An Epiphany: How 2020 changed my relationship with my body

WRITTEN BY SUBHAM RAI

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, 2020 was really a year for the history books. It was chaotic, at its worst and perplexing, at its best. Personally, it was all that, but it was also a year of great reckoning in terms of the way I felt and needed to think about my body.

When 2019 ended, I was in the midst of great transformation. My former friendships had run their course due to a lack of effort. Since I shared a house with the parties involved, this negligence and negativity bled into other areas of my life. I felt like I was simultaneously pushed into a vacuous period, bound to be homeless, and I felt compelled to distract myself by eating away my feelings. This unhealthy eating habit had made multiple appearances in my life before. Now instigated by remnants of broken friendships and the arrogance of losing so much weight in the preceding year. In the twenty-something years old conflict between my body and myself, historically, I had always been on the losing side. So, when the tides finally turned, and I lost close to 20 kgs, I felt my victory against my body weight was an irreversible accomplishment. God, was I wrong!

I marked the new year of 2020 by moving into a new place and with the sincere intention of turning my life around. It was, in many ways, reflective of how I, like everyone else, felt obligated to associate the new year with an era of self-transformation and re-invention. I had lost my sense of direction, and that’s why I think I started the year by imposing restrictions on the only thing I felt I could fully control – my body.

I tried to squeeze my now much heavier behind in my old work-out clothes and started to deprive myself. I genuinely believed that because it had worked before, it was going to work for me again. Of course, that is not how the events in my life progressed. I could not have possibly anticipated the pandemic and how it would alter my relationship with all the comforts I loved and had abused over and over again.

I failed and started to feel the weight of that failure. I could not help but feel like a toddler trying to walk but repeatedly falling, regardless. I finished the year with a feeling of exasperation and decided to finally just give up. Once 2021 was around the corner, I had no plans to re-invent or re-imagine my life or body in any way other than what it already was. I was tired and wanted to remain in the comforts of old habits. Somehow that felt like the most liberating thing I could have, possibly, ever done for myself.

This complete re-account of my experiences and what I put myself and my body through in the last year perhaps reads like a self-diagnosis of my years-old eating disorder. To an extent, it might be, but it is also an acknowledgement of the epiphany I had this last year. For some inexplicable reason, our bodies are mirrors. They reflect the way we see ourselves and the way others view us. That is an inevitable truth, but it is also the only constant in our lives, a place we will forever inhabit. We must take our time with it. Understanding all its complexities and its ironies is just as much our moral responsibility as it is the best way to truly love and adore ourselves.

Finding Beauty in the Mundane

WRITTEN BY SUMMER HEALY