My body has always been an external “thing” to me. I don’t ever remember thinking of it as a real part of me, as material to my identity and personhood. I have always valued it mainly for the praise or censure it has garnered from others, whether other people seemed to approve of (or consider enviable) my weight, hair colour, the shape and colour of my eyes, the size of my feet, and the like.
My head reproaches my body as if it were reprobate. It doesn’t care that my body is, in many respects, relatively healthy and able to accomplish much with a certain amount of ease. I am capable of walking to work and work standing much of the day, and I forget to be grateful for this; I forget to integrate this positive part of my bodily experience into my identity. My head, rather, cares about two things: my body is not skinny and my body is not pregnant. Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) and Hypothyroidism bother me more for their visible side effects (among them, weight gain and crispy, dull, dry hair) than for their impeding of the healthy functioning of my body’s systems. Weight and infertility are grievous sins, according to my head, and worthy of harsh punishment. Mental self-flagellation is the order of the day. Therefore I am lazy. Therefore I am undisciplined. Therefore I am a bad person.
I know that my body is more than a shell because this state of affairs hurts. If my body truly weren’t important, weren’t material to my identity, this would feel about as significant as my messy house feels to me. My messy house doesn’t make me feel deeply ashamed or broken because it is less than ‘ideal’. I am not thrown into crisis if someone insults my housekeeping. But this, it feels broken. And indeed I experience my body as broken, like so many shards of discount restaurant serviceware that are not to be mourned.
(Purity Culture Sidebar: Speaking of the body as broken shards of dishware, a book I emphatically do not recommend is And the Bride Wore White by Dannah Gresh. In it, she conceives of sexual purity in terms of perceived value: promiscuity suggests disposable “Styrofoam cup,” a middling commitment to sexual purity suggests “everyday ceramic mug,” and the best is “fine china,” special, rare, treasured. I think this scale of perceived worth could illustrate our tendency of devaluing larger bodies – so a skinny person would be considered (and encouraged to consider themselves) the treasured “fine china,” and I would be encouraged to locate my worth, based on my weight, somewhere between a Styrofoam cup and a ceramic one. Styramic? Ceramifoam? Rather, I believe that people (mind and body) are always valuable, and should feel themselves to be valuable, regardless of and without reference to their sexual status or decisions, or more to the point of this post, their weight and procreative ability. I am convinced that purity culture communicates otherwise. Part of the insidious damage purity culture wreaks on women is the antagonistic or disassociated relationship with their bodies it encourages, the reduction of their identity to a narrow bodily issue while simultaneously telling them their bodies are unimportant theologically, because “the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Sam 16:7). End Sidebar).
Where is the sense that my body and my head are indeed innocently imperfect, journeying toward being more fully themselves, more fully alive, toward something that is not merely size or state? How reductionistic, to value my body only in terms of how it looks or how it functions in a particular way.
My way forward has been to come up with rituals of a kind, to honour my body. I attend to its comfort and health, treat it like it matters, right now, not merely if and when it accomplishes imposed goals. Something as simple as a good moisturizer or a particularly comfortable pair of pajamas, a pair of nice shoes, demonstrate tangibly that my body is worthwhile, that my body is part of God’s good creation, and worthy of tending. I am hopeful that these rituals will help me to integrate my physical and mental realities into a more holistic self-conception, despite the presence of physical illnesses beyond my control that wreak havoc on my body and bring it places I don’t want to go.
smallbutbrave 