One-Eighty

Bodily insecurity isn't a new struggle.

I am not the first to experience it. I will not be the last. I wish I could be.

Becoming a preteen in the early 2000's didn't help. The era of low-rise skinny jeans, Megan Fox in Transformers being the beauty standard for teenagers, and fat-shaming Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada did everything to fuck over young women and girls' mindsets with respect to being comfortable in our own skin.

By the age of twelve I was already well aware that I didn't fit the cookie cutter. I was taller than most and had female peers who went out of their way to remind me that I dwarfed them.

By the age of seventeen, in 2014, the body positivity era was dawning. I still rode my bike everywhere. I danced in school, I had been trained in taekwondo for ten years, and I was training to become a lifeguard.

I was in literal killer shape but it was too late. The insecurities had already settled in and I couldn't see myself for how I really was.

I found flaws in every aspect of myself. I began to hide from cameras. I caused strife with my family because they wanted pictures with me.

I fought them tooth and nail because I hated to look at myself.

Then my taekwondo dojang had a shift in instructors. The master's son took over the elite Hwrang team and began to outright favour girls who didn't work nearly as hard or take their training as seriously as I did.

They were certainly prettier and skinnier though. My dad called him out on it, and he was banned from the dojang.

Just to be clear, my dad was banned. Not the instructor.

And the instructor acted like it was my loss when I finally washed my hands of him and his father's dojang.

As I threw myself into university studies, I still worked out when I could, but I didn't prioritize it as much. I walked when and where I could and I convinced myself that should be good enough. I wasn't prepared for my metabolism to slow as I became an adult.

As the 2010's went on there was a bigger push to appreciate bigger bodies. I should have been thrilled to be represented. Instead I took it as an insult to all the effort I'd put in my youth. I was a lifeguard at this point, and I had convinced myself that I was somehow elite.

I'd taken so much crap from other people and I was done turning the other cheek. So I lived in a delusional little bubble that I had risen above everyone else, and I believed my judgements were justified.

But I still knew better than to say any nasty comments out loud. I knew how hard it hurt to be fat shamed and yet I still did it to other people. I didn't bite my tongue to be empathetic. I did it to avoid the hypocrite label that I deserved. It might not have been out loud, but I still did it.

And I resorted to tears when the harsh comments got hurled at me. As I let go of my physical fitness it became an outward representation of my growing bitterness. I was so resentful of the world around me and how I never seemed to catch a break, and I let it consume me.

The only comfort I found was in over indulging in food. I would eat whatever I wanted and as much as I wanted. Then I would throw it all up and convince myself that it balanced out in the end.

I knew my own attitude and behaviour was wrong. It took an ex whose laundry list of insecurities outweighed mine tenfold to kickstart that shift. I had walked on eggshells around his problems. He told me point blank that my size was a valid reason to fall out of love with me.

I hard shifted my attitude toward other people after that. I became more conscious of how I thought about them, and I started to silently correct any snap judgements I made.

My own insecurity still occupied the forefront of my mind. By the end of the pandemic, the body positivity concept had more or less run its course.

While I no longer hypocritically judged anyone else for their size, I still faced off with my own little demon.

I was twenty-six years old when I finally turned my sights to a possible military career. I wasn't getting anywhere in the civilian career market, and this came with an incredible pension at the end.

I also wanted to be whipped into shape. I relished the challenge of basic training, and I fully expected my insecurity to get virtually beaten out of me.

So I jumped through every red-taped hoop the Canadian Forces put in front of me.

I passed the aptitude test. I scrounged up all my academic records. I special-ordered a copy of my birth certificate. They specifically wanted to test my asthma and my eyesight so I summoned all my millennial courage and booked all my appointments through various phone calls.

The first appointment was a Pulmonary Function Test. I questioned why they wanted my height and weight.

When the tech told me I didn't have to look at the scale I experienced a mental tug of two different trains of thought.

One was the old immature insecurity that insisted he was silently judging me.

The other was new. It was an adult voice of reason that told me:

"It's about your health. Suck it up and face the music."

Funnily enough, they both wanted the same thing, so I indulged them.

I still remember the pure and paralyzing shock when I read 253 pounds.

Numbers don't lie. They don't embellish. They don't bullshit. They aren't cruel. They're indifferent.

In that next instant I didn't care if the tech was judging me. I was judging me as the glassy illusion in my head shattered into a million pieces.

I was judging how delusional I had allowed myself to become. I couldn't bullshit my way out of cold hard facts.

There were three options in front of me.

The first was to stay bitter and defensive about the way I saw myself.

I had done that for my whole life and I was tired of it. I wanted to be happy with myself.

Door number two was that I could embrace my body as it was. I could decide that I was happy with my chubby form and forget about anything else.

I couldn't do that. It isn't my place to tell someone they shouldn't be happy with their own body no matter its size.

But I would never be happy with myself the way I was. Not when it had been made too brutally clear that I was unhealthy.

That left me with door number three, which meant a complete one-eighty switch in my day to day life.

I can't explain how suddenly and profoundly my brain chemistry was altered in that moment. It could be that as an adult I was able to take the facts with better maturity than ten years ago.

It could be that my body image issues were no longer mere insecurity and I couldn't ignore the work that needed to be done.

For one reason or another, I learned to embrace vulnerability. I was fat, single, unsuccessful, and at the absolute rock bottom of my self esteem. I was already as vulnerable as it was possible to be.

When you have nothing left to hide from yourself, what else is there to do but come out head on and face it?

So when I left that appointment I did something I'd never done before:

I let someone help me. I let someone show me a tool to track what I ate, and I repaired my relationship with food. As I shrunk, I continued to embrace vulnerabilty and I relaxed. I learned to laugh at myself. I learned to draw boundaries and reach for better things for myself.

I took greater chances and built better relationships. I threw myself into preparing for the military standards. I was ready for them by the following summer and was rejected on the grounds of asthma.

A year before that rejection would have crushed me. I would have splintered apart and fallen into a considerably darker place.

In restoring my physical health I had restored some self esteem. With my restored self-esteem I could focus on an alternate plan.

I didn't need the military to beat my insecurities out of me, because I had already done it myself.

For all that numbers matter, I lost fifty-six pounds. I'm back in the same size body that I had at the age of seventeen. I'm hardly slender, but I'm healthier than I've ever been.

But that little inner demon, the one born in the fat-shaming patriarchal culture I knew growing up, has no power anymore; it's gone.

I care too much about other things, and I'm too aware of how connected all aspects of my health are.

I'm not the first person to struggle with body image. I won't be the last.

If I have one pearl of wisdom to offer anyone struggling with an insecurity, it would be to ask yourself one question:

What can I control?

There will be some things you can't, like genetic predisposition. You can't control what other people are going to say to you. You can't control the way they can and will trigger you.

You can control your own habits. You can control your own behaviour. You can control your own awareness.

It is a hard pill to swallow when you embrace the facts, but remember:

The facts won't hurt you; only your denial of them will.