Every time I put on a pair of pants, I analyze whether or not I think they fit me the same, better, or worse than the last time I wore them. I think about seasons past, when I am sure that I remember that there was at least an inch more room around the waist of my Bermuda shorts, and I despair. There is the occasional high associated with slipping pants up over your behind and realizing that putting your hands in the pockets of these pants might not actually prove a feat. This occurrence is, for me, rarer than the former.
I am so over this tug of war. When I say "over" it, though, I mean that I am so tired of it; not, unfortunately, that I am beyond feeling this way. That, however, is my goal.
Last spring, in my senior seminar for WGSS (Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies), we read a book called Appetites, by Caroline Knapp. A specific fragment, "the body as a worthy place to live" pretty much highlighted itself on the page when I read it, enough so that I wrote it on a sticky note and put it on the wall next to my computer. When I moved out on the bright afternoon following graduation, I removed it from the wall and put it in my wallet, sure that I would need it. It's still there.
Over the last several months, I've thought about this little note, and have been unable to place the exact syntax of the phrase (I guess I was too lazy to get up and read what it actually says). In my head, I kept thinking that it was "a body worthy of living in." Now, not only is that incorrect grammar (never end with a preposition), but it's actually, I've decided, the exact opposite of what Caroline Knapp meant (I write "meant" and not "means," even though I am fairly sure that is incorrect, because I cannot forget that after overcoming her eating disorder [for the most part, I guess?], she died of lung cancer following a long smoking addiction, and this is one of the most poignant facts about this work for me, somehow).
And so, the last few months, I've been going to the gym and thinking about this phrase in the exact opposite way that I meant to when I put it in my wallet. I always knew that it connoted positively, but I don't know what somehow made me reverse it in my head.
Now that I've reminded myself of what it actually says, and means, I'm working on the way in which I make it mean what it's supposed to in my own head, in my own body, which is, I'm deciding, a worthy place to live. Gym-going or not, extra inches in my shorts or not. Unconditionally worthy.
Do I sound convincing?
