The Mirror

I haven’t reclaimed my body yet. I’m not going to pretend I have. This isn’t that story.

This is the other one. The one nobody writes because it doesn’t have a neat ending. The one where you’re nearly forty and you still can’t look in a mirror without hearing someone else’s voice.

He said I wasn’t attractive any more. After the second baby. Just said it. Like a weather report. Like information I needed to be aware of. Matter of fact. Not cruel. That’s the thing. He didn’t say it to hurt me. He said it because he believed it and thought I should know.

That sentence landed on top of twenty years of other sentences. You’d look better if. You shouldn’t wear that. Have you thought about. Are you going to eat all of that.

Twenty years of men having opinions about a body that was never theirs to comment on.

The eating disorder started when I was a teenager. It comes and goes now. Like a tide. Some weeks it’s barely there. Some weeks it’s the loudest thing in the room. Counting without deciding to count. Skipping without deciding to skip. The old software running in the background on a machine that should have been reformatted years ago.

I know what I’m supposed to say here. Something about self-love. Body positivity. Acceptance. Something that wraps up in a bow and makes you feel like progress is linear and recovery has an end date.

I don’t have that. What I have is this: I’m still here. In this body. The one that grew two humans and survived a marriage and carried me out the other side. And some days I look at it and feel nothing. And some days I look at it and feel everything. And most days I just don’t look.

That’s not a failure. That’s where I am. And where I am is honest, which is more than most of the stories about bodies ever manage.

I’ll get there. Or I won’t. But I’m not going to pretend I’m somewhere I’m not because the narrative requires a resolution.

Some stories are still being written. This is one of them.