SMASH THE SCALE
I smashed my scale about four months ago, sometime in September. Literally. I was in my apartment, staring down at the cold, impersonal metal surface, one foot hovering over the body-fat sensors, bringing to the surface the constant insidious chatter that made up a devastatingly considerable amount of my internal dialogue.
I didn't want to step onto the scale. I didn't want what it said to matter to me. I didn't want to give it that power--to give away MY power. I was so tired. Tired of tying my personal worth to the digits displayed on the interface. Digits that would determine, if only by a pound or two, what clothes I would wear, how I would feel looking in the mirror, whether I would "indulge" in a full meal for dinner or heat up some frozen vegetables and naw, unsatisfied, on a piece of fruit.
This exhaustion--mental, physical, and spiritual--weighed over 22 years old. I can remember quite distinctly the first time I ever consciously expressed dissatisfaction with my body to myself. I was at a gas station with my parents, filling up our Volvo station wagon. I was in a tank top and flip flops. I remember standing in the sun, looking down at my slightly protruding stomach and thinking:
It should be flat.
I wasn't more than six. Maybe younger.
Where did that come from? The media? Barbie dolls I played with? The Britney Spears poster in my bedroom? Something my mother said about her own body? I have no idea. The specific medium is largely irrelevant to me at this point. But somewhere, (see: everywhere) the message that we are not enough has been repeatedly (see: continuously) conveyed and digested. Across gender, race and social class. Across all walks of life. No facet of society has been spared from the overriding and prevalent theme of NOT ENOUGH. We operate within a framework that tells us that to be worthy of love, to be worthy of feeling safe in our own bodies (see: to be worthy of EXISTENCE), we must be or strive to be X, Y, and Z. And this benefits who?
Not us. Not me.
This message externally manifested itself for your young author, among other ways, with terrible body image and a dysfunctional relationship with food. It's not a private struggle. This shame assigned to our bodies is designed to keep us from connecting. To keep us hiding. To believe that we fight alone and against ourselves. But it is a battle and you--me, him, her, hir, us--we've been enlisted and indoctrinated from day one.
Whether or not you believe the human, industrial and governmental powers that be are systematically oppressing and repressing everyone that is not themselves (and actually unknowingly themselves as well) through media, legislature and rape/shame culture in general, it is a simple fact that the culture many of us live in encourages our focus on losing weight, having perfect skin and generally investing huge amounts of energy (and money) in how we appear to others. This leads but is not limited to; depression, extreme self-consciousness and self-doubt, anxiety, calorie counting, excessive exercise and full blown eating disorders. And this conveniently keeps us (see: kept me) from proactively meddling/challenging everything from the status quo to immigration policy, at least not with our full potential and strength in tact (see: exhaustion, see: compliance, see: obedience).
Women are the world's richest and naturally inexhaustible resource and instead of having our growth and development encouraged and celebrated, we are still largely and tragically, not just underutilized, but actively, and often violently, kept silent and dehumanized. And don't think that that number on the scale yanking your emotions and closing your throat with shame is superficial or silly. Don't dismiss its effect. Because associating your self-worth with that sterile, numerical measuring stick is just that. Dehumanizing. Defining yourself as a commodity let's your value be judged by others. A woman sexually confident and at home in her body, a woman without shame, is a fucking POWERFUL being. A woman not obsessively focused on when and what she can eat or what other people think of her is a woman who can make waves and move mountains.
It makes me sad to think of all the time spent and energy wasted on trying to make myself smaller, on an impossible and doomed mission to be what I thought was everyone else's version of enough. Skinny enough, smart enough, accomplished enough, pretty enough (see: eating less than 1500 calories a day, see: binging, see: waking up at 5 am to walk through a snow storm to my gym at boarding school to workout before breakfast, see: not eating for two days to make weight for a tournament). What else could I have been doing? What friends could I have made and gotten to know? What projects could I have pursued? What lives could I have made a difference in, what causes could I have joined?
It's not easy, getting to the point where you are ready to smash the scale. It's scary, letting go of the false safety of having something or someone else define you. It can be a very slow road. But the freedom, the feeling of coming home to your body and realizing your inherent right to respect, is nothing short of a miracle.
So, when I stepped on that scale for the last time, when I saw the innocuous disjointed lines that made up those numbers and caused my heart to squeeze, I calmly walked over to my tool bag, got out my hammer and went to work.
I have stories to write. I have places to explore. I have ideas to manifest and people to love, myself included. I have SMASHED THE SCALE.
Join the revolution: http://bit.ly/1dSoLmO
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