127. Tender and Strong – Nell Diamond
At 13-years-old, my body felt like an enemy.
At 13-years-old, my body felt like an enemy.
I sat on the floor of my tub with the bright lights blaring and willed myself different. I hated the long, tangled hair, the skin so pale it showed blue veins, the flesh that hung over the waistband of my Miss Sixty jeans. I fought my body with celery and cold sliced turkey. I plucked and brushed and cried when she wouldn’t bend. Humanity spilled out of me and I mopped it up hungrily, desperate to fit neatly into the world.
Seventeen years later, I sat in a cold room on the Upper East Side and watched two dark circles appear on an ultrasound screen. Twins. “High risk,” said the doctor with the cat-eye liner. “This will be difficult.” I walked along Seventh Avenue that afternoon and begged my body for forgiveness. I begged her to find the strength to bring me my babies.
For nine months, I multiplied, my cells dancing. My skin stretched to fit two brains, two hearts, twenty fingers and toes. By September, my organs huddled close, like lovers in the winter. I was round like a balloon, like a beach ball, like a planet spinning through time and space.
I watched my body shift and grow like a gardener tending to a rose bush. I fed her bread and butter and sweet, syrupy lemonade and plates of cucumbers dusted with salt. I held her close even when the vomiting felt endless, even when I had to sleep sitting up. Mostly I stayed out of the way and let her get to work. I trusted this sturdy thing with a mind of its own, these mounds of flesh and blood.
Together, we made it to October. On the day I gave birth I felt an other-worldly sense of purpose. I was so certain of my body’s ability to power through.
In a room with twenty doctors and nurses, I closed my eyes and curled my spine and pushed with everything in me until I met my babies. Twelve pounds of life sprung into the air. When I held their sticky little bodies on my chest, I felt hot joy like a middle school fever dream. My body was open and raw and ravaged but she kept me breathing, kept me awake to feel the warm breath of my two babies on my neck.
Today I rejoice in the deep purple gashes on my hips and thighs, the black wiry hairs, the bones that still feel fragile and soft. My body is a tender thing and she forgave me for not trusting her.
– Nell Diamond
Prompt:
Think about a time that you experienced a shift in your relationship with your body. What caused this shift? Did it last?
Alix Nestel
Location: St. Louis, MO
About: I have been overweight for most of my life. I have been single for most of my life. I made myself believe until very recently that those two things were mutually exclusive.
Age: 29
I was twenty-three the first time I was touched by a man. Really touched. I had spent that past year madly in love with this guy. He was my best friend, we were in a band together, sort of. Six months prior to our hooking up, he had told me he wasn’t and was never going to be interested in a relationship with me. So, when he got on top of me and started feeling his way between my legs after we fell asleep watching Netflix, I was a little surprised. I remember stopping him and asking him if he knew he was awake, thinking that maybe he had fallen asleep and was dreaming about touching someone else. He laughed and I let him continue.
I was twenty-three the first time I felt I could be seen as a sexual being. I spent my entire life being told that I had to be thin to be beautiful and I had to be beautiful to be loved. Forget being pretty enough for a man to want to fuck me, I was just trying to be pretty enough for a man to want to talk to me. The worst part about everything that happened between me and my best friend at the time was that in the six months between our conversation and our hooking up, I had dropped about sixty-three pounds; this only further corroborated my theory that a man would only want me if I were skinny. We continued hooking up in secret for weeks, cancelling plans with other friends just to sneak back to my place. I had never felt more beautiful in my life. I was being desired by someone I thought I could never have.
I began looking at my body the way I thought he saw it. My breasts went from too small to “perfectly cuppable”, my stretch marks no longer mattered, and my stomach was of little consequence. After a while, once the excitement of the newness washed away, he paid less attention, started coming over less, flirted with girls in front of me more. Admiring my body in the mirror turned into microscopic levels of comparison. If he talked to a red head, I’d snub my hair for being blonde, if she were thinner than me, which she often was, I’d have nothing but coffee for a week and run four miles a day. It scared me how quickly I could go from “loving” myself to hating every inch of my body.
Looking at it all now, I realize he was an immature and incredibly shallow individual who took advantage of my desire to be desired. I didn’t have enough self-worth to see it then. I’m currently at a point where I love myself in spite of my appearance; I have gained back the sixty-three pounds and gotten six years closer to menopause. Looking at my body now is like looking at my favorite childhood blanket; I have so much love and appreciation for what it’s gotten me through, but I also see how poorly I took care of it. Some damage is irreparable, some will take a lot of work to fix. I haven’t had a man touch me since that first time, and while there’s a part of me that’s terrified I’ll never be sexy enough to be touched again, I have to remind myself that first of all, I am not my body, I am so much more than the skin I wear. Secondly, I have been and always will be sexy enough for someone to want me, I just have to stop believing otherwise.
Arwyn Carpenter
Location: Toronto, Canada
About: I've been learning to feel things in my body and this journal entry describes recent feelings and a shift towards deeper self-compassion.
Age: 48
I don’t know where my eternal optimism comes from. When you texted that we had to talk, I had a feeling in my cells that it would be good news. I told myself don’t do this, don’t chase a mislaid confidence that you Lori, would be calling to tell me you’d chosen a life with me. What was the source of this curiously ever-persistent spring in favour of my own worthiness.
Before your call, as I stepped off the icy curb, Ozzy pulling at his leash, the feeling jittering through me was the same one I had year after year, when I tried for the Burtynsky Award. Each time I filled with the hope and brazen certainty, this would be my year.
I was wrong.
Your wife’s very name alarms me. Sets off a screeching security blare, sets my nerves on “imminent danger.” She had your phone and knew you were looking for it? She wanted you to show her a text to prove you’d delivered the message of ending it with me? Did I hear all this correctly?
My mother, to me, is dangerous. Her need to control my thoughts and movements feels like never melting shards of ice stuck through my skin since infancy.
When I was 14 my mother demanded I end my relationship with Mary. She wanted me to stop loving my best friend. It was easier, I felt, to lie and make up the names of new friends I was supposedly spending time with. To keep my friend I lied.
And was beautifully true to myself.
My mother hated herself and took it out on me. She weighed me nightly and punished any gains with shame and hateful language that soon became my mother tongue. She also put terrific effort into making it look like all was perfect with vacations and dinners and stylish clothes.
She abused me, though I didn’t know it. And she really actually meant to love me.
This past summer, at age 48, a ground shift occurred in my self-perception. If my mother was never ever ever ever going to to be able to actually love me, then it was time for me to stop trying to earn that love. Stop lying, stop pretending. This is why I’m coming out now.
That ever-bubbling hope that she would see me and love me ran down the drain. I felt the last drips dry up in the grey basin of my ribs.
And now I see the gaslighting, the manipulation, the power struggle were her desperate grasps at loving me. And I feel sad to let it all go. But true, true, true to myself.
I won’t disrespect what happened between us by trying to sum it up as a lesson.
I don’t want a reply. I don’t want to hear anything more about your scary wife.
This is not to say I’m not in love with you. I am Lori. I am in love with you.
I knew I would be. I tried to tell you. I fall in love. I’m not afraid to fall in love. I like falling in love. Even if it’s reckless and likely to cause injury. What is the point of this existence if not to ride the feelings rollercoaster?
When Mars died it was Nov 13. The grief was instant and insistent, unrelenting waves crashing my limp body against a rock cliff. And as it was happening I was grateful. I loved my body for giving me this fullness of sensation. This wracking was an exact expression of my processing a beloved child’s suicide. I cried it out so hard and it was right.
Yesterday, on the phone, in that crystalline snow, I had words inside me that I kept to myself. I didn’t tell you that I loved you. It didn’t matter. I tried to cry quietly though my insides were crumbling. I barely know you, and there I’d gone, trying to earn your love with my chatter and pics and poems and dances, all my expressions begging you to love me.
I laid my head back on the snowy bench and my tears flowed sideways, instantly cooling on my face, icy trickles by the time they reached my ears.
By Nov 25 when you and I began texting, I was taking beginning steps to considering myself gay. This felt like a high diving board and chatting with you was a gentle hand on my back up the ladder.
And I let myself feel loved by that hand. And I’m glad. Even when you say it’s over, I still feel that firm, guiding hand. Maybe it’s my own hand now? You had a part in nurturing my coming out. I’m still up there on that board and obviously no one can force me to jump. I know I’m going to do it. I will picture your shy smile when I do.
My friend Sara says coming out is not one big jump and I can see that you have to make many gestures along the way but I think with sharing the news with my mother, it is a single jump. There will be no climbing back down the ladder.
Madeline Berg
Location: Brooklyn, NY
About: Hi! I'm Madeline Berg, a Brooklyn-based magazine journalist, currently working at Forbes. While I write nonfiction every day for work, I try to never forget the freedom and solace I find in exploring my personal narrative and place in the world.
Age: 27
Ever since I was a little kid, I was good at math. I rivaled my older brother at the brain teasers my mom would throw our way and was the first kid in my third grade class to learn the multiplication table. I got excited to solve for x in algebra and work through tricky word problems.
But at just around the time of my fifteenth birthday, my ability to count and calculate in my mind took on a new purpose. The figures in the trigonometry and calculus problems I encountered in math class paled in importance to the other numbers that crowded my brain: calories, dress size, the inches around my waist and the digits on the scale at what soon became weekly pediatrician visits. No differential equation or parabolic formula could ever be as consuming as those figures. I wanted to devote every cell of real estate in my mathematical brain to my body: what I put into it, what I sweat out of it, its literal mass.
As a result, there are certain numbers branded on my brain: my weight, down to the pound, at any month over the past ten years; the minutes I would spend exercising each day and the corresponding calories burned; every size of Rag & Bone jeans folded in my closet.
Then the pandemic hit. Before I could mentally prepare myself, I was stuck in rural Vermont, without regular access to a scale for the first time since high school. The work out classes I was used to taking were suddenly halted and the gym shuttered. In an attempt to avoid unnecessary trips to the grocery store, pasta and frozen pizza replaced my greens-heavy diet.
For the first time ever, I began to run. At first, it was purely a way to stay sane, to pick up endorphins wherever I could during a decidedly endorphin-free time. There was no instructor telling me to jump higher, no tracker letting me know how many calories I’d burned and no pair jeans to let me know if I was growing and where.
In the beginning, the only numbers I could find were the one-two, one-two of my steps in my head. Music filled the space in my mind that was typically devoted to the various statistics on a piece of gym equipment.
Of course that complete freedom didn’t last all that long—if an obsession was that easy to shed, we’d all likely be much healthier people—but the new numbers looked different from the old ones. I took note of the miles I’d travelled and revelled in watching the amount grow. I started to keep track of my speed, celebrating every pick up. My legs became a vehicle to drive me further and faster; my arms propellers. Numbers became a documentation of that power. They were a testament to the space my body could cover, not the lack of space I wanted it to take up.
If you’d told me at any point over the last decade that I’d care more about the distance I’d run or the speed at which I did so than the calories I’d burned or consumed, I wouldn’t believe you. I will never consider myself a runner, and each time I return home from a jog, I am slightly shocked. Shocked that my body is capable of doing something that had seemed impossible ever since the earliest days of gym class. Shocked that I could find peace, rather than constraint, in movement. Shocked that all that number crunching could be put to a different use. Shocked that it could be turned off, even for a little while. And most of all, shocked that I could enjoy it.
Madeline Berg
Location: Brooklyn, NY
About: Hi! I'm Madeline Berg, a Brooklyn-based magazine journalist, currently working at Forbes. While I write nonfiction every day for work, I try to never forget the freedom and solace I find in exploring my personal narrative and place in the world.
Age: 27
At 13-years-old, my body felt like an enemy.
I sat on the floor of my tub with the bright lights blaring and willed myself different. I hated the long, tangled hair, the skin so pale it showed blue veins, the flesh that hung over the waistband of my Miss Sixty jeans. I fought my body with celery and cold sliced turkey. I plucked and brushed and cried when she wouldn’t bend. Humanity spilled out of me and I mopped it up hungrily, desperate to fit neatly into the world.
Seventeen years later, I sat in a cold room on the Upper East Side and watched two dark circles appear on an ultrasound screen. Twins. “High risk,” said the doctor with the cat-eye liner. “This will be difficult.” I walked along Seventh Avenue that afternoon and begged my body for forgiveness. I begged her to find the strength to bring me my babies.
For nine months, I multiplied, my cells dancing. My skin stretched to fit two brains, two hearts, twenty fingers and toes. By September, my organs huddled close, like lovers in the winter. I was round like a balloon, like a beach ball, like a planet spinning through time and space.
I watched my body shift and grow like a gardener tending to a rose bush. I fed her bread and butter and sweet, syrupy lemonade and plates of cucumbers dusted with salt. I held her close even when the vomiting felt endless, even when I had to sleep sitting up. Mostly I stayed out of the way and let her get to work. I trusted this sturdy thing with a mind of its own, these mounds of flesh and blood.
Together, we made it to October. On the day I gave birth I felt an other-worldly sense of purpose. I was so certain of my body’s ability to power through.
In a room with twenty doctors and nurses, I closed my eyes and curled my spine and pushed with everything in me until I met my babies. Twelve pounds of life sprung into the air. When I held their sticky little bodies on my chest, I felt hot joy like a middle school fever dream. My body was open and raw and ravaged but she kept me breathing, kept me awake to feel the warm breath of my two babies on my neck.
Today I rejoice in the deep purple gashes on my hips and thighs, the black wiry hairs, the bones that still feel fragile and soft. My body is a tender thing and she forgave me for not trusting her.