The other day, someone asked me why I care about challenging diet culture in my writing - why the need to pull apart stereotypes about bodies, health and fitness matters to me. The answer is that I’m sick of women feeling as though they need to live painful, stressful lives with the end goal of taking up as little space as possible; that all they can offer to the world is a neat, tidy body; that when you dislodge your body from your worth, so much brain space opens up for you to think about what you really want and really deserve.
They tried to echo my answer back to me, saying that feeling good is more important than looking good. But I was slightly irked at that take on what I’d said. Mainly because ‘feeling good’ seems to have become just as a high-ticket goal as ‘looking good’, and I can’t take part in that chase anymore.
I’d already written this newsletter, gone through the motions of why I feel so strongly about no longer seeking to optimise my feelings, only to open the Sunday papers to Eva Wiseman’s Observer column on the same discussion. Good minds! And far be it for me to try to articulate anything better than her, so I’ll just share the questions she asks: “It’s bad enough being told how to look and how to behave; must we also be told how to feel? Am I alone in feeling utterly exhausted by this insistence on positivity, on confidence? This pretending that everything’s fine?”
The feel good fallacy
Right now, it is cold and dark. I haven’t left my house today. The sore throat I’ve had for three weeks has only just dissipated and the margarita I drunk last night has made my brain feel mushy. My anxiety is less gurgling in the background, more a full-throttle beating in my chest.
Wellness culture tells me that these things are wrong. It tells me I should be moving these negative feelings out of my body with exercise or meditation, perhaps a green juice or some manifesting. As a quest, avoiding feeling bad is not necessarily… bad? Feeling good makes for a more palatable, frictionless existence. But in a world that is now obsessed with perfecting our feelings as much as our aesthetics, we expect to avoid all illness, reject anything that makes us slow or foggy and feel pressure to always be at our peak physical performance, most positive emotions, highest-tuned cognitive function and clearest mind.
The problem is that feeling our best is just as fleeting as looking our best. Yet, while there’s loud discourse around the acceptance of the fact that our physical bodies fluctuate from hour-to-hour and day-to-day, aiming for consistently feeling good has become a noble goal. At least, it is for people who already feel fine the majority of the time, those known as the ‘worried well’. “The wellness industry thrives because it trades on crises, of mental health and women’s healthcare, but the people buying its products and buying into its messaging are rarely actually the ones affected by these crises. We, instead, are the ones seduced by the idea that life can be perfected; ironed out like a shirt,” writes Wiseman.
So we obsess over exercise routines that are meant to make our brains, hearts, lungs and muscles expand like sponges in water. We turn down time with friends because the later nights at restaurants, bars or on sofas stop us from being perfectly awake for our wellness routines come 6AM. We opt out of the delicious foods that make our tongues do somersaults and choose meals that are packed with nutrients but leave our stomachs still gnawing for satisfaction.
Doesn’t that sound familiar? Aren’t these steps for feeling our best on par with those we’d take to look like our perfect selves? Steps that, if I expressed to friends were done with the desire to look perfect would be met with concerned questions, but are applauded when done in search of a feeling.
Good girls
Now, feeling anything less than fine doesn’t only come with its own heaviness, but the additional weight of guilt. If I have a hangover, I berate myself for having fun and not being on the top of my game. If I feel run down, I question the choices that got me there (not enough greenery? Poor sleep?) and what I need to cut out of my life to feel better. When I have anxiety, I get more anxious about figuring out what disorder I’m stressing over. In reality, these are not problems to solve but simple side effects of being human, having a body and living in the world.
In On Our Best Behaviour, writer Elise Loehnen notes a conversation she had with psychotherapist Lorri Gottlieb who proclaimed that women “are very cautious about feelings they believe are unacceptable.” That is why the wellness world has soared, selling us solutions to any disgusting sensations - period cramps, stomach rolls, sore throats and depression. Loehnen’s book is focused on the notion that women are only acceptable when we are good, and as such our anger, distress, frustration, worry, depression, sickness, etc remove our worth. It is no surprise we internalise that, attempting to rid our bodies and minds of bad feelings with restriction, movement, pills and diagnoses.
The answer isn’t to just stop doing things that make us feel good. Please, continue exercising, taking vitamin D, seeking therapy, doing breathwork. But maybe what needs to change is the reason we search for these things. They are there for support, rather than avoidance: spin classes can bring you pleasure but they can not rid you of negativity; supplements will not stop the natural fluctuation of your health but maybe help you fight back against illness; therapy can give you tools or an outlet for grief, panic and depression but not stop the ride of these emotions.
“It is appropriate to feel bad sometimes, worried sometimes, guilty even. It is necessary. It is a result of things like grief, inequality and empathy, rather than, say, ‘gluten’,” notes Wiseman. “In our governments, in our homes, inside our bodies, terrible things are happening, and we are – or we feel, or are made to feel – powerless to change them.” And more often than not, attempting to rid ourselves of badness only makes us feel worse. Like how the harder we work for the perfect body the more flaws we notice, the more we fear negative feelings the more we will deem ourselves to have. The goal posts on looking, being and feeling well will keep moving, so here’s your permission to not always feel good.
Thank you so much for reading Gray’s Anatomy. I appreciate all of your comments, so please do leave a note below on how you’re feeling right now - I welcome the good and the bad!
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