The language I have had to unlearn

What surprised me was that the difficult feelings did not follow the timeline I expected. My hardest month was much later than I would have predicted.

That is a kinder way of putting it than I have managed about myself.

Mine has settled into something quieter over two years. Not resolved. Quieter, and much less central than it was.

What helped was other people describing exactly the same complicated feelings without tidying them into a lesson.

My relationship with my body has been complicated my whole life and none of this created that. It surfaced it, which is a different thing.

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

No advice, only that you are not the only one who found this part hard.

Thank you for the update. Threads that stop are the worst kind.

I have stopped reading anything that presents bodies as a before and a subsequent state. That single decision improved my year measurably.

The comparison habit was the hardest to break and I broke it mostly by removing the things I was comparing against.

Something practical: I bought two things that fit, properly, rather than waiting. The waiting was itself a message I was sending myself.

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

The thing that has helped most is spending time doing things where my body is useful rather than looked at. Swimming, mostly, badly.

Clothes were the practical version of this for me. Nothing fitting the way it used to, and the daily reminder of that was wearing.

Marking that I am here, in case that counts for anything today.

Nothing here is medical advice and nothing here is therapy. If this is taking up most of your attention, please do speak to somebody qualified.