Dear June, I’ve hated my body for my entire life.

"I’m constantly at war with myself."

Content warning: Eating disorder mention.

Dear June,

“I’ve hated my body for my entire life. I had an eating disorder when I was a teenager. I don’t anymore. I know this sounds bad but I often think: I’m too lazy to have one now. I have the same thoughts but don’t have the same level of effort to restrict, which in hindsight, is a good thing. I spend the entirety of summer indoors, every year, as I cannot bare the thought of wearing clothes that don’t fully cover me. I’m constantly at war with myself and I’ve come to accept that I’ll always feel this way.”

This writer gave consent for their message to be shared and responded to publicly.

Dear friend,

I want you to know I’ve been sitting with this one. It hits home for me as I, too, spent the majority of my life thus far hating my body. Looking in every mirror or reflective surface and immediately spotting 10 flaws that would make me want to crawl out of my own skin. This is an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It’s brutal and relentless. In a world obsessed with the unattainable body, it doesn’t help when your brain turns that obsession inward and uses it to inflict mental pain on your physical being.

It’s important, I think, to note that if laziness is what keeps you from acting on the pull towards restriction, we’ll take it. Your reasoning for not acting on sickness or addiction is irrelevant if it means you’re avoiding the thing itself and ultimately protecting yourself.

I might even wonder if this “laziness” isn’t exactly as you’ve labeled it.

It is exhausting to feel the way you describe feeling. It is a daily struggle to exist in a body that you perceive to be so abhorrent. I’m not going to sit here and tell you to be grateful for all that your body does for you or any of the other clichés that, while possessing merit in their own right, don’t actually make you feel better or see your reflection any differently.

I imagine for you, as it was and can still be at time for me, that facing the day knowing the mental battle rages on leaves you fatigued from the moment your feet hit the floor.

Let alone that walk into the bathroom to address the aftermath of 6-10 hours in bed.

Then to the closet where you figure out what of your wardrobe can provide any solace for what the day holds.

Then onto whatever your day holds, where no doubt you will encounter the bitter taste of comparison around every corner, behind every screen, and even maybe on the street.

Countless routine body checks and the subsequent shame wave that follows.

Meal-time chaos where, though you are eating, you’re considering the pros and cons of every bite. Recommittment and fuck-it energies duking it out as you chew and swallow, chew and swallow.

Each season brings a host of new challenges to navigate, but none quite like the defrost into summer.

Ads of skinny, beautiful bikini-bound babes swirling.

Conflicting social media posts are consuming feeds with mixed messages of self-love, the next celeb to fall victim to Ozempic, a greens powder that will change the game, mindful eating, and the pros and cons of HIIT vs low-impact exercising for weight loss.

Suffocating and unrelenting, and yet, maybe this tip or that fad will do the trick this time. Who can blame us for holding out hope after all this time… not when the alternative feels destitute?

My friend, of course, you are tired. You are carrying a weight that is not yours to be carrying, and your nervous system is terrified at how unfamiliar it would be to put even a fraction of it down. I see you. I sit with you. And I offer you my shoulder with which to offload some of that weight.

Janina Tłuczkiewicz on Pinterest.

Bear with me as I offer a statement that I myself believed to be SUCH bullshit as I crumbled underneath the weight of this that I carried, too, for so many years.

There is no solution but to find peace within yourself.

I hope I don’t lose you here… younger versions of me would have been lost here, so I won’t hold it against you if you read this and say fuck-off. I only hope you come back here when you’re ready again.

There is a reason you hate your body. It didn’t happen all at once; it likely formed via a series of experiences before you were aware, all confirming the same message to you: your body is wrong.

And with no defense, no language, and no understanding of how utterly impossible that statement actually is, your subconscious adopted it as truth and built a survival mechanism, your eating disorder, around it.

In case no one has ever told you otherwise, I am glad it did this for you. It was a cry for help in the face of a belief that was rooted within you but that you wouldn’t, couldn’t accept. It was — as much as I know it didn’t feel like it at the time, and likely doesn’t to this day — an act of rebellion.

You are strong.

I didn’t believe this for myself until very recently, 13 years post the eating disorder that nearly took my life. 13 years of quietly hating myself and my body as I idly performed that which was expected of me in recovery and my entrance into adulthood. Of feeling wrong and somehow too much but never enough, still, despite having “recovered.” 13 years of perfectionism that robbed me of a personal identity to the point where I felt like I had very little to live for.

What exactly had I recovered from then? The risk of heart failure, osteoarthritis, hair loss…. Certainly all worthy accomplishments, but not any that made my brain feel the kind of validation and acceptance it so desperately needed for survival.

You can still hate yourself without taking it out on your body physically.

And therein lies where I invite you to get curious with me.

You don’t actually lack the ideal body. Whether you believe it or not, you have an ideal body because you are alive on this earth.

So, what, then, does your soul need?

What did your inner child require that was never offered to her?

This is a very hard thing to answer, which is why it is an exploration of curiosity and has no singular right answer.

Think about patterns in your life… with food, with your body, with other people, with the little things you quietly struggle with and the loud things that attract you most.

Is there a theme?

What feels good to you? Meaning, what catches your eye and your heart and your soul in a way that you can’t help but move closer to.

What feels bad to you? Where are you hiding and what are you hiding from? What do you avoid like the plague, such that mere tangential reminders send your heart racing and skin crawling?

Is there a pattern?

Spend time here. Let it take time. It took many years to get here, didn’t it? Don’t give yourself anything less than the time you personally require to undo and relearn.

If the choice is to get curious about who you are and what you deserve emotionally or hate yourself, I invite you to not choose to live in hate any further.

Non-judgemental (to the best of your ability, this grows with time) curiosity. That’s how you begin.

The odds that you are here right now are 1 in 10 to the 45,000th.

That is a 10 with 45,000 zeroes after it.

This is not random. You are fundamentally meant to be here just as you are.

There cannot, nor is there any possibility that your body — the one that carries your soul, your spirit, your mind, your pain, your memories, generations of trauma and sacrifice, grief and heartache, potential and capacity, joy and love — could ever be worthy of hate. Nor can the you that exists within and in spite of the physical.

You may carry false narratives about yourself. We all do.

You likely believe untrue things learned in your youth. We all do.

You bear the scars of wounds long healed and the leech the blood of wounds yet unhealed. We all do.

You hope and live on just the same. We all do.

You are energy.

You are light.

You are love.

When you finally see yourself for all that you are and all that you possess. When you claim the power of your birthright as bound by those odds, 1 in 10 to the 45,000th, you will heal. You can make peace with your existence for better and for, occasionally, worse. You can, and you are capable of loving what your body may never represent to you properly, your self.

It is a journey. Maybe one we set off on and never come to the end of.

There are highlights and lowlights. Good days and bad.

You can carry both. You are strong enough to feel love and the echo of that misplaced hatred. You can be angry and compassionate. You can be strong and weak.

You can be.

In all that you are.

It starts with a simple step. Instead of believing the narrative and cycle of hate that drains color from your everyday, I offer you the option to quietly, and perhaps even meekly at first, challenge the validity of those beliefs with questions of curiosity and wonder.

What if my body is not the problem?

What else is happening in this moment?

What can I learn from the sensations present in my body right now?

How can I do one small but mighty act to honor my body instead of re-confirming to the voice in my head that it is right?

That voice is a long-learned, well-reinforced survival mechanism. Find love and curiosity in your heart for this, too. What has this protected you from? What does it do for you? Why do you need it? Do you need it?

And I wish for you that someday, as you wander down this unfamiliar path, you find yourself wondering what it might look like to finally let it go.

with gratitude,

-June

I invite you to stay and be seen here.

for words with nowhere else to go

unspoken thoughts, unfinished feelings, & everything in between

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