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What do you (dis)like about your body? 👻

Dear Creatrix,

How do you feel today? How did it feel to think more about your body in this world and how it may or may not shape your experience?

Please share your thoughts and questions with me, and other participants, by leaving a comment below or in our Facebook group.

Today we are going to go a bit deeper into how we see ourselves, and we will honestly explore what we like and don’t like about our bodies.

And that may mean digging deep, and, if we feel ready to do so, facing some traumatic experiences we had, that shaped the way we currently relate to our bodies.

So this is a trigger warning and an invitation.

Do this when you feel ready, if you need help or have questions, reach out.

I’m going to share some of my experiences, that were not always so nice, so also see that you’re in the right mindset when you read this.

After writing this, I felt pretty down for a while because it brought up unprocessed emotions.

This process of looking at what hurt us at a time, when we didn’t know how to process our emotions, can be difficult. We may relive situations – but we can now process them in better ways.

Check out the ritual in the family chapter to learn how to rewrite stories of your past, or the practice in the relationships chapter on how to process your emotions – as both of this may help.

But most of all, listen to your body and be gentle.

If you feel like you can’t handle something, pause, seek support and only come back when you feel ready for it.

Here’s part of my story:

When I grew up, I did not feel like I had autonomy over my body. Or like my boundaries were respected very much or ever.

One thing I remember was having chicken pox, and it was really bad. My whole body was covered, and it was painful and itchy, and I felt even more uncomfortable in my body than I usually did.

Yet, my mum kept taking pictures of me naked and then continued to show them to all of her friends even though I protested. I felt like no one saw my pain, or was there for me, and that my pain and my body was just there for other people’s entertainment.

I remember how I finally snapped when she put the pictures she took into the photo album.

I ripped the pictures out and tore them into pieces – I remember how surprised she was, and how she asked me to stop, and tried to explain that this was a good memory for me to have later on in life.

I still full-heartedly disagree.

And I still have no idea if my mother ever understood how painful that experience was for me. I felt so deeply violated.

Not once in the whole process, of being sick and suffering, did I feel seen as a person. I was shown around and treated as if I, or my pain, didn’t exist, and as if I was just there for their amusement – and I had no idea how to be help them see me – or how to be able to be seen as a person.

It really showed me that in that context, in my family, my emotions, my feelings did not matter.

And as I was a child and that was my world, I thought that this is true for me in this world.

I thought that what I feel, what I need or how I am, doesn’t matter in this world.

And so I lived my life accordingly. Being timid. Feeling like a burden, because I couldn’t always hide my feelings. Trying to become invisible as much as I could.

Later in puberty, my mum was concerned about my breasts getting too big, and I remember how she had a whole group of friends over and asked me to come to the living room, to show my breasts to them, and they asked me to undress so that they could all collectively judge me.

It was incredibly humiliating again, and felt so wrong, but I didn’t know how to say no yet, or any more.

In the end, they decided to schedule an appointment to reduce the size of breasts, but fortunately, at some point in the process they needed my agreement – which I didn’t give.

I must have been 12 or 13 at the time, and I just remember that I realized I had no idea about the implications of such a decision, and from everything I knew – neither did my parents.

But I felt like there must be a reason for me to be the way I am, even if I didn’t understand it yet.

I knew I wasn’t able to understand myself and the world yet, and that it seemed wrong to make an irreversible decision without knowing if it’s right or wrong.

And I’m glad I listened to myself there, and that they didn’t push this any further.

But the way it was dealt with, the way I was treated, made me feel ashamed of my breasts and my body until I started my own journey of self-actualization.

And I could share many more stories. I was forced to go to Ballet classes where I was body-shamed 90% of the time.

I was put on diets, and I could always feel what people think. The fear of me being too fat lingered over me like a shadow.

Other girls were constantly pointed out to me, and I was told how nice and skinny they were, implicating that I was not, and so on.

And so I felt like I couldn’t be loved in this body.

I thought that my body was wrong, and that somehow it was my fault and that I needed to do something to change it – so that maybe then I could be loved.

Which obviously isn’t true – but it was as long I thought it was.

And I feel like many of us weren’t born thinking that there was something wrong with our bodies, it’s our experiences during the time when we were growing up that created these ideas – that made us learn that there was something wrong with our body.

And what we can learn, we can unlearn.

So we will get to explore how to do that in a bit.

Before we do that, I’d like to share another story.

One time, when I was travelling in Macedonia, I was out with a friend and two guys came towards us, and one of them just grabbed my breasts.

It was in the middle of the day, in the middle of a busy street, and no one did anything.

My friend eventually said something to them, and then they just grabbed her and put an arm around her neck, holding her in a lock and the other guy, I think, grabbed my arm very firmly.

I remember how powerless I felt because I knew I wasn’t as strong physically, as they were, and no one around seemed to care enough to intervene.

So, I did what I learned growing up fighting with my brother: I pinched the guy who was holding my friend and then the other and eventually, they let us go.

But it reminded me of the fact that I’m fragile, as a woman in the world, and that no one had my back.

There was more sexual harassment in Egypt. Guys literally just came up and touched me wherever they wanted – the hardest thing for me at that time was that my boyfriend at the time didn’t do anything about it at all.

So again it felt like it was okay, because no one protested.

And it took me a long time to realize that it wasn’t. But this didn’t just happen in other countries, it also happened at home in Germany. And in lefty, queer, punk places. Or regular places. Really. So many times.

I could fill a whole book with stories about that.

And I had so many discussions with men around this as well – because no one ever intervened.

I remember one very sweet and queer friend, who I really liked in many ways, but who I met at a time when I didn’t tolerate sexist behaviour any more and had just shared about another episode of unwanted touch at a bar.

He said that women should just learn self-defence, and that it’s also kind of hot when women know how to defend themselves.

I agree that it’s good to know how to protect yourself because it gives you more options to move and to possibly feel safe in the world, but it is clearly no solution to the problem.

The only solution to stop women from being touched by men, without their consent, is for men to stop touching or harassing women.

Those who get harassed are not the problem, and responsible for the solution – those who harass are.

That doesn’t mean that I am not and won’t be better prepared from now on – against and for harassment – but in other ways than commonly practiced.

I don’t want to use self-defence, I don’t want to react – I’m working on creating an aura that is so strong and powerful, that no one will dare to touch me any more.

I will love myself so fiercely and walk around so confidently, joyfully and embodied, that people will know better than to try things with me.

But the other thing that we will have to do – collectively – is to raise boys who don’t think it is okay to touch anyone without their consent.

And we need conscious men to teach other men this and to hold them accountable as well.

And then we also need to make sure that all people become aware of the fact that it is never OK to touch any other person without their consent.

I have two little nieces (my cousin’s kids) who have Afro hair and I only went to two family parties with them, but at each one I had to stop a white man from touching their hair.

They were literally just putting their hand in my nieces’ hair, right in front of me, without asking or checking, or hesitating.

These two men will surely never do that again because from the way they looked, they got the talk of their lives from me, but it’s incredible how people have such a hard time respecting other people’s bodies and their right to exist unharmed.

Or how they think their curiosity is somehow more important than the consent and the free will or choice of another person.

And then, of course, there are the ways in which the media presents the body.

The beauty ideals in certain regions or globally that have an effect on how we see ourselves as well.

Or just remarks we hear growing up.

I often heard my mum say men just get better looking as they age, while women always look worse when they get older.

Or that gay men are okay, but gay women aren’t.

It confused me, I could tell that I didn’t actually think that what my mother said was true, but it made me wonder about what other people may think of me later because I knew I was a woman and gay, even if my parents maybe didn’t at that point.

And so the list goes own.

In my ballet class, I was told I couldn’t play any of the good parts because those were only for the skinny girls.

I remember that in High School we had one PE teacher who actually gave me a good grade because she based her grades on performance and effort, and didn’t just give good grades to the skinny girls or athletic boys and medium grades to the rest.

But the thing is that all of this has not only shaped my image of myself, looking back I realize that my image of myself also created all of these experiences.

And that is not to imply that I am to blame for them, but that I co-created them to learn from them.

And now that I have learned these lessons and can see this, I can create a different reality and different experiences for myself my consciously choosing how I want to be seen by world. And that is also the reason why I shared this with you.

Because the CREATRIX School is about empowerment.

It’s about realizing that while we couldn’t help ourselves as children, or young adults, or even as adults, we can now.

“You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”
― James Baldwin

James Baldwin was a keen observer and a truth teller, and I wholeheartedly agree with him on this one. I personally wouldn’t call it, or work with, force – but I actually adapted this quote and put it on my wall.

My version says: “Decide who & how you want to be. And then be that, every day. You can do it. The whole universe is cheering you on.”

Because we may have certain default settings, and we might have attracted certain situations in our lives so far, but we can change.

Not by changing others, but by changing ourselves.

And once we set the tone for how we wish to be treated – the world changes accordingly.

(And if we don’t do that, it never means we are to blame for other people’s bad behaviour –  but that we can choose to be treated differently from now on – if we want to be – and that we’re not doomed to stay stuck, just because others are unwilling or unable to change or that we have to wait until they do. We can create a different reality for ourselves right now.)

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