My recent hot day morning routine looks a little something like this:
Wake up
Turn the fan on to its highest setting and blast it in my face for 30 seconds
Wash my face, rub some SPF onto my cheeks, lather on deodorant
Eat a banana, drink a coffee
Pull on the only pair of gym shorts that aren’t in a sweaty wash pile, grab a top that looks vaguely like it matches, lace up whichever trainers have my insoles already inside them
Walk to the gym
Work out
It’s about as mundane as a 6:30AM can get - but my younger self would find this revolutionary. Leave the house without looking in the mirror? Without body checking the roundness of my stomach? Without grasping my thighs to check the dimples? Without trying on four different types of Lycra to find the one that best hides those 'flaws'?
While it’s been years since that intense level of hyperfixtion filled my morning, it hasn’t been so long since avoiding these habits were conscious decisions. Anyone who has worked through body stuff - and I assume that is most people who read this - knows you don’t just wake up one day and be over the micro-fluctuations of your body. Instead, it’s an active choice that begins by unpicking and challenging your instinctive thoughts. It’s forcing yourself to wear something that seems scary or purposely not looking in the mirror when choosing your outfits.
Making the choice to change your narrative is exhausting but typically boring. The point of it is to realise that there is no fanfare over your body, that no one cares as much as you do, that you can exist as you are with no consequence (and, for those who have bodies that are more marginalised, that any ignorant or aggressive feedback does not put an end to your day). It’s like preparing for an Olympic sprint - psyching yourself up to the starting line with months of training and a buzz of caffeine and pre-workout energy - and no gun going off.
Very slowly, there stops being a starting line. There stops being training. Eventually, the whole race is over and you land in this place where it’s more intuitive to not think about these things than it is to think about them. The act of rebellion against your inner voice is no longer an act.
With this realisation, I've been thinking a lot about a piece I wrote recently on body neutrality for Red magazine. In the piece, I spoke to body image expert Jessi Kneeland, who spoke about how it’s normal to have preferences about our bodies, but being neutral means you don’t let your fulfilment - or lack of - of these preferences stop you from doing what your body needs to do.
They explained it to me like a living room: you might look around your lounge and not like the curtains or wish you had a different coloured walls or roll your eyes at the stain that’s been on the carpet for weeks that you can’t get out. But do you go about your life stressing out over your lounge? Do you let your living room dictate your worth as a person? Would you stop a friend from curling up on your sofa with a mug of tea when they’re sad?
The slow move from extreme caution to complete passivity about my body has meant I can do those things: I can dress, move and use my body in the most practical, exciting, loving, joyful and boring ways without preferences even being a factor in the decision making.
There’s nothing I find more unhelpful than the social media trope of ‘WEAR THE DAMN SHORTS’ because how? Why? But I guess this is a note to say the exposure therapy works - and getting ready in summer won’t always be a build up to the biggest event of your life.
Thanks for reading Gray’s Anatomy. I’m off to Glastonbury tomorrow - please can everyone give my body some well wishes for surviving and hit me with any last minute supplements or products I might have forgotten to add to my ever-growing bag?