Clothes shopping was worse, not better

What I found was that how I felt about my body moved almost independently of anything else. Good weeks and difficult weeks with no obvious cause.

I liked how I looked before as well. That is a complicated thing to say in most places and it is straightforwardly true.

Reading Gwyth, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

I had assumed this would resolve itself and it did not. It needed actual attention, and in my case some therapy, and I resisted both for a year.

The bit in the middle is the bit I needed to read.

Photographs are difficult for me and I have stopped apologising for stepping out of them.

My experience is that other people's attention was the destabilising thing, more than anything about my own body.

I have nothing to add and I did not want to leave it unanswered.

"You look well" landed strangely for a long time. I know it is meant kindly. It still made me feel observed.

Coming back to say it has got easier, slowly, without me solving it. Some things get quieter rather than getting answered.

The mirror thing comes and goes. Some months I barely notice and some months it is the first thing I think about, and I have stopped trying to control which.

Somebody in this circle wrote that a body is a place to live rather than a thing to display, and I have thought about that most weeks since.

What I got wrong was expecting a change in circumstances to change how I felt. It did not. The feeling had its own history.

I found the comments from people who had known me a long time hardest, because they carried an implied opinion about before.

That is a very clear way of putting something I have never been able to put clearly.

My therapist pointed out that I was describing my body in the third person, and I had genuinely not noticed I was doing it.

This is the honest version, and the honest version is harder to write.