For most of my life when I heard messages of self love and body positivity, my reaction was sarcastic. Rude hand gestures and snarky voices and eye rolls.Some part of me recognized the truth in there, but I did not believe it pertained to me. My life experience has been more cops and hospitals than supportive coaches. I’ve spent more time on rocky roads than smooth sailing, so I’d hear those messages and dismiss it as only for the privileged. Not the irredeemably broken like me.Self love must be nice for them, I thought. As for me, I was gonna keep limping along, trying to hold my fragments together and hating every part of this vessel I was stuck with.
Pickling yourself in shame and self hatred is not a pleasant way to live, so I TRIED. I tried to find a way that I could value my body.
The actual originators of the body positive movement are therapists early to address the consequences of our body terrorist culture. They were early in the mental health world to address issues often misogynistically dismissed as “women’s issues.” Eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and self esteem issues that come from a constant onslaught of messaging telling us the ways we do not measure up and should be ashamed.
Then body positivity caught mainstream attention in a social media campaign to expand the definition of beautiful to include fat people too. Tess Holliday, a plus sized model, shared images on social media with the hashtag #effyourbeautystands and #bodypositivity, introducing the concept to an even wider audience. But, as often happens, when systems of power get challenged, and power sees that it can make some cash on a concept, they take that concept and twist it until it is divorced from its actual meaning and becomes something else entirely that supports the status quo. You can see this same pattern in “self care”. It was started by activists, social workers, and nurses to address burnout, and now it sells us bath bombs and spa days.
Now companies sell the same images of the same one kind of body – thin, athletic, white, not visibly disabled – with the goal of making us feel dissatisfied enough with ourselves to part with our money. They still sell appearance as the most worthwhile quality. But now they call it body positivity.
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
– Audre Lorde
Many people still love and benefit from body positivity, but the liberation movement aspect has broken off into Fat Liberation. Others felt unrepresented by body positivity and needed a different framework. For these people, body positivity became another measure to fail at. They felt intense pressure to perform positivity even when that didn’t accurately reflect their feelings. If they felt less than positively one day, or if they worried that only the “right kind of curves” could be included, they felt that they were bad for hating themselves, but also bad for not loving themselves correctly.
Body Neutrality was the response. It appears to have popped up somewhat organically on social media, and then became developed into a philosophy by therapists who specialized in eating disorders. The idea is intuitive – you don’t have to care so much. You can just be.If self love feels like an insurmountable mountain, then just chill out in the foothills of body neutrality where your opinion of your body doesn’t have to be the most important thing. It got back to valuing aspects of a body beyond appearance. For many people, this approach is life saving and liberating.
This was still unsatisfying to me. Body neutrality allowed me to cope, but it felt like grief. It gave me a ladder out of the pit of self hate, but it couldn’t get me across the bridge to self love. I tried to accept how I felt as if it was a chronic illness. Some people, I don’t know, people with loving parents maybe, or people who had never had a big bad thing happen to them, those people could keep going, but it felt like my trauma was always going to keep me away from self love. Like never knowing self love was the permanent disability I was left with.
Body neutrality assumed other parts of you were valuable, and those were worth celebrating. So I tried to believe that. I looked around and saw ways I was allowed to value my body beyond appearance, and what I found was a “sport” approach celebrating fitness and ability, and a “fertility” approach celebrating the miracle of life. Neither made much room for me, and they didn’t paint a future for the miracle baby I finally had – a baby born through emergency C-section at 27 weeks, resulting in disabilities with high support needs.
Atticus was the key. I thought about what I value about this boy. A wheelchair user who requires round the clock care, whose future options appear limited to outside observers, who has spent his entire life listening to a litany of doctors and specialists tell him all the things he will never do.I do not feel neutral about him. He is the joy of my life and the best thing in my world. I am wildly devoted to him and think his body is a miracle. Even though that body will never be compliant enough to be approved of by society. Honestly, I value him BECAUSE his body is uncompliant to society, because it shows me where my own conditioning is.Compliant bodies are valuable to capitalism. That’s why they are valuable socially. They have something about them – labor, performance, appearance, sexuality, fertility – that capitalism wants. What I value about Atticus has nothing to do with anything he will ever contribute to capitalism. So why should I value myself that way?
Being Atti’s mom has also shown me the reality of intimate caregiving. Any honest caregiver knows there are days when you do not feel warmly towards the job of caring. Toddlers can be exasperating. Babies can’t tell you why they’re crying. Animals do not care if the place they want to poop is convenient.And in those moments, when you are struggling to maintain composure and keep the frustration from boiling over, it’s LOYALTY that gets you through. Loyalty borne of daily, mundane, intimate care. Loyalty that comes from literally being in the shit with someone.
You do not have to like your body to be loyal to it.
But like it or not, you are in the shit with it.
And if you are loyal to it, if you show up and you care for it even when it’s inconvenient, that is how trust is built. And where trust has grown, love can flourish.
Even for someone has bound up by self hatred and trauma and disability as I have been, self love is possible. But you don’t start there. You start with showing up every day, caring for yourself, making daily healthy choices, as an act of loyalty to the body that has carried you through.