The Body Before

There was a version of my body that belonged to me. I think I was about seven. It didn’t last.

At seven your body is a thing that runs and climbs and falls over and gets back up. It’s not a topic. Nobody has an opinion about it yet. It just works and you live in it like a house you haven’t thought to judge.

Then someone says something. Maybe it’s a relative. Maybe it’s a kid at school. Maybe it’s a look. A pause. A glance that travels somewhere it shouldn’t on a person that small.

And suddenly you’re aware of it. This thing you live in. This thing that apparently other people get to have thoughts about.

I was bullied. Not for being fat. Not for being thin. Just for being visible. Just for existing in a body that someone else decided wasn’t right. The specifics didn’t matter. What mattered was the lesson. Your body is public property. People get to comment. You get to adjust.

So I adjusted.

By twelve I knew which clothes made me invisible. By fourteen I knew which ones made me visible in the ways that got attention from the wrong people. By sixteen I was starving myself because a boy said something about my thighs and I decided he was probably right.

The eating disorder started like all the quiet things start. Slowly. Politely. Like a guest that moves in and rearranges your furniture so gradually you forget the room ever looked different.

I’m nearly forty and it still circles. Not always loud. Sometimes just a whisper. A calorie counted without thinking. A mirror avoided on a bad day. A compliment deflected because the operating system still runs the old software.

My body has grown two humans. It has survived things I haven’t written down yet. It has carried me through every single day of this life.

And I still can’t look at it without hearing someone else’s voice telling me what it’s worth.

That’s what they took. Not my body. My relationship with it. And I haven’t got it back yet.

Yet. I keep saying yet. Because I’m stubborn. And because yet is the most defiant word in the English language.