A Metaphorical Kiss
on learning to love our bodies as allies, lovers, and friends
*details of “client” stories are fictionalized composites of common experiences from decades of clinical experience*
I’m watching her from the side. Her face is alight with passion and joy as she speaks of her craft, of the art that saved her. Life radiates out in ripples where her face folds, her eyes a riverhead from which deep streams flow, rainbowing from blue where light dances to the pink of her wide smile. These lines, I think to myself, are beautiful.
I want to tell her how much I love her wrinkles, the vibrance they bring, how every crease makes me love her, but I do not. I am afraid she will miss the truth and become self-conscious. We are women, and we are taught not to love this etching of life’s passions. We are taught each line marks our value, a slash through a sales price as it is marked lower, and lower, and lower. We forget that the rings on a tree, those arching lines, build its worth. That each story, painful or joyous, shapes our ultimate beauty.
A client sits before me, eyes downcast. She hates her body, every fold of softness that warms her. She resists dressing up, going out, being seen. She does not see what I see: the hands that prepare food like art, that drizzle sauces and garnish and create bespoke culinary experiences late into weekend nights. I see the way the constant circadian shifts of her work register in her body and I see the beauty of this altruistic sacrifice, the strength and grace of her spirit. She does not see this: she sees failure.
And then another client, this time in my virtual office, too ashamed of her body to venture into the world and be seen. She believes she is ghastly, monstrous. This musician so tender of spirit, so intelligent, so thoughtful and careful and kind. She is beautiful, but she does not know it.
And then another sits before me and I with her, and she glances away as she tells of her latest hate-filled binge and shame-drenched purge. These episodes are few now, but the punishment she exacts on her body stems from the same loathing. She is learning to be with her feelings, to move through rather than run from and stuff and expel them, but the road to self-love is long.
The next client weighs herself 4, 5, 6 times a day, she tells me, any deviation sending her into fits of anguish. She is 60, and still the fear of imperfection goads her, telling lies of her worth. Sixty years, and fifty of them enslaved to diets and scales and insecurity. She fears age is making her unlovable. My heart breaks at her deception.
And then another client, and then another, and then another… this anxious shame so pervasive.
It is not easy to inhabit a body in an overly filmed and photographed world. It’s not easy to live in a body in a capitalist place where every variation is vulnerable to exploitation for a solution to a problem that never was. It is not easy to grow up with mothers who note our weight or dictate diets to mold us into what they wish we were. It’s not easy to live in a body amongst men who assign value numbers and worse, who grab and take and ridicule, making us both afraid to be attractive yet fearful of being labeled unfuckable. It is not easy to inhabit a body in a cutthroat world with peers who assess and scrutinize and compare, trying desperately to work out their own insecurity through creation of ours.
I am eleven, and the other girls stare at me in the corner of the communal changing room as we dress for Phys-Ed. “You’re so skinny,” one remarks, eyes narrowed, and I do not know whether to be proud or ashamed, but I know it is not neutral. “Be careful,” another says, “Or you’ll end up with an eating disorder.” I do not know what an eating disorder is; all I know is that I am hungry every day. I cross my arms high over my flat chest to hide the difference between me and my blossoming peers as I line up in the gym.
The gym holds an older memory, and this one brings embarrassment. I am very young, and quite alone. I am hugging these same thin arms around me for warmth and perhaps also for comfort as I wait for the dreaded rope climb. The skin on my shoulder is bare and smooth and I bring my lips to it inexplicably. A peer notices and calls out this odd behavior, loudly: “Did you just kiss yourself?” I don’t know what to say. I look away.
I think about this moment of scorn often. Indelible from the hot blush of shame, but turned over in my mind with curiosity. Why did I do it? Was it sensory-seeking? Or was it a daring stretch toward self-love, a tentative experiment in giving myself something I yearned for – the tenderness of a loving touch?
Why is it okay to wrap arms around self but odd to kiss?
Strange little girl, so alone, so misunderstood, standing small and anxious before obstacles: You were right.
You were right to show yourself a small tenderness.
You were right to love your body, this extension of you with feet to run and hands and lips to make music and arms to pull you up that knotted rope, up high away from everyone where their scornful voices fade to unimportance, and into trees and toward apples and cherries and plums.
In some small place you believed a truth the world shouts at us to disbelieve: your body is your friend, your lover, your ally.
At 29 I discover yoga for the first time. The class winds down to savasana, and the instructor guides us: Give yourself gratitude for taking time to do something good for your body. This message is revelation: It is okay, even good, to take care of my body, to treat it with love. (A metaphorical kiss!) I am surprised by this idea, even while recognizing the reverberations of truth.
Another class, another closing thought: Send gratitude to your body for all that it has done for you today. Subversive embrace! My body is not an apology, nor a project toward external ideals. It is a gift, and a resource. It carries me where I want to go, it lets me dance when my heart is light, its arms hug those I love. I decide: I like my arms. I will focus on these arms rather than on parts that have brought insecurity. Why does what feels inadequate matter more than what feels right?
What messages have you internalized about your body and your worth?
What early experiences planted those seeds?
Are you willing to uproot them?
What is one part of your body you are willing to claim that you LIKE? We feel so free to decry what we dislike. I challenge you to share some self-love “out loud” in the comments below!
So much truth here. Every woman I know experiences body shame. I’m sure men do too, but it’s universal among American women, young and old, for different reasons that all stem from cultural indoctrinations. Thank you for this post.
Dr. Deborah your writing is beautiful and very honest. I am the grandmother of a 9 yo foster child to be formally adopted by my daughter and her husband. She is from Central America and it’s been three years she’s been with them. Suddenly at nine she seems to recognize how she looks different from her peers. She’s in the South and all her friends are blonde and built totally straight like a board. She has luscious thick gorgeous curly black hair, skin like Tupelo honey, a smile that would melt an iceberg, and a beautiful round young body. She is a strong, flexible gymnast with immense grace, a wonderful dancer who does her own choreography… and a young writer. She’s amazing but always so critical of herself. So worried she won’t be accepted as she thinks she’s “ not pretty enough”. Her mother’s worry is so layered- the child came from an abusive family and the traumas have made adjusting so difficult- as you know. They have come so far with her and trust among the three is really growing after three years. Thank you for writing about the need to love ourselves FIRST and foremost. Such a long journey ahead. I sent my daughter your piece and hope she decides to follow you. You gave me hope and renewed belief in the human spirit to overcome so much. Namaste.