It's fine, it's all fine, everything's fine

In which I realise the road to body neutrality is longer than I thought

Hello everyone,

Sorry for sending you this newsletter a few days late. As you’ll know, if you follow me on Instagram, I spent the first part of this week on a bike trip with my Dad - something I’ve been wanting to do for years, and which exceeded my expectations in every way.

Proud daughter

I’ll write a bit more about it in next week’s (more timely) letter; for now I’m still unpacking, doing laundry, going through the hundreds of photos I took, and generally processing memories into stories.

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This morning I had a familiar and unwelcome experience. As I was getting out of the shower, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I’m ashamed to admit that what I saw made me want to cry. I haven’t felt like this for ages. I had actually begun to think I’d left all that behind.

I’ve done a lot of work on this, publicly and privately, over the last few years; I doubt you’ll have missed it. And just a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that I hadn’t had any particularly strong emotions about my body, good or bad, for ages. Perhaps I was finally out of the woods of body negativity, through the long grass of body positivity, and into the clear blue waters of body neutrality. I thought about writing a newsletter about it at the time, but I couldn’t quite muster the intensity of feeling necessary to start putting words down on a page.

It felt a bit like how people sometimes describe their spiritual enlightenment: a vivid awareness coupled with a blissful unattachment. I still had an awareness of what my body was up to, but without feeling the need to ascribe any specific value judgements to the way it behaved. Sometimes it was bigger; sometimes it was smaller. No big deal. Maybe this was it. Maybe I had arrived. Maybe the work was finally done.

But sadly, I was wrong. What I thought was the end of the road was just a false summit.