Navigating the Messy Middle by Ann Douglas

Author:Ann Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women's Health, Self-Help, Motivational, Inspirational, Social Science, Women's Studies, Middle-aged women, Life skills guides, Middle age, Psychological aspects, Social aspects
ISBN: 9781771623445
Publisher: Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
Published: 2022-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Body Love

“What does it mean exactly to love your body on its own terms, as it is now?”

Samantha Brennan and Tracy Isaacs pose this question in their book Fit at Mid-Life: A Feminist Fitness Journey—and Brennan proceeds to answer in a really powerful way. “What does it mean to ‘love’ this body? I don’t think it’s perfect, aesthetically speaking,” she writes. “That’s not what I mean at all. I could list all its flaws . . . but I won’t. I love my kids. I don’t think they are perfect. I’m not talking about aesthetics and I’m not talking about perfection. I don’t associate either of those values with love.”

I’ve probably read those words a hundred times over the course of the past year, and yet every time I read them, I am transported to a place of radical self-acceptance, a place where my body doesn’t have to be anything to be deemed worthy of love. My body can just be. It’s a place of freedom, calm and joy—and a place I couldn’t have even imagined visiting, back when I was trapped in a decades-long state of self-neglect and self-loathing.

“Body shame flourishes in our world because profit and power depend on it,” writes Sonya Renee Taylor, a Black queer author and activist, in The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love. A key piece of my own midlife journey has been rejecting body shame and stepping into a place of body love. I am choosing to live my life in a way that robs profit and power of at least some of its body shame supply.

It’s not necessarily an easy journey. Not only are we likely to be carrying around a lot of cultural baggage about body image in general, given our culture’s toxic and limiting messages about what a body is supposed to be, but now we also get to add a new layer of messaging related to aging. And so, for many of us, midlife becomes a time of recognizing and working through messages of internalized ageism—what psychologist Mary Pipher and others have described as “prejudice against one’s own future self.”

Sheila, who is fifty-seven, remembers struggling with those feelings, back when she was in her early forties. “I remember looking at women who were maybe ten years older than I was and actually feeling afraid. I remember asking myself, ‘Am I going to look like that?’ I remember feeling like I wanted to distance myself from these women. And I remember being both deeply aware of my own internalized ageism and very troubled by what I was feeling.” Sheila ultimately managed to work through these feelings. A decade later, those friends who are ten years older no longer seem “ancient” to her. But it took time for her to make sense of all the thoughts and feelings that were bundled into that initial visceral reaction to the signs of aging on her friends’ faces.

And that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this

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