Athletic Greens Tastes Like Shit.

Body image (TW), childhood wounds, and forfeiting the search for rightness

Note: this post contains discussion of body-image and relationship with food.

Hi. Hello. I come to you feeling vulnerable today. Fall seems to do that to me, as I know it does for many.

In college and in my later 20s this season meant I’d be going back home soon for winter break or for the holidays (it’s Hannukah for me), and I always felt tender in these weeks. I was often rundown from a semester of overworking, sleep deprived and undernourished. When I finally stopped doing whatever I’d been manically doing (studying or teaching usually), I’d land back in my body and be absolutely exhausted.

I don’t know why, but the change in weather always brings me back to the feeling of being a nascent adult, uncertain and bleary eyed, collapsing into my childhood bed.

When I was in my hometown recently I had a lot of very visceral flashbacks. I wrote them down but they’ve lost their potency since then. One of the weirdest parts of being human is how heightened a feeling can be in one moment and how distant and flat it can feel in another. In those two weeks, I was brought back to how I felt as a teenager…which was always a little disheveled. Too tall. And too emotional. Too idealistic and too liberal. Too boyish. Not quite artsy, or athletic, and not especially smart.

Always wanting to be something other than what I was, and ALWAYS desperately desperately desperately wanting to be skinnier.

That was the central desire of those years and many years that followed.

Being back in the environments of my early life for two weeks illuminated where so many of these feeling (which were real, but not true) came from. This trip showed me how much has changed inside me, that these feeling are mostly visitations from ghost versions of myself. I can be home, in the places where I was 12, and 15, and 18, and 22, and understand the pain of those iterations of myself while carrying all the nuance. I was happy and I was also sad. I grew up with immense privilege and advantages and also internal pain. I am the happiest I’ve ever been, and past hurts sometimes feel very present. I love my life and I have real wounds. None of these feelings are mine alone. We are all the same and we are all different.

I guess, really, this is a post about my body, because when I go home this is the wound that always reopens for me.

I am learning, finally, that my body is not the most important project in my life. My body is not the most important project.

I have learned…and forgotten, and learned again that my body is for creating and for connecting. It is for inquiring and for bringing life and art and innovation and love into the world. It is for living out big and little moments with groundedness and vibrancy. But, it is only the means to that end. When it becomes the end (as it was for me for way too long) I lose myself to ideals that were not mine to begin with.

When J’s grandmother was sick in a nursing home she had one photo hanging on the wall. The photo was her and her husband, shiny and young. Him sitting, her standing behind him, a bracletted wrist draped over his shoulder. On the back of the photo she’d written in smeared ballpoint pen the date and her weight. It was a photo of a fleeting moment: when she’d been her ideal size.

It’s dark, but it’s not shocking. I have an almonds-for-dinner grandma, too.

This is not their fault. It’s not my mom’s fault or my grandma’s mom’s fault. It’s not my fault. It is a generational wound borne out of diet culture, rooted in misogyny, tied up with ageist and fatphobic beauty standards that harmed all the women who came before me and whom unintentionally passed down their hurt.

This is not news, I know. But as I heal these parts of myself I see just how sick and deep all this is, how entrenched and difficult to uproot and rewire in my own mind. When oppressive ideas about our bodies are internalized, absorbed from a culture that touches everything, it becomes especially difficult and painful to upend inside ourselves.

This has been a slow slow slowwwwww process for me. Over a very long period of time, I’ve come to see that I’ve poured most of my energy - both physical and mental - into efforts to change my body. This sad realization wasn’t a light switch, it was a slow creaking door.

Here are things I can no longer bring myself to do:

Overexercise

Cut out foods for made up reasons

Read every goddamn label at the grocery store

Listen to 10-million podcasts on health

Link every pimple I get to a dietary choice

Get didactic or moralistic about nutrition

Attach myself to any dietary labels: vegan, veg, pesc, blahhh, blahhh, blah.

Cut a sliver of cake that crumbles on its way to my plate.

Tonics. Powders. Mushroom coffee blends. Atheletic Greens tastes like shit.

@CherylStrayed posted an old Dear Sugar letter on her Substack recently. In this letter she responded to a man who wasn’t sure if he wanted to have children. In Cheryl’s reply she cites a poem by Tomas Transtromer called “The Blue House.” These stanzas struck me:

It is always early here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.

We do not actually know it, but we sense it: out life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route.

Cheryl interprets the poem to mean that every life has many possible versions of itself. “We want it to be otherwise,” she writes, “but it cannot be: the people we might have been live a different phantom life than the people we are.”

Lizzy Mcalpine’s song “All My Ghost” touches on this truth, too.

All my ghosts are with me. I know you feel them too. Riding shotgun next to your free slurpy, they know all of my habits, but they don’t know about you. I hope that’s true.

All this to say, Lizzy’s song and Tomas’ poem capture the nostalgia of this season for me. Going home, seeing all the alternative ways this life could have played out. Feeling the same pressures I felt as a young person, rubbing up against my present and past ideas about how I should be… or could have been, or who I once was.

BUT now I’m home, where I’ve built my life as an adult, and wow. When I pulled into my driveway after two weeks away I felt immediate relief, like of course this is my life! This is exactly who I was trying to be before I got here! Suddenly, all the existential questioning seemed kind of laughable! LOL!!! Why have I been problematizing my life? Why have I been wondering if I should be doing something differently!? Why have I been making so much importance out of what comes next?! There are a million ways to live a life and there is not perfect clarity ahead of action. I forfeit the search for rightness!

Happy Holidays! To all 11 of my readers! Ha.

Really, though, sending love (especially during what can be a challenging season),

Stephanie

(Also! If you like this writing project it would mean so much to me if you’d share a link to your fave piece so far…or a screenshot of a paragraph that particularly resonated in a text…or an email..or irl…or on your social media pages! OKAY - thank you!)