on accepting my flawed body, there’s a good chance someone somewhere is judging my worth based at least in part on how I look.
Recovery is also knowing that I’m not paranoid because even here, at the GSB, in the most educated and accomplished of communities, people will inevitably make assumptions about my social or intellectual ability based on my height, or shape, or hair, or skin tone. But after seven conversations worth of shared catharsis, I will challenge myself to be more discerning than that when it comes to my opinions of myself, and the people around me.
