The Cutprice Guignol

Please note that this article will contain brief discussions of eating disorders.

Over the years, I’ve had something of a complicated relationship with my body.

Positive, neutral, negative – trying to cram it into a certain shape only to go bulging out of it and leave myself forced to deal with the welts I picked up in the process of making myself fit, I’ve been through a bit of everything. And, while I am at a point now where I’m relatively comfortable with the way my body looks, there was a time when I really, truly hated it.

Hating your body is one of those venoms that invades every corner of your life – everywhere you go, you bring this despised form with you, dragging the parts of yourself you can’t stand into every situation whether you like it or not. The way that it can become an almost pathologized second nature, supported by a beauty and fashion industry that holds us to constantly-shifting standards that are impossible to meet, would be shocking if it weren’t so normal.

And that’s what it became for me for a long time – utterly average, a normal way of living out my life. I can identify now that some of it was tied to OCD, consistently seeking validation and reassurance that I wasn’t some unbearably offensive-looking piglet, but beyond that, the bone-deep dislike of how I looked served as a motivator for a lot of the choices I made. I really, genuinely believed that everyone I met and knew thought less of me for the pouch of fat on my stomach or the psoriasis outbreak on my neck, and I could not convince myself otherwise.

And, looking back, I can see the absurd hypocrisy of that. These details of myself that I saw on other people, I never thought of them in the same terms – it wouldn’t even have crossed my mind, in fact. I accepted people’s bodies without question because it would have been bizarre and counter to my ideals to do so. I was capable of being neutral towards or even actively attracted to bodily features on other people that sent me into a genuine spiral of despair. The people I loved, I did so not because or in spite of their bodies, but because of who they were.

And, as time went on, I came to realise how damn insulting it was for the people that I encountered for me to assume that they put so much meaning on the shape and presentation of my body. Sure, there are people who lend someone’s image more weight (pun intended) than other aspects of their personality, but for the most part, people are not directly connecting my morality and worth to the way I look. And, more importantly, those who do aren’t people I’d offer my respect to in the first place. A little voice in my head started to take the piss out of this dramatic self-centredness – what made my body so special that it needed to be despised with such vehemency? Why was I an exception to these rules? The idea that my body must be so uniquely horrible as to demand that kind of judgement was, at a distance, so utterly self-obsessed as to almost be comical.

I had to ask myself if there was a body, any body, so inherently horrid it would devalue the person it happened to house – and the answer, honestly, was no. Even mine. And it was recognising that hypocrisy that went such a long way to salving the worst of my body hatred. Seeing it not as some virtuous self-flagellation as apology for the grotesqueness of my own form but as the illogical and self-centred obsession that it actually was – damn, there’s no greater antivenom than realizing that I seem like a bit of a selfish dick, you know?

Realising that my body was not the exception to unfair judgement has made the world of difference to me, but I’m well aware that there are so many of us dealing with the discomfort and dread of living in a body we can’t feel comfortable in. If you’re comfortable sharing, what helped you overcome or manage these thoughts about your appearance? Let me know in the comments!

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more stuff like it, check out my other blog, No But Listen, as well as my fiction work! You can also support me on Patreon to help keep this blog running and keep my very demanding little cat in treaties, and me out of her clutches for another month yet.