Since I got back from travelling four or five weeks ago, I've started going to the gym, for the first time in my life. And I... don't hate it as much as I thought I would! I'm actually really enjoying it for the most part. I don't think I've had any noticeable weight loss since I started, since I'm not doing a whole heap of cardio and I'm still eating about the same (also, I straight up haven't owned scales since like 2014, so I don't actually know how much I weigh), but I'm sleeping better and my body feels like it's mine again and I can do more than three pushups in a row, so I'm counting this as a positive.
Anyway, on my walk to the gym every second day (yeah, yeah, I'm working up to it) I go past my old work, where several of my friends still work, and if they're there and they notice me we wave at each other and if they're there and they don't I take a really zoomed in picture of the back of their head and send it to the group chat like "look behind u". Normal teenager shit, y'know. The other day my friend... let's call her Bella, managed to turn the tables and get a photo of me in all my gross post-workout splendor going past, which was actually pretty funny, and the group chat got talking about going to the gym. The group chat in question is basically composed of me and the girls I go clubbing with, most of whom I've known in some way for most of high school.
And like... guys. I'm not an idiot, I have eyes and ears and I'm on social media and I watch the news occasionally. I'm well aware of how fucking much this world hates women. But somehow I've wound up in this little bubble where most of the time I can forget how badly many women end up hating themselves, and I like to think my friends are pretty well-adjusted people, but sometimes shit just gets driven home. Like learning that last year Bella had a bad breakup on the same week as her hockey tournament and lost three kilos in under a week by playing every game on an empty stomach. Or that the fastest Aditi says she's ever lost weight was when she got her wisdom teeth out and survived on liquids for a fortnight.
Wait, I think I phrased that last bit slightly wrong. Those things, the breakup and the wisdom teeth, are only mildly fucked up in and of themselves. What's really fucked up is that both of them view those as good things and want the results those things gave them back.
Which is just - terrible, it's terrible, and I don't know why my friends are so desperate to look good ("good", ha, we all know that just means skinny but with an ass) that they'd view straight up starvation as a semi-viable option. Well, yes, I do know why, it's because our culture teaches women that our greatest asset is how we appear to others and we should aim to be attractive above all else at any cost, but I don't get it. How have I avoided (for the most part; there was a pretty sketchy month or so before the school ball last year when I went the less-dinner-get-thinner route) the part of womanhood where you see your body as constantly under construction and never good enough?
It's all tied up in club bathroom compliment culture, which is what I call that thing where no matter how endless the list of stuff you hate about your own body is, you'd never, ever talk about another girl's body that way. What this means in the context of my friends is that even though I'm easily the fattest out of us all (and I don't even mean that in a self-deprecating way! I've never been strict about diet or exercise and I have a hormonal disorder that makes me more susceptible to weight gain and that's just how it is!) they all seem determined to make sure I don't feel bad about how I look. For example, if I'm feeling unsure about a particular outfit because it makes my pudge show a bit, they're reassuring me that nobody'll even notice it, or if I'm complaining about how inconvenient big boobs are someone's telling me that they're a B on a good day and they'd kill for what I've got, and let's not even get into when I tried to talk to them about body neutrality (maybe more on that another time) and was met with a full set of genuinely confused "but you are beautiful"s.
But then Bella tells us she's not going out on the town again until she's lost more weight, or Aditi announces she's seriously considering a nose job, and all I can think is when did we lose the second half of do unto others? We've all gotten stunningly good at saying nice things about other people; we just can't manage to say them about ourselves, most of the time.
I don't know what the answer is. I don't know if there even is an answer. All I know is that if my time at the gym does nothing to shift the fat on my stomach, I won't really care, as long as it makes my body feel like it's mine, like it's good and strong and useful, and not something mainly to look at.
