I thought a lot of things would get easier instantly. And some have. But many haven’t. I thought, of course, that this was the key that would turn all the locks inside me, that would set in motion all the parts of my life that seemed stuck and stalled. I thought seeing that magic, fabled, dreamt-of number on the scale would turn me into a person who revels in her own skin, who dances in her underwear, who walks into every room fearlessly and shamelessly. I thought that number on the scale would protect me from the vulnerability I had always felt, that it would secure me, once and for all, a place at the cool kids’ table at lunch, my very own place in the world of successful, happy, confident people.
What I found, though, is that if you’re not chasing one fantasy, you’re chasing another. If it’s not your body, it’s your bank account, and if it’s not your bank account, it’s your résumé, or your nose or your boobs or your car or the perfect marriage or the perfect vacation or the perfect child. For two decades, I believed that if I could just get this one thing under control, then the whole of my life would magically bloom like a perfect, lush flower. But to my great dismay, I realized that my life was still my life, and I was still myself, just in smaller pants.
Certainly, there was a particular joy I felt in those smaller pants. For a person who had routinely cried in dressing rooms, those new sizes made me childishly, inexplicably happy. But what I found is that there is no such thing as skinny enough. There is no magic number that can make you feel safe or protected or confident. That, I found, was an entirely different thing—a belief, a decision, something—but not a number.
I became confident the cheap way, at first, by Zone-dieting myself down to a cuter butt and into smaller pants. But after a while, I found that the cheap stuff wasn’t going to do it anymore, and I needed the real thing, the ever-elusive thing: peace. Peace with they way I was made, with the self I was given, with the way life is unfolding around me, but more specifically, with the way it is unfolding in my arms and my legs and my mouth and my eyes.
And that required an entirely different language and set of practices. Yoga is one. It’s helped to connect the inside me to the outside me, to bind my breath and my thoughts and my arms and legs into one whole, as opposed to bright spirit and faulty shell. I know it’s so five years ago to discover yoga. But when yoga was new and cool, I was still hating my body with such venom, that all that kind, empathetic thankful yoga business was downright offensive to me.
I’ve had to rethink and relearn a thousand things about food and silence and judgment and walking. In the words of the Indigo Girls, whom I love and feel I am close personal friends with, psychically, it’s about learning to “starve the emptiness and feed the hunger.”
The biggest change, though, to my surprise, isn’t in my body, but in my eyes—the cruel, appraising, critical eyes that have been measuring and accusing my body for decades. And in my mind. I couldn’t forget if I tried what my life was like before that, feeling like a linebacker in a world of Tinkerbells, the pinching feeling of a too-tight waistband making my stomach feel fleshy and soft, like scrambled eggs spilling over the top of my pants.
I carry with me the very heavy shame of being ten and too big, and fifteen and too big, and twenty and too big, and twenty-five and too big. And it’s a lot to carry, but I can’t leave it behind. I don’t want to. In some ways, everything has changed, and at the same time, when I look into my own eyes in the mirror, we both know that only so much has, and that we all carry our own weight in very different ways.
**This excerpt originally appeared in Shauna Niequist’s best-selling book, Cold Tangerines.Â
***You can purchase her newest book, Present Over Perfect, on Amazon.Â