in pursuit of satiety

My body has been everything but ally and self. It’s been enemy, weapon, victim, liability. It’s been other in every possible way, as I’ve struggled to make peace with my uniquely flawed exterior, to reintegrate body with self and feel once again whole. My struggle, I believe, is a distinctively feminine experience, a battle fought by every woman who feels uncomfortable in her own skin, every woman devastated by her failure to embody (the illusion of) aesthetic perfection.

For years, I fought the fight for physical flawlessness, refusing to consume necessary calories, compulsively and excessively exercising, despising my shape and constantly criticizing its shortcomings, even slicing my own skin as punishment for imperfection. I embraced self-denial wholeheartedly, sliding into self-destructive habits effortlessly, shamelessly indulging in despair, and failing to see the selfish nature of my behavior.

I’m embarrassed by my time spent in utter disengagement from environments and individuals, time spent using my body as an excuse for a mostly isolated existence, believing physical faults might somehow and adequately justify emotional detachment. In her memoir Appetites: Why Women Want, Caroline Knapp reflects upon this kind of embarrassment, the way worrying about the self—particularly in terms of the external—can be “devastatingly blinding,” taking us out of contact with the wider world, allowing us to become comfortable in the discontentment of tight jeans and big thighs while others face the real devastation of poverty, hunger, and war.

I have experienced this kind of reality firsthand: the kind that makes starving myself seem reasonable even as people everywhere fight for enough food to survive; the kind that allows me to harm my body, cut into it, while others struggle just to keep theirs alive. And, having recognized the absolute idiocy and narcissism of this reality, I have chosen to change and reject it, to begin inhabiting my body, responding to its hungers, celebrating its assets (and even its flaws), making peace with my physical self as a way of eliminating its distractive influence in my life.

The stomach I used to despise for its slightly-soft-even-when-strong appearance, is now something I consider essentially female and sexy. I embrace my once-loathed, ample, ballerina-style ass as an attribute inherited directly from my mother--whose beauty I find breathtaking, any part of which I am proud to possess myself. I value my body for its athleticism and not for its aesthetics, for the fact that it runs farther and faster and stronger these days than it ever has before.

I’ve abandoned my habits of physical self-abuse in favor of connectivity and engagement with others, no longer allowing superficial flaws to consume and exhaust me psychologically. And as I settle into a healthy appreciation for and comfort within my body, I turn my attention to my equally damaging tendency toward emotional self-destruction, my pattern of perpetuating relationships that inadequately nourish me while monopolizing my emotional energy, stifling instead of enhancing my experience of intimacy. I have (mostly) relinquished my fear of physical imperfection, choosing to feel corporeally sated (in spite of flaws) instead of starved. Emotional satiety may come at its own price, may force me to forfeit my familiar fear of loneliness, may ask me at this moment to just let go.