“I have always been under the male gaze.”
These words entered into my thinking as I sat in child's pose in a yoga session last week. The instructor reminded us let ourselves turn our practice inward, to continue to breathe and feel space in our bodies, and I began to cry. My torso bouncing up and down while my forehead remained rested on my forearms.
“It has been so long since I felt good in my body,” my thoughts continued. As I cried, I felt relief. This is why I have been both avoiding and desiring to take on a more regular yoga practice. I want to feel in my body, be in my body, and heal my relationship with my body.
From birth until 20 I was under my father's gaze. RAGE!!!! Literal pains in my head as I write this. The stares, glances, and look in my fathers eyes will never leave me. It now instigates a visceral gag response and feelings of violent rage.
From 20 - 33 I was under the gaze of a male therapist. Only recently am I coming to terms with his grotesque obsession with bodies, all in the name of “being healthy”, “treating ourselves better than our parents did”, “not acting out”, “feeling your feelings instead of eating your feelings” - all things that could be useful to consider but were just covers for his narcissistic gratification of seeing women fit the stereotypical norm.
I am exactly 5 feet tall. When I weighed 115 lbs (about 52 kg), I had a BMI of 22.5, which is within the healthy range according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control. I won’t even go into the many criticisms of the BMI (read more on that), but on that particular measure, I was healthy. I was physically active 6-7 days a week. And I’m talking running 4-6 miles twice a week, playing football (soccer), cycling to and from work on weekdays, and 20+ mile cycle rides on weekends, and doing high intensity workouts. I was eating 1600-1800 calories a day, closer to 2200 on heavy workout days. No “standard” person saw me as unhealthy. In fact, I have had to struggle with the fact that at the time, people saw me as “hot” and “attractive”.
I don’t believe that the body I held then is the only attractive body structure, especially because it met an oppressive standard, but I do wish I could have enjoyed how I felt in my body. Instead, the therapist I was seeing created a culture within this therapeutic community (which become toxic - more on this another time) that made me constantly thinking about how I wasn’t as “fit” as so and so and how this was holding back my healing and trauma recovery. (And yes, he would point out certain clients as the “perfect body”. I said toxic, right?)
Skipping through a handful of years that included a traumatic exit from that therapist and community and building a more free life in the UK, I’m now 38 and refuse to weigh myself. I was weighed at the doctor recently and quickly forgot the number but did not forget that my BMI sits in the “obese” zone. I am working through internalized fat shaming and ableism and I’m learning what matters to me about my body.
I’ve lamented gaining weight and becoming less active in the UK. Even in lockdown, I couldn’t get out and run as I used to. I’ve been held back by depression, repeated ankle injuries, and a on-going battle with “whose body is this?” I stopped counting calories, eaten more carbs (biscuits and cake, anyone?), and stopped militantly exercising. I let myself sleep in. I’ve not pushed through the completely normal fear of cycling on UK streets.
But when I sift through all the abusive crap, I still don’t feel good in my body. Forget the weight, the clothing size, and what other people have said or think, I want to feel better in my body. I want to feel in my body. But for trauma survivors, this is a unique challenge, as dissocation from the body was part of survival. Feeling the soft flesh, the places where I can bend, brings up feelings about the places I thought I would break. When I exercised a lot, there was also a fight or flight element to it. Be fast and strong enough to escape a situation. Show that I am strong and not to be messed with. I couldn’t be soft. Part of this is because I was still in danger - no longer in danger of my parents’ abuse and those they would loan me to, but I was in danger around my therapist. I was still serving as a man’s desire. Although he never touched me inappropriately, his eyes did the scanning, piercing, and predation.
I am heartbroken over the extent to which my life has suffered under a man’s gaze.
As I turn to my own gaze, I feel vast, empty space. My tears fill the cavern, so that I may float to the top. I don’t want to stay instead this cavern peeking out. I am a body but I am everything else this body gives life to. I want to be embodied. As Mary Oliver writes, I want to “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”.