Category Archives: life

Breaking Up With My Past Self

Posted on by under body image, chronic pain, life, memoir

To be given a diagnosis was a relief.

“Are you certain?” I asked.

There can be no doubt. The fusing of your sacroiliac joints is clear to see. She continued to discuss treatment but I was suspended in that moment of certainty, of being believed. For two years, as pain wracked my body, so severe that I would lie screaming silently to myself with hot tears leaking from clenched eyes, specialists had told me they couldn’t find anything wrong. I had taught myself to brace for further disappointment, yet here was an answer. An autoimmune disease, a form of arthritis. Connective tissue hardening and fusing my joints together. Ankylosing Spondylitis.  A word I’d always need to check the spelling of. But I was only 23. Now I had an answer I could resume living life.

**

Are you in pain now? My bikini waxer asked as she spread hot wax in my most intimate areas.

The answer was yes but the question wasn’t as daftly obvious as it appeared.

I am always in pain.

**

I could adopt a guise of normality at first: slamming back the pain killers at night to sleep, slamming back the double-shot espressos in the morning to rid myself of the druggy veil. But then the disease struck my most vulnerable spot. My body

Medications conspired with reduced activity to quickly dump thirty kilos onto my small frame. I was so enraged and humiliated by what my body had done to me: not only was it sabotaging me from within with fatigue and pain, now it was turning me into a grotesque joke.  It was a traitor and I hated it.

Women are taught that investing in your body with exercise and diet are signs of self-love. We are taught that our sexual appeal decreases as our size increases. Here I was, flabby, soft, bloated and married to an athlete. We chose each other when my fat was appropriately placed and thus considered ‘curves’. How could I believe his claim to find me attractive? Compounding this was the ever present duo: pain and fatigue. He wanted to help. He saw my agony and felt helpless. He wanted to hold me but the pain wouldn’t allow even a gentle touch. Our roles melted from lovers and partners to patient and carer.

**

Life is measured in numbers

Weight.

Income.

GPA.

Who am I now, if my identity cannot rest on the certainty of success that these numbers gave me?

**

The next blow was to my social life. A day at work left me too exhausted for midweek plans and weekends became closely protected and utterly necessary recovery periods where I yielded to the fatigue and sleep. If an invitation was accepted, odds were I’d need to cancel at the last minute – body winning over mind. If I went, I’d pay for it with days of pain and tiredness.

I became so guilty. I missed so many things. And so few friends understood. I could look so well. They didn’t see the collapse that followed. Many, many friends drifted away.  Those who didn’t, those who understood without being told, those who checked in with compassion, who never forgot me in my prison – those friends are my strength.

**

It feels like my spine is made of something rigid. Wood that I’m trying to coax – through stretches, through diet, through aggressive medications – into yielding and moving like the myriad bones in my back should. Around this wood I am tender, bruised, swollen. This is the pain that is my everyday – my normal – that makes me come across as though I’m always slightly pissed off about something.

Sometimes, the pain screams. A crescendo through my whole body, intensifying from dull ache to sickening shock. Pulse after pulse. A knife twists in my spine: cold, probing metal, finding bone, pushing further in, twisting.

I try to find reason when it’s like this. How did I bring this pain upon myself? Did I overdo it at work? Overdo it at play? Not exercise enough? Exercise too much? I won’t sleep. I won’t function. I sweep my diary clear as I brace myself for days of stubborn recuperation. I will pay for this ten times over.

**

My body is at war with itself. This is a truism of an auto-immune disease. But my body is also at war with my Self. I must resist starting each sentence with “I was”. I was a gymnast. I was a soccer player. I was thin. I was a pianist and a singer and a performer and a burst of energy and a friend and… I had ambition.

For three years I fought the reality that shoe-horning myself into the ‘normal’ professional environment was headed for disaster. I hated disappointing anyone – my colleagues, my bosses, my parents who were so proud of my academic and professional achievements. I was the type whose bedroom dripped with medals and trophies, whose life was propelled forwards by a singular drive to ‘do my very best’.

And here I was, starting each day with a plea that my body move (that’s step one) then begging the pain to recede. Then battling the constant fog of pain medication and heavy fatigue to do a job that relied on a quick and curious brain. I tried to keep going. Everyone tried to help me. But eventually, I just couldn’t be relied upon. With deep shame, I confronted my failure and my professional persona – so integral to my idea of who I was – collapsed.

**

I sit across from another version of myself. She looks cool and together, and her armour is cropped blazers and pearls and pencil skirts. This is it, she says. The dream, the pinnacle. And now you’re going to fuck it up because you can’t hack it? Do you know where I could go? Who I could be? What my life would be like? I am on the cusp of the world and you’re offering me a little life of brushing crumbs off my boobs.

Yup.

Who am I without this job though? Without the clothes? Without the comfortable descriptors? How do I explain my availability, my free time? What do I write in occupation when ‘inert t-shirt covered in food stains’ is how you propose I occupy my time?

I wave my hands vaguely. Alternate Naomi, with the vision and ambition and capability, slips through my fingers.

**

Over the years, because of the implications of my disease and medications, doctors asked when I might want children. I would pluck the number 28 from my arse – to defer the question as much as anything. It sounded suitably old: an age by which I would have established life on its awesome, adventurous trajectory and be ready to create monuments to my awesomeness in tiny human form.

It started well:

Career at 21.

Married at 23.

Owned a home at 24.

Then the wolf came and blew it all down.

Amidst wreckage, however, we have the opportunity to rebuild.

At 29, I am breaking up with who I was.

Like most relationship breakups, this one is drawn-out. I’ve been sitting in the wreckage for some time, trying patience and compassion and listening, instead of fighting. With tearing effort, I remind myself that Past Naomi wasn’t perfect: she hadn’t found her empathy or sensuality, her confidence or creativity. She was smart, but she didn’t have wisdom. I like these things about Now Naomi.

I have stopped fighting against the monstrous waves that have battered my body and mind for eight years. I have stopped thinking that mimicking an idealised, created version of myself is proof I am doing ok. It is the opposite. I have said, ok enough. I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to do it anymore. I cannot fight against my disease – against my Self – anymore. I know what I can’t do. Now I just have to nurture what I can do. For the first time in a long time, I’m growing again.

This article was originally commissioned and published by Feminartsy. 

 

A Political Body

Posted on by under body image, fashion, feminism, life

 

My awakening started with the clothes.

As a performer child, I loved creating a character through costume. This was no mere dress-up game but a careful application of hair, makeup and clothing to capture a nuance or signal a mood. Initially, my inspirations were caricatures like ‘fading Hollywood star’ (to practice my wrinkles) or ‘ski accident victim’ (I loved doing bruises). As I grew up, the characters became more subtle; sometimes an expression of my mood, sometimes an optimistic projection of what mood I wanted to be in (my famed poncho of happiness – rivalling the technicolour dream coat for its loud, clashing colours – is a winter staple to forcibly inject joy into Canberra’s grim winters). When I dressed each day, the question I started with is ‘who am I today?’, and I enjoyed that my costume would provide hints to the person within.

But then I got fat.

I was a weird shape already. Very short, skinny arms and waist, and an arse that heralded the Eastern European dumpling I would become. A size 6 (unless I wanted to buy pants in which case I tried on the largest size in every store and ended up throwing a tantrum, crying, leaving, binging, purging). I wore a lot of skirts. So when my narrow bits started catching up to the wide bits the clothing options rapidly receded. As a size 12-14, there was no room to move. If it didn’t do up, you got nothing. I was still smaller in weight, size and measurements than the average Australian woman and yet fashion was clearly telling me its doors were not open to the likes of me. Keep walking past those well-lit storefronts and find the shop where everything is draped and baggy. For once you’ve fallen off the size 14 cliff you are to shroud yourself in loose fabric. I did. I hid.

I hid in the clothing fat people are told to wear to look slimmer but actually just render us bland. It was all that was available, serving as a sartorial dunce’s hat to publicly shame us for our grotesque shape. My technicolour wardrobe was crammed to the side as black, beige, more black went on high rotation. I was background while fashion took place on more deserving bodies. The fashion equivalent of playing a tree in the school play. For the odd occasion where I needed to haul an old character out of the wardrobe (the role of glamourous wedding guest, for instance, cannot be played in a jersey wrap dress), I would cram and fold myself into layers of horrible shapewear that would line my body with cruel, red indentations, and give me painful stomach cramps from holding in my soft pudge. I look back at the few photos I permitted at that time and the character I’m portraying is the invisible woman. I didn’t think people like me could be seen, should be seen, let alone celebrated.

 

I recognise that regardless of what I look like on the outside, I will always carry these seeds of a distorted relationship with my body. Even though I have now made peace with my body, I still struggle to shut out the cruel whisper that life would be different if I weighed twenty kilos less. I’m still pulling myself up on my perceptions of health. This is how I’m meant to be. But society, with its warped perception of what ‘fit and healthy’ look like, and an obsession with ‘health-shaming’ people (which is really ‘fat-shaming’ reimagined for the 21stcentury), doesn’t get that, and it’s hard to fight that society off and keep it out of my mind. Every day is and will be an internal battle to quieten that instinct. I still look at old photos and trace my protruding bones with a smile (mmm… sexy clavicle). My closest human helps me through the bad days with compassion and forgiveness that I struggle to show myself. I’m ok, and I’m safe.

 

Psychologists, nutritionists, personal trainers, doctors and gyms aren’t what got me to this place of begrudging acceptance. Not even Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth cut through my conditioning. My awakening began with Instagram. And it went back to the clothes.

I’ve always liked to look at aesthetic things, so when I first got Instagram it was filled with models and celebrities ostensibly marketing incredible fashion. But, as I had with fashion magazines, I had to block these out as they were also marketing a body shape and ‘health’ aesthetic (health is running! And gymming! In lycra! And look at the salad I’m eating! Wow!) that was so far removed from what I needed for my own recovery and reality.

Somehow, I started following a few ‘plus-size’ bloggers, and I thought they were magnificent. There was no baggy jersey here but colour, and texture, and skin, and TIGHT FITTING CLOTHING that showed dimpled thighs, soft bellies, and jiggly arms. I curated my feed so every time I looked I was inundated with something that made me joyful – creative fashion – and that recalibrated two decades of social programming of what visible bodies are supposed to look like. Of what active bodies look like. Of what clothes should fit like. It was revolutionary.

And then slowly, I started making myself visible to the world again. With the help of online brands with more sizing options, I started choosing costumes again instead of disguises. And if felt bloody amazing. So I would take a photo of it, and I would share it, because I wanted to be seen again. I wanted to capture that moment of creativity and confidence so I can revisit it on my shit days. I wanted to insert myself into a landscape that I thought I had been denied entry into.

The rest of the world is slowly catching on, though for now fashion for all bodies remains a side show. And risks abound even in this intended safe space: the curve fashion industry risks being co-opted by brands who want the social cache of concealing naked consumerism behind messages of empowerment, and the ranking of bodies’ worthiness is sneaking in, with tall, white, hour-glass bodies most likely to be deemed acceptably curvy.

We must be awake to this and we must keep critiquing what is put in front of us. But now, because of my curated Instagram with its celebration of diverse bodies wearing whatever they want, I can look more critically at ‘fit inspiration’ images, ‘health’ marketing, fashion only ever displayed on tall, thin bodies and see them for the constructed forms of control, exclusivity and branding that they are.

As an Eastern European dumpling in a world that values conformity and striving to achieve that conformity, to be seen, even if only in a curated digital world, is an act of political protest. It’s an act of radical self-love in a world that tells me to starve and purge and hide. And I love being part of the revolution.

Experiences of body shame and eating disorders are unique, but you don’t have to feel alone. If you or someone you know needs information and support, please contact a specialist organisation like The Butterfly Foundation for guidance. Be gentle with yourselves. x

The River

Posted on by under life

Lately I’ve given myself over to a pull I’ve resisted for a very long time. I’m floating in a calm, clear river, carried by the water’s flow and whirls and moods. I don’t know where I’m going, and for once, that doesn’t bother me.

I’m uneasy about the apparent lack of ‘doing’. My closest are too. But I’m learning to trust that I’m doing something very important and very profound, just very quietly. The action is taking place inside and I feel the searching, finding, growing and healing happening in cyclic swells.

I wonder whether it’s wartime, British pragmatism that taught us we ‘must keep going’, ‘mustn’t grumble’, ‘stiff upper lip’. The immediacy of the danger and disaster has receded and yet we still frantically propel ourselves while squashing our instincts into a too-small box. I’ve found myself telling so many distressed friends that it’s ok to stop, be still, withdraw and nurture. To lick our wounds. To create a safe cocoon for a little while. We feel so much anguish when we resist this. Then we feel guilt when we yield. We see this as giving up, of not being able to handle everything. I’m trying to free myself and my friends from this mindset. It’s not doing nothing. It’s not hiding from the world. It’s listening to ourselves and caring for our needs in a gentle, comforting way. It’s no less valid step towards health than doing something others would more easily recognise as being ‘good for you’. To hold yourself close with tenderness is not failing, it’s flying.

I think these summons inwards happen when we’re on an unsustainable path. If we ignore these calls, we risk not hearing an important announcement to ourselves. I didn’t know, until I stopped struggling and started floating, that there were so many sharp corners in my life that I had been repeatedly running into. I forged the path I had been on so long ago that I’d neglected to check it was still the one of least resistance. I have changed and that life doesn’t fit anymore, and I can’t force it too. As I float, I can find new paths led by this change, by curiosity and passion, based on my now, instead of my then.

And so I keep floating. Outwardly restful, inwardly calmly observing and learning. I didn’t know how much I was missing about myself, how much I was yearning for things I wasn’t making time for. Somehow, I had stamped out whimsy and creativity. This was the cost of the contortion it was taking to keep charging ahead. To have stilled long enough to make these discoveries is affirming of the decision I made against the concerned resistance of my driven mind. I’ve never felt such lightness and happiness.

The time will come for me to swim again. Until then, the sounds and the smells of the gentle river are a tonic to my burnt out, injured body. I don’t know where I’m going, but trusting my instincts is what is keeping me afloat.