Summer Body Blues in the Wake of Ozempic: Installment II
publishing this while my cupcakes bake 💝
Hey guys. I wrote this yesterday in one big exhale after attempting to write every day for 14 days (more on that another time). I think it came out pretty good, for writing something in one big exhale in between checking for work messages, but please hold me gently because the subject matter is #sensitive. Last year around this time I wrote about body image and was decidedly more positive about it, if you’d like to read that it’s here.
I’m finding that Substack is sooo run-through these days (I say while writing my own), but now at least I can sympathize with how the Polish felt when we gentrified Greenpoint. Also, names have been changed because I’m learning this thing called privacy.
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It starts when Katrina knocks in the morning and pushes my unlocked door on its hinges, releasing a familiar creaking sound my dad always urges me to fix. I’m dying for a bagel she says, as I double knot the pink laces of my sneakers and slip my house key into my pocket. I’ve already eaten (yogurt, cut fruit, peanut butter) but of course I go, and when the cashier at our neighborhood spot asks why I’m not getting anything I say I’m just along for the ride. We walk across the island (Manhattan, that is) toward the West Village and my brain feels foggy. I can’t tell if it’s the electrolyte beverage I’m chugging or the lack of sleep I got because I woke up in the middle of the night with searing cramps that sent me to the bathroom floor, so visceral yet so fleeting I wonder if I dreamt them up. I hope that it passes because I’ve got a long day ahead of me, one that really only just begins at 1:30 PM and picks up speed as it catapults toward dusk. When I get home from the long walk where my head felt fuzzy, I lay out on my couch, the one stained with nail polish marks not even bleach will release. I wait for the foggy to pass. It almost always does.
After my inbox is cleared and the work messages are sent, I putz around on Nuuly, the app I rent clothes on. This goes on for quite some time, and soon I find myself poring over the reviews accompanied by each renter’s height and weight (author’s note: my dad made a big deal of distinguishing poring from pouring when he edited an essay I wrote in 8th grade and now I will never, ever forget it). I scroll through the photos of size 0’s and size 12’s and I compare the weight of each girl at 5’9 to my own. I zoom in on the photos the girls leave on the site, the ones that are supposed to show how the dress hits too short or how the fabric’s color looks different in the afternoon light, but all it shows me is that I should be skinnier. Later, I reveal perhaps for the first time to my therapist how much this comparison plagues me, how on the street I calculate the circumference of a passerby’s upper arm, and then I check my own. I feel ashamed to spend all this time counting and comparing, I tell her, because not only do I know that it’s bad but I find it in fact boring. There are enough girls wrought with demons since the dining hall days, now calorie counting and scale-checking and swapping dessert for cigarettes, dinners for cocktails and fries. I don’t want to be one of them.
I suppose I escaped it long enough, and I suppose every woman feels this way, nursing a decades-long desire to be 10 pounds lighter, one jean-size smaller, to take up less space. My therapist asks me what I think of my body and I’m relieved that my first thought is— it works. The pants once roomy are now too tight to zip, the shirts that gaped now stretch across the broadness of my back, hug against the fullness of my chest. When the ads for off-brand Ozempic and belly-tightening gummies (hi, Lemme Burn) flash across my feed on Instagram, I don’t just pause but go so far as to follow their links, adding to cart, almost reaching for my credit card before abandoning the pursuit all together. I don’t blame the algorithm either because I work in marketing after all, so I know that I’m giving all the right signals. I’m taking every action save hitting ‘purchase,’ barrelling toward check-out with every wrong intention. No wonder the ads keep coming.
I’m on the phone with Elizabeth when she tells me that she ordered her ‘size-up,’ expecting the shorts to hang low on her hips but instead found they were snug at the waist. I’m not alone in this, how could I be, when every message received is one that tells me that smaller is better. I was smaller once, too. I didn’t mean to be, didn’t try to drop pant sizes and deepen the chisel under my cheekbone. I wasn’t hungry so I didn’t eat. I wasn’t tired so I didn’t rest. I walked miles and miles, treading the soles of my sneakers bare, with each press of the heel and stride of my step I hoped to lessen the anguish in my chest. It did, sometimes, but there was only so much it could do. When all was said and done, it was too far gone, no walk or guided meditation or B-complex vitamin could make it all go away. I started swallowing the SSRI I was so hesitant to be prescribed and slowly, the world opened up again. I was hungry and I didn’t have to walk 8 miles a day to feel like I could find my own mind somewhat at ease. Eventually, those days were but a distant memory, and to my surprise, so were the pants that once gaped but now left marks on my body from where they pinched too tight.
Sometimes I hate the way that the woman I am now doesn’t fit in the pants of a girl I can’t even recognize. I tell myself over and over again that I’m supposed to grow. To be tender and soft. I don’t believe it everyday. And perhaps the idea of loving my body is too lofty a pursuit. Expectations are crippling and so I won’t set once I cannot reach. Instead, when I can find the courage to scroll past the weight-loss ads and choose not to guilt myself into a workout class I never actually liked, I tell myself this: The world needs more of me, not less.
Relate heavily. Fuck Nuuly reviews :P
Thank you and love you darling🩷