Show Notes

Listeners’ Letter

Dear Body,

I want to thank you for never giving up on me. For so many years we didn’t speak – I treated you like a second thought – something that was only good for carrying my brain around from place to place.

It’s taken a lot to get the point where I feel you, notice you, care for you. It took a long time for me to understand what my frustrations were truly rooted in. I had been told so often that surely my disordered eating was about simple dysmorphia – being exposed to too many images of models growing up. And certainly the looks of the early 2000s didn’t help.

But it was more than that. When I looked at you, I saw a body that did not reflect the androgyny I craved. I saw a body that was too feminized – that drew too much attention to being a “girl”.

I yearned to have a frame that possessed no curves, just angles. The same year that I developed restrictive eating, I had months of crisis – panicking at random times throughout my day that I should have been a boy. That everything about my life and my body was a mistake.

The more I leaned into a feminized performance, the worse I felt. Until, eventually, I felt nothing. My body was now a tool for getting me around. It was something to be punished and minimized and contorted. Because I didn’t understand what to make of myself. Because I didn’t have the language to name myself. Because it felt like there was no other way.

COVID has caused many gender transformations. It’s given folks a chance to stop performing, to be with themselves, to be with their bodies. I’m not the only one who began using new pronouns over the past two years. I’m not the only one whose recovery includes a gender awakening.

And even though I’ve been in process with recovery for quite a few years, known the truth of myself for longer, it’s only recently that I felt brave enough to say it. To ask others to reflect that knowledge back to me by using the pronouns and name that feel like who I am. Who I’ve always been.

I never thought that I’d be able to let you be. To see you more as a vessel and less as a receptacle. It’s not easy. Dysphoria isn’t easy. But each day I accrue more moments. Each day I feel more grateful that you led me here. To doing work I love, to having a community I love, to feeling embodied & connected to the world around me.

Thank you for being the medium through which I experience it all.

– H.