Author’s note: this post is a guest contribution by my best friend Genevieve Hollingsworth.
Genevieve and me circa 2007
Gen and I met in a MAC makeup Livejournal community in 2004, and have been friends ever since. We’ve been there with each other through hard times and great times. It has been both shattering and uplifting these past several years to witness Genevieve’s struggles with health, body image, acceptance, and her spiritual transformation, becoming an even more beautiful person inside and out. Today, she writes about how chronic illness has given her a new perspective on what body image means and how she views herself as a person living in a body.
chron·ic
adjective
- (of an illness) persisting for a long time or constantly recurring.
- (of a problem) long-lasting and difficult to eradicate.
- (of a person) having an illness persisting for a long time or constantly recurring.
My name is Genevieve and existing in my body is sometimes the hardest thing I do.
My body and I haven’t had the best of relationships first and foremost. We did just fine until age 12 when things in my family fell apart and I took signs of hips and breasts as personal failure on my body’s part. I immediately resigned myself to the belief that if I could take up less space in the world maybe I could stop feeling so sad and empty.
So began a dance of starvation, purging, and self-harm that lasted for years even with much therapy and many inpatient treatment centers. Despite my weight being the pinacle of my universe, I often felt very removed my body. For years I felt like I watched it from afar as it shrank and grew and shrank and grew again.
Anyone who has an eating disorder will tell you that recovery is an ongoing process that never ceases. Your ability to love and nourish your body isn’t always linear and sometimes you find yourself circling back to destructive ways.
In my mid-twenties I found myself starting to cultivate new experiences with my body while still continually struggling with what I looked like. Exercise became a new source of joy for me as my long-hated legs conquered a hilly half-marathon, cycled though 2 hour spin classes, and perhaps my greatest achievement, managed to run a 6:47 mile in 97 degree heat.
It seemed that though I still wished to be thinner, sleeker, leaner I was finding a sense of what my body was and what it was capable of. For the first time I found myself finally feeling more centered in what it felt like inside my body.
At age 28 life as I knew it changed dramatically when I became sick with two chronic diseases, both of which would leave me with daily unending pain, fatigue, and loss of cognitive function. It all happened so quickly that I often just felt in shock of how quickly simple acts like standing or dressing myself were things I now struggled with.
Gone were my days of working the job I adored or running or even leaving the house some days. This was a new body foreign to me, one that spoke in a sharp tongue of pain and never seemed out of fresh ideas of to make me understand that I had absolutely no control of what was going on. After years of starvation and self-harm, I was stunned by the realization that I could not force my body to stop malfunctioning as it responded to the inflammation going on inside me.
I am almost 32 now and my health has had many up and downs similar to my journey with my eating disorder. I have had periods of time where I am able to work part-time, do yoga, or go on a walk with my husband. I have also had periods where I have had to go to the ER for pain intervention and only able to leave the house in a wheelchair.
Chronic illness is truly humbling as you find yourself having to adjust your goals to what your body can tolerate. The pain has sometimes made me feel so defeated and angry at my body, a problem I think many struggle with when they are faced with suffering beyond their comprehension and looking for something to blame.
While this anger at my body isn’t a new concept , I now understand how fruitless it is as my body is fighting as hard as it can while under siege. I can finally see that disconnecting from myself even in moments of horrific pain leaves me empty and lost.
Photo by Stephen Caroll Photography
For a long time I refused to accept that this may be how the rest of my life is. Anyone who is chronically ill always has that hope in their back pocket that they can one day feel “normal”, that remission or a cure is waiting in the wings.
I told myself repeatedly that the life I was leading while sick and in pain wasn’t important because it didn’t live up to the standards I had set in my head. Just like with my anorexia, I created strict ideas of what I was supposed to be like and how because I was sick I was a failure. This thinking only exacerbated my grief and I finally had to face the reality that this is how my body is in this moment in time.
For the first time in my life I am experiencing true surrender as I accept that I cannot control my body anymore than I can control the stars in the sky. This body is the only one I will ever have and together we are traversing hard territory that no one prepared us for.
I choose to believe that there is a lesson within this experience although I don’t yet know what it is.
Maybe it is to continually find my center within my body no matter how my body feels.
Maybe it is to have more empathy and compassion for those who also struggle with health issues.
Maybe it is to love and accept my body with all it’s external flaws along with it’s angry nervous system and systemic inflammation.
Maybe it’s the experience of continually surrendering to the unexplained detours life guides us through and admitting powerlessness in the process.
Despite the pain I will continue to search for peace within my body and love it for everything it can achieve even if it is something as simple as putting my feet on the floor.
About the author
Genevieve lives in Winchester, VA with her awesome husband and two crazy dogs. She is the proud owner of Glow Skincare & Makeup. When she isn’t pimple-popping or making brides look fierce, she is an avid bookworm, knitter, and tv-show binge watcher. She also loves doing yoga and going on walks hoping she might find a kitten to take home.
I loved your post and can totally relate. Having chronic pain is very hard to sometimes function. I am now learning at the age of 47 to love my body and accept it’s limitations.
Thank you for sharing your journey and may you be blessed.
I have hashimoto’s which is autoimmune thyroiditis…even treated, I suffer flare ups when I lose hair (eyelashes and eye brows too), am exhausted, anxious and depressed at the same time and do not recover from bruises, scrapes, weight lifting muscle repair quickly at all. I can totally relate to this post in that I too, struggled with body image, weight, disordered eating as a tween/teen/young adult…finding my equilibrium in my mid twenties only to end up with this disease after the birth of my third child at 28 years old. Now, i’m 31, and currently searching for inspiration on the internet because i’m going through a flare up and trying not to sink too far back into depression about my disease and screw up all the progress i’ve made dealing with it. Thank you for not selling to me that you changed one thing in your diet and fixed all your issues miraculously! I’m sick of hearing that if one just eliminates gluten or dairy, all their problems will disappear…(I feel sicker than ever when I eliminate things from my diet). Thank you for writing from a place of self care and not just another form of self restriction and changes we need to make to improve our individual diseases. You’re writing from where you are, honestly, and that’s just what i needed to read today.