Body neutrality made more sense to me than positivity

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

Bodies are not projects, and I have agreed with that sentence for years and only recently started believing it.

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

Tavish has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

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.

No wisdom, just: I am sorry. That sounds genuinely hard.

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.

Something that helped was reducing how much I looked. Not as a punishment. Just less often, and it made the looking less loaded.

Quietly agreeing from the other side of the country.

The changing room was where it caught up with me. Nothing had changed in that room except that I was looking, and the looking was the problem.

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.

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.

What I would say is that this is harder than the physical side and gets a fraction of the discussion. I am glad this circle exists for it.

This is why I read the boring weeks. Thank you for the boring weeks.

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