When I was 7 years old, I noticed my stomach wasn’t perfectly flat like the other girls in dance class. For a moment, I remember contemplating taking a pair of kitchen scissors to trim off the “extra” flesh. I hoped that if I looked more like the other girls, maybe I would feel better in my neon spandex mid-drift bearing dance costume. I spent the next 15 years of my life at war with my body, developing a life-threatening eating disorder, which ravaged every aspect of that body in an attempt to distract myself from the emptiness and pain I felt inside.

After reaching a full recovery in my twenties, I was confident in my body, which was thin, white, and able. I identified my thin privilege and used it to spark conversations with clients and felt proud of my life as a recovered clinician. I often talked about set points, and how my weight had been stable for years and how, when we feed our bodies throughout the day, they level out and find the weight range that works best for them. As I worked in an eating disorder treatment center for several years and food was ever abundant, and I inched closer to thirty, I found myself handed a print out of a doctor’s office with my weight on it. I hadn’t seen my weight in years as I actively choose not to know it out of respect for the eating disorder clients I work with. I preach all day long, “I am not a number,” and I always try to live by what I preach. Those numbers on a clip art scale jumped out at me as if they were in bright neon. I was faced with the fact that I had gained weight since the last time I saw my weight, and I was faced with a surreal, out-of-body experience. I instantly knew how my clients had interpreted similar experiences. I instantly knew how my eating disorder would have taken this moment. I also heard diet culture ringing in my ear, I could lose the weight, I could diet. I remember going back to work and processing this moment with a co-worker and she looked at me and said, so what you gained weight? Instantly the uncomfortable feeling in my chest was gone. She was absolutely right. Who the fuck cares? I was happy in my personal life and career. I had finally reached a point in my life where I was content; there was no space for old tapes to play in my head. I knew my truth, and that was that being heavier meant nothing.

As I sit here writing this, I am 32 years old. I have no idea where life will take me, but I am often contemplating my age and my body and what it means to be female and how my eating disorder potentially could have jeopardized all of it. Recently, I participated in an online training done by Elizabeth Scott of The body Positive, and it got me thinking about my body and it’s history. As an able-bodied human, I was given everything I need to create and sustain life. The curve of my hips and breasts was passed down for generations to allow me to birth our future. My red hair is a nod to my pale and freckled family members who stood out with their fiery spirits and also had to hide from the sun. The scoliosis in my back represents my ancestors who also struggled with back pain. All of these body parts represent those ancestors. The men and women who went before me, who had their babies in war torn countries, who used their legs to walk on foot from Poland to Germany, the women who used their bodies to dance the night away as flappers in the 1920s, the women who used their arms to swaddle and cradle their children at night, the woman whose eyes saw unimaginable sorrow as they mourned the loss of two sons, the women who defied the gender norms by working and wearing pants instead of dresses because they were more comfortable, the women who used their voice to laugh and speak and be themselves when the world was attempting to silence them. Yes, my body is flawed and imperfect, but there are history and legacy in those flaws; this is not my body alone. This is our body. I carry their legacy and strength in each step, each meal, and each action I take.