Choosing My Hard

When neither path is easy, which hard do you choose?

CW: Body stuff, diet culture, menopause. If reading someone’s experience with their body and its changes is unhelpful to you in any way, please skip this one. Take good care of yourself, always. 

My body has changed a lot over the past two years. Menopause, a few medication changes, and general aging stuff caught up with me seemingly all at once. I had to stop running during this time too, meaning that my activity level, which had been fairly consistent for a long number of years, changed pretty dramatically. Long way of saying that I’ve spent the last 18 months not recognizing who I see in the mirror. It’s given me lots of thoughts and feelings. 

Before I go any further, I want to say explicitly that I am not fat and that I retain many of the unearned privileges that accompany an average body size. I can walk into most any store and purchase clothing, I am not lectured about my weight by healthcare providers - even with weight gain, I fit comfortably in chairs everywhere that I go. My body has changed and all of those things remain true.

A few years ago in October of 2021, my anxiety escalated in a way I’ve never experienced. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and none of my usual practices for navigating anxiety, which I’ve lived with for my entire life, worked. Not even a little bit. I lost a noticeable amount of weight. In the midst of this, I saw someone I’ve known for a long time. This person commented on my weight loss, saying that I “looked like myself”. In the past, I was a fairly serious runner and quite thin, that version of myself is what they referenced. I didn’t know how to tell them that I was in a crisis and had barely been able to eat. I was really sick, struggling mightily, and all this person saw was a thinner body. 

What pulled me out of the anxiety spiral was Prozac. Beautiful, wonderful Prozac. It took time, but slowly my brain came out of the crisis and life got good again. Within a few months of taking it, I started to slowly gain weight. The slow gain continued for most of the 18 months I was on it. I only recently stopped taking it and I don’t know how or if my body will change as a result. It’s mostly not important. I spent every day between Oct 2021 and this summer being deeply grateful for that medication. If my anxiety escalates unabated again, I will take it again in a heartbeat. I’m grateful to have medication that I know will help.

Because the universe has a sense of humor, I also went through menopause during this time. Is there a connection between the fluctuating hormones of perimenopause/menopause and anxiety? Most likely. Anxiety aside, I dabbled in hormone replacement therapy (HRT) last year at the urging of my physician, but couldn’t stay on it for more than a few months due to unpleasant side effects. Among them, boobs that I’m apparently stuck with now, adding to the foreignness of the meat suit I live in. (Did you know that HRT can cause breast growth? I did not. Buyer beware.) It is truly wild to be in my late 40s and to feel like I’m living in a completely different body. Maybe this is normal for this phase of life? I genuinely don’t know. 

As my body went through the various changes of the last few years, there were moments when I felt myself wanting to restrict my food - something I’ve never done - or wanting to start some hair-brained exercise program that would have only made my chronic illness worse. Each of those moments felt like a fork in the road. It was the place where I chose my hard. 

Hyper focusing on food is hard…an understatement. Participating in an exercise program that goes against my body’s needs is hard (and harmful). Trying to force my body to be something it’s not is hard. Fighting my hormones is hard. Complying with what the patriarchy expects of me is hard. 

Making peace with my body as it is now is hard. Unlearning diet culture and anti-fatness is hard. Buying new clothes is maybe not hard, but annoying (and a privilege, as I have the resources to make those purchases). Examining the gap between the grace I give others and the grace I give myself, or don’t give myself in my case, is hard. Learning to give myself that grace is hard.

The way I continue to see it, because this is not a static process, is that I can either use my time and energy to try to get my body to fit into some cultural ideal - thinner and thinner (but never thin enough though, have you noticed that??), or I can use those resources to cultivate kindness and acceptance for myself and this body that has really been through it the last several years. Which version of hard is the right kind of hard? Which version of hard is kinder - to myself and others? Which version of hard is expansive? Which version of hard means I still get to eat cheeseburgers? 

I do not believe that smaller bodies are better bodies, and if that’s true for everyone else, it has to be true for me too. Full stop. The older I get, the more I wonder who benefits from women working so hard to keep ourselves small. What don’t we have the bandwidth for, what do we miss when we’re so distracted by this? What do we overlook while we are striving to reach some unattainable ideal? 

People whose work has helped me in my unlearning include: Sonya Renee Taylor, Roxane Gay, Fariha Róisín, Virginia Sole-Smith, Rina Raphael, and Virgie Tovar, just to name a few. Several of these writers explore wellness culture more broadly, but wellness culture has simply become the next acceptable form of diet culture. It’s all worth interrogating. 

May the hard you chose take you one step closer to the peace you deserve. I’m cheering you on.

Until next time, 

Kim 

PS Thank you to my dear friends Jill and Julie who let me think through some of this aloud while we were at lunch last weekend, and to my therapist Michelle, who has been an invaluable resource as I’ve tried to sort out all of this {waves hands wildly around}.