Overcoming the Space of "Meh"

I don’t really write/talk a lot about body image, and the reasons for that are fairly boring.  First of all, I don’t think I have much to add to the discussion: I feel like we should all love our bodies, but I understand why we often can’t, and I’m reluctant to contribute to the guilt people feel for failing to cultivate a healthy body image.  This array of feelings makes me the world’s most indecisive cheerleader, “Love your body!  Unless you can’t, which is understandable because of the oppressive onslaught of images the media throws at us and the way we all judge and punish one another for failing to fit into unrealistic confines of ‘beauty.’ So if you can’t, that’s OK!  I wish you would, but…What?  Oh.  Sorry.” And someone then would take away my pom-poms and megaphone, and rightly so.  I don’t really know, in this hypothetical, who was foolish enough to give me a megaphone in the first place. 

The other related reason I don’t really discuss this very important issue is that I have no wisdom to pass on to those suffering from a bad body image.  If I can shamelessly generalize for a moment, people who talk effectively about body images are often people who either really hate or really love their bodies.  I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of body love/hate, in an area that, in my psychological and sociological expertise, I will label “meh.” I don’t experience the perpetual self-loathing that becomes disease which so many people have bravely fought through, but I also spend exactly no time celebrating how I look.  I spend a lot of time actively not thinking about my appearance, but I don’t do this out of an evolved sense of humility, I do this because I want to avoid that perpetual dissatisfaction.

Don’t get me wrong, my body is a good companion.  It doesn’t get sick very often, and when it does it knows we still have to get things done, so it very seldom requires a lot of doting.  It has worked despite quite a few sprains, torn ligaments, and out of place joints, and only emits muffled complaints on rainy days and cold mornings.  It has learned that coffee is amazing, and, whatever “experts” say, this magical beverage actually has its own level on the food pyramid, and we should revere that.  So I appreciate my body on a functional level.  I’m healthy, and that’s fantastic.  I could totally teach a class on “Listening to Your Body Except When You Don’t Want To Because You Have Papers to Write Or Other Things That Need Done,” but I did not think I could write a blog post about “Loving Your Body.”

And yet here we are, so what happened (you may rightly ask, as you wait for me to get to a point)?  Well, this happened, and that happened, and it’s almost summer, so I keep running across articles telling me how to get a bikini-ready body, when all it takes to have a bikini-ready body is buying a bikini you like and putting it on your body.  In other words, my people, shit is going down, and I am not amused.

I’m not here to warn you about the scary, nefarious Media.  We know the media doesn’t particularly care if a size ten girl is sadly perusing a magazine where the models are so thin it’s like an inadvertent game of Where’s Waldo.  I think the people who point out the flaws in advertising do very important, necessary work, and I also think that we as individuals need to acknowledge that there’s more work to be done that only we can do for ourselves.  There have been many times where I have doggedly deconstructed a commercial’s harmful portrayals of the female or male body, and then spent the rest of my afternoon dodging mirrors because I was having a fat day.  Really, “meh” is not an empowering place to be, and as fun as tearing down the media is, we need to do more.

I’m going to sound like Oprah or maybe the Dalai Lama for a second, so bear with me: The work we need to do starts inside, and I believe it starts from a place of gratitude.  Maybe we do start by being grateful that our bodies actually work for us, that they fight off disease, and that if we ask them to run a marathon for us, they might be like, “Seriously? Why? Will this cut into our Game of Thrones time?” but ultimately agree as long as we provide cupcakes afterwards.  It’s unlikely we’ll ever live in a world where appearances don’t matter, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  There are a lot of beautiful people out there, waiting to be appreciated.  But, that’s sort of my point here: we are the beautiful people, and we need to stop waiting to be appreciated.  We can’t afford to wait any longer for the media to change or for standards of beauty to be adjusted.  We need to find a place for ourselves in the world we have now.

If we can be happy with the things our bodies do (maybe you have great eyesight, maybe you have horrible eyesight but that allowed you to get kickass glasses, maybe one time in second grade you were the only person to make it across the monkey bars without falling the humiliating four feet into the dirt), that could be the secret to cultivating a thoroughly positive body image.  For example, I trip very seldom for a person who is often thinking of potential revisions to papers while walking instead of paying attention to my surroundings.  Perhaps gratitude for this will help me eventually garner appreciation for my legs. 

But on a more sincere note, a few days ago I was playing Space Monster with my five-year-old friend Liam. At one point, Liam enthusiastically tackled me, and I was able to catch him and purposefully crumble to the ground with a surprising amount of grace and dramatic flair.  I’m really grateful to have a body that allows me to do that. 

I guess I’m just asking that we approach this really complicated issue from a simple, pragmatic standpoint.  Let’s not start from “How do I look?  How do I not look?”  Let’s instead start from “What can I do?” I think that’s a more powerful place to begin, and I believe that will make our journey to healthy body images more meaningful.