You wouldn’t think there’s much link between travel, adventures and body image, necessarily. Or at least, not within the improvement of relationships between body and image.
I tend to credit Iceland for my lack of bodily self-hate. In a world where you’re always the wrong shape and size, it’s quite refreshing to share the Obligatory Naked Shower with a stranger, holding a very awkward conversation in which you both gradually realise no one is looking at your misshapen flesh, no one cares what it looks like. Well, “refreshing” isn’t the right word at all. But in some way, it’s absolutely right. That realisation can be cleansing to your soul.
After all, if no one cared about the appearance of your unclad flesh, why would anyone care what it looks like clad?
I know my body, my flesh vessel, the meat that transports me around, doesn’t look like it’s “supposed” to. No one’s does. That’s what we’ve been sold all our lives, this idea that we’re the wrong shape and size. Look at the movies and the TV and the magazines. No one looks like that. Even those people don’t really look like that. They’re digitally altered and enhanced and the body underneath the Photoshop is a product of physical alterations and enhancement and the sort of dietary regimes that normal don’t – can’t – live on. Mine is the product of progestin and the Webb genes and chocolate. It didn’t look like this ten years ago but I think you’d struggle to recognise Now Me and Ten-Years-Ago Me side by side, and not just because Now Me is physically bigger.
Look at all that for long enough and it starts to look normal. Real. Plausible. You start to believe you should look like that and you start to resent your flesh for not looking like that. Maybe you start doing things to make it look like that. Maybe you settle for merely hating yourself.
I got lucky, I think. I didn’t notice any of this until at least my mid-twenties. I didn’t know I was supposed to want to look like my Barbies. One of them had its head ripped off. I suppose my hair was pretty Barbie-like at that age. I didn’t notice the homogeneity of people on screen and magazines – guess I’ve never really watched much, though. Bucky O’Hare, Neighbours, Farscape, Mock the Week. That’s pretty much my life in TV. I look at my Brownies now, nine years old and obsessed with the Kardashians and Love Island – are they going to grow up believing any of that is real or attainable? And nowadays there’s social media as well – my girls are mostly on TikTok but a few have Instagram accounts. What world of bodily expectations are they being exposed to? Do they notice things like that? They certainly notice designer handbags and shoes. But then again, they also leap over each other like miniature goats when they’re practising First Aid so maybe those child instincts are still in there and maybe they’re cheerfully oblivious to “all the people look the same and it’s not like me”.
Or maybe this cheerful oblivion was a side-effect of my particular brand of neurodiversity.
I’m now aware that the world – or at least the societies I live in – want me to hate my body. They can use that, direct it, monetise it. But in that shower that night in Fontana, I found my own inner peace. Besides, why would I hate this? I dropped it in an Olympic-size pool the other day and it swam nearly a mile (26 lengths of a 50m pool). Last year it walked the Laugavegur trail. Last weekend it walked 23km around North Devon without a murmur of complaint, and that’s just the bits my GPS recorded. It can hit the gold pretty consistently with a bow and arrow, to the delight of my pupils. It can fight with a sword and it’s not even the age of pirates! Alright, my right foot is refusing to function properly at the moment for no apparent reason and I’m limping like I’m caught in a bear trap but it was probably me who damaged it and it’ll have fixed itself by the weekend and I’ll only remember it ever hurt because I wrote it in this blog.
Besides, there’s an entire subplot about me nearly starving to death as a toddler that I’d rather not go into in detail here. Eating is a great and glorious thing and I’m not ready to sacrifice that delight to the Forces of Shape and Size Regulation. I had hot baked rolls this evening, full of lactose-free cheese and they were magnificent. My body doesn’t like cheese but I do so we compromise and mostly it works pretty well.
Anyone who dislikes their body shape or size, have a think about the things it can do for you, even if that’s only keeping the weather off your internal organs. And if that doesn’t help, then uncomfortable public nudity can work miracles.