Heads Up: This story mentions anorexia and disordered eating. If that is something that you just aren’t in a place to read about today, please take care.
I used to be a dancer.
Using my body to speak the full expression of the emotions rattling around my teenage body brought me release. And joy. Maybe joy. I’m not sure.
It also brought me anorexia.
I danced fat. Looking back at the pictures before my disordered eating began, I stuck out in group photos, clearly the one stretching the limits of costume sizes. But I looked happy. On the stage, I didn’t feel the weight of my body. I just moved. It’s not that I felt beautiful, it’s that, on stage, my body preoccupation was all dedicated to hitting my mark, to full extension of my legs and feet, to counting and spotting and spacing.
I made Company fat, the competitive dance team our studio was locally known for. So, I must not have been imagining my core skill set. Something was working in my body.
But the more adept I became at dancing, the more pressure my Mom received to make me thin. The rationale seemed to be concern for my ability to advance in Company, although I made it year after year, so I can only guess that the real motivation is that I started to fuck up the aesthetics.
My Mom never acquiesced to that pressure. But I did.
1400 calories a day. 21g of fat. My daily algebra.
I did it so I could dance. Except it got to a point where my doctor and my Mom pulled me out of dance until I gained weight. I knew the scale on the right side of my pediatrician’s office weighed 3lbs heavier than the left side, so with a belly full of water, I demanded we be seen on the right side. I just had to hit 115lbs, and they’d let me back in.
I did it so I could dance, but I kept doing it because everyone, EVERYONE, but my doctor and my mother told me, with joy in their own eyes, how amazing I looked.
I was borrowing their joy. Letting it seep into my bones, which is about all I had left, and nourish my depleted body.
I was tired. And hungry. And uncertain how to graduate from algebra to calculus. What advanced math was required to stay skinny but just fat enough to be able to dance? Such precision. Such discipline.
The opposite of joy.
You can see it in my eyes in the skinny pictures. Collar bone popping out, hollow cheeks, dark circles under eyes that didn’t register the smile on my lips. My body was no longer allowed joy.
In one of my first acts of self preservation, I quit competitive dancing. And with it, I let go of bodily expressions of joy. Anorexia taught me how to control my body, how to make it small, light, acceptable, even admired. But “joy” and “acceptable” live at right angles to each other. It takes a hard left to get from one to the other, and I could no longer make that turn.
Except.
At the club.
Club dancing became my new outlet for joy. Give me a dance floor, the chest thump of a sub, and a circle of girls so I could do my thing without being bothered.
I knew I could dance to that music. And I didn’t give a shit who saw me or what they thought. Free. Fluid. Mostly un-acceptable. Joy.
I went home sweaty, legs on fire, feet swollen, falling asleep in a body curled up in a smile.
But, at some point, you get too old for the club. Or maybe the club gets too old for you. The few times I’ve been in the last decade, all I notice is the sticky floors, the disgusting bathrooms, and the creepers ten years my senior lining the walls. It’s why I like weddings.
At weddings, they play club hits from the 90’s that transport all of the women back to a time when black stretchy pants and spaghetti straps were a uniform and lemon drops were considered “hitting it hard.” Stilettos come flying off and there’s a lot of jogging to and from the dance floor as you can’t quite make it back to the table because the opening diddy from the speakers to another “must dance to” teases you back.
There are entire weddings where there is not a single photo of me without one hand in the air or my mouth open. I’ve issued a universal apology to my best friends and told them just to call off their photographers from the jump as we know what’s about to happen.
During my mid-20’s, what I affectionately refer to as the “Year of 18 weddings”, I used to leave one of these events feeling like I owned it. I won’t go so far as to say I was the life of the party, but the bride never worried if people would dance if I was on the guest list. I didn’t need a lick of alcohol. The second I heard “To the window! To the wall!”, my feet power walked my behind to the dance floor. I don’t go to many weddings anymore, and when I do, I leave slightly embarrassed but a little exhilarated, my body tingling with the memory of fully physical joy.
I started running in graduate school. The cheap food, cheap wine, study, repeat lifestyle combined with my genetics was leading me back to that fat phase and my roommate just happened to be a cross country runner. I started out moving my feet at what likely was a slower pace than walking while she literally ran backwards in front of me. Sometimes, if she really wanted to piss me off, she’d run around me. I hated it.
The first day I ran a mile straight I celebrated by almost flying off the treadmill. I was so shocked and elated that I didn’t have the dexterity required to press the “Stop” button and slow my feet simultaneously. Despite nearly breaking an ankle, something (maybe that actually), felt familiar. My body was talking to me again. It was proud of itself. This was not my brain applauding my body. My brain had been saying “What the fuck?!?” the entire 11 minutes it took to achieve this end state. My body, though, my body was singing.
Joy. IN my body.
I’ve run in some capacity ever since.
Embodiment.
Frankly, this feels like a word I would never use in a sentence. It’s so….fruffy.
My opposition to the term likely stems from its foreignness. Carrie Dennett offers this positioning
“What is embodiment? It’s about your experience in your body. That makes it an internal experience, with your body as the subject, not an object.”
So yeah, that tracks. I’ve spent the last thirty years trying to ignore my body’s experience and make it do what I want it to. It’s never been overly compliant, quite possibly because it is the subject, not the object, of its own story.
Dennett goes so far as to have her clients write or draw their own “body story”. She asserts, and I agree, that our culture’s recent shift to body positivity leaves out an important part of the narrative. Body positivity encourages feeling good about how your body looks or is, but the emphasis is still how the outside views the inside, not how the inside views and experiences itself.
I starved my body. And I feel quite fortunate that I was the only one doing it harm. I have the opportunity to seek its atonement. Reparation required from injury inflicted by another’s body can be far harder to achieve.
So, assuming I can go to my body and ask for her story, which is a massive assumption considering I have intentionally muzzled her for most of my life, what would she tell me?
Most curiously, what would she say about joy?
I woke up yesterday morning tired, unsure if I could do the prescribed workout and dreading finding out.
There’s a chill in the air when I open the door, so different from the weeks and weeks of walled heat that I inhale deeply. I set my watch to dictate the impending torture and hit the Start button to begin the warm up.
The first 6min 15 sec feels awful. My breathing is labored, far more so than my effort requires. My hips ache, yesterday’s workout making itself known in my body. My feet assert a position of dominance, cajoling and nudging my body along. The sleepy parts are not going to win this one.
I make it to the track. Ten more minutes of cruising in circles convinces my body to stop its bellyaching. My legs are warm, and deep whiffs of that cool, crisp air feed my muscles.
GO!
800 meters at a pace 45 seconds faster than tempo. I’m not sprinting, but I’m pushing the perimeter of comfort for sure. By the time my watch starts beeping at the end of the interval, my lungs are crying out for air and my legs are ready to stop. 90 seconds to recover. It’s not a lot, but its enough.
GO!
Six times the watch beeps. Six times my body yells “GO!” to itself. Six times my feet, legs, lungs, and heart are left to decide if they’re fighting each other or together. But six times we make it until the next beep.
I jog back home, legs loose, body…proud. Before I even look at the splits, I can feel my body smirking. She knows she hit her times. And she’s pleased as punch. It’s odd to have to use your brain to control your body’s swagger, but she walks in the door like Sha’Carri. Joy that she can still do this. Joy that she’s being fed, and watered, and rested, and listened to. Joy that her story includes this success, knowing that my brain alone could not have produced this effort. This is her victory.
One of my biggest fears as the mother of a daughter is that she will absorb the world’s insistence that she bend her body to their boundaries. It’s why I balked the first time she told me she wanted to dance and intentionally found a studio that welcomed all bodies. It’s why I’ve banned use of the words “weight”, “thin”, “skinny”, “tiny” or really talking about her body at all. When she weighs herself, we talk about her “numbers” and how great they are. But even the fact that she wanted to weigh herself freaked me out, so we put the scale in the basement.
But I think I’ve been doing this wrong. I’ve been so worried she’ll get the external message that her body needs to be some kind of way that I’ve failed to ask her to tell me what her body is telling her about the way it already is. Instead of encouraging her to listen to her body’s story, I’ve been trying to guard her from society’s story.
But what if her body is already the subject of its own story and not the object of mine?
My daughter and I had a Taylor Swift dance party on Sunday night in the living room of our lake house. It’s a place where we both feel more free to be. I watched her as she jumped and shimmied and shook and shoulder shrugged and sexy looked and ninja chopped and parkoured her body to the music. Her little body tripped and turned and fell over itself in an effort to just get it all OUT. She flopped down on the sofa next to me exclaiming
“I’m tired!”
Clearly.
Red-faced. Loose limbed. All smiles. Joy shining from her body.
Her body already knows how to tell its own story. It doesn’t need my help. It understands joy far better than I do. My only job here is to show her how to listen to her body’s story. To honor it. And trust it.
Joy will do the rest.