If and Only If: A Journal of Body Image and Eating Disorders Winter 2015 | Page 75

bring myself to search out voices that might have told me I was OK. I discounted any evidence that I was. I think about this in relationship to a familiar saying: “Youth is wasted on the young.” It was certainly wasted on me. I had a big old healthy butt, muscular and perky, in my teens and 20s; when I didn’t outright hate it, I could barely bring myself to tolerate it. Eventually I grew to accept that it might give others pleasure, but for the longest time, I could not believe that it might be a source of pleasure for me.

I’m not going to say that I finally learned to love my body; I didn’t. I merely realized that I would never get a different one, that I could live a successful life even with an inadequate body, so I might as well make do. I convinced myself that a single body part didn’t determine my overall physical attractiveness, that a fat ass didn’t render full, thick hair or well-shaped breasts utterly worthless. I made myself stop searching for mirrors to show me, clearly as possible, just how far I failed to meet an ideal. I worked to see my body once again as me, not some awful object that somehow thwarts and obscures me. I quit believing that just because my body is pear-shaped, my life and relationships must be as well. Life may or may not be a cruel joke—I don’t actually know—but I finally know that my body shape is not the butt of it.