A week later, sitting on the couch with her gaze locked onto her phone, I peered over her shoulder and saw a still from Ariana Grande’s music video, “Petal.” Carolyn stared at the photo, then down her own shirt at her sternum, tracing a finger over the ridges. “Is my…this…showing too much?”
It took everything in me to remain calm. “There is no such thing as too much as long as you’re okay,” I reminded her. “You’re exactly the way you’re supposed to be.”
It was a reassurance I’d longed for as a kid; there is nothing wrong with you. You are beautiful. I’d spent so much of my life aching to be told those things, so long that eventually I’d learned to tell them to myself, and eventually believe them.
My daughter deflated, leaning back on the cushions, looking defeated. “But why don’t I look like you?”
Amid the swelling conversations around thinness—who’s on what GLP-1, whose collarbones and arms mean what—I’m watching my daughter navigate the same hell I waded through for most of my life, but from a totally different vantage point. It has turned my understanding of body image and body discourse upside-down; for so long I’d assumed that a benefit of my daughter’s thinness would be fewer body issues. It’s a message that is delivered over and over. People who have lost a lot of weight catalog the benefits: people are kinder, movement is easier, energy returns. There is an enduring promise that if you can get small enough, the scrutiny will ease. Emotional fallout over public body discourse was something I’d only ever experienced as a large body’s burden.
Of course disordered eating is dangerous. Of course being underweight can be, too. But a person’s health and body is a matter between them and their doctor—never the public. Speculation, condemnation, derision dressed as concern: it all amounts to the same thing, which is a young girl looking in the mirror and believing something about her is wrong.
