west coast.

on my body and how i can never stop thinking about it.

i’m tired of always having something that my body is going through.

I’m about to go home for the Easter holiday, and all that’s slinking through my brain is the thought of being able to run my familiar route again.

I don’t run in the fall and winter. I’m terrified of running in London, which has terrible conditions in my eyes for even a light jog, and I hate the way being perceived as a runner makes me feel.

My body locks up at the thought of someone peering at me through their car as they watch me lag like a lame horse, relearning how to push myself forward and pick up the pace.

I’m always going through something: the luteal phase, menopause, stomach rumbling, stomach hurting, back aching, checking on my thigh gap, shoulders tense, legs too long, random bruises, breaking out. Exhausting. Constant. Unfair.

I’ve been told on two separate occasions that I am so intuitive with myself and my body and that it’s admirable. At the time it sounded nice and made me feel warm, but there are days when I hate how aware I am of how I feel.

I feel like it makes me unstable in a way and there’s less of a desire to believe me when I speak. I’m a hypochondriac already, but that doesn’t mean that all of my pain is phantom.

But there are phantoms. They are there when I try to do an at-home pilates workout, making me think about how I’d look if someone saw me now. I try to block it out when I run back home, the Virginia summer making me itch across my back.

I know the concept of being unwell and I know it familiarly through my mom. When she got sick, my life changed and hers did even more. I know what it feels like when my body is weak and I’m tired and I refuse to stop.

I know what my body looks like, whether it’s wrong or right. Like when portions of my back were lighter than the others. I sent a video to my family and they assured me it was nothing, but I still booked a physical.

I went to my GP, only to discover I had a non-contagious overpopulation of yeast that caused discoloration. She was very sweet about it.

It’s really common with women. It’s nothing serious. Let me know if it begins to spread or itch.

It was almost euphoric to know that I’d been right. That something was off and there was a name for it and I was right it getting it checked. It might not have been serious, but there was still a cream for me to pick up and use to make it better.

I thought about her words as I walked through the park on my way home.

It’s common with women.

What’s not a shared experience among women? Someone could make a video today about the way she feels displaced in her body and its motions and it would have a minimum of ten thousand likes and one hundred comments sympathizing and offering solutions.

Why was Eve so severely punished when she was manipulated by a man and Adam ate the apple too?

I’m too intuitive. I’m too aware.

Sometimes I feel like I’m not.

When I came home from my first year of university, I didn’t realize how much I’d given up on eating in order to save money. It was only when my dad said that it was like I’d been starving myself, that I realized how unwell I felt.

My body shut down around two weeks before I had to go back to London for my second year. I was really sick and highly anxious. Even typing this out makes me feel nauseous.

It was such a weird process to realize that I had unintentionally given myself an eating disorder. It’s even weirder now to attempt to heal from it and change my mindset. I constantly fear being unwell.

I know that I’m seen as skinny—people tell me all the time—but sometimes I think I’m fat or gaining weight. I constantly fear it.

I think of how my stomach looks in my activewear. I prefer leggings and a long sleeve, no matter how much I sweat.

There are countless times I stand in front of the mirror in my flat room and turn to the side, my throat tightening as I see my belly form a pouch. I squeeze the sides of it from underneath the covers and try to tell if the skin is too soft and saggy or if this is normal.

I’ve even put two fingers in a circle around my wrist to see if they closed around it.

My mom’s voice echoes through my head: You need to do something. You’re not going to look like this forever.

She didn’t mean it like that but I took it like that.

There’s a sickening rush of relief when my clothes fit the same as two weeks ago. There’s something heavy in my stomach when I have to block people because their ‘what I eat in a day’ videos are a little triggering or just EDs disguised.

(Like, you can have a calorie-deficient diet and still eat well.)

My relationship with food could stand to be improved. I used to have a large appetite and I don’t anymore because my stomach has quite literally gotten smaller. It doesn’t help that one of my flatmates makes comments about how she needs to lose weight and get back into shape.

We look the exact same.

But I’m doing better even though there are times when my body and mind freak me out and make me freeze. I get angry at how easy it is to slip back into how I was freshman year, my grocery list a little smaller than last week.

I wish I could stuff my face and then go to sleep without lying in the dark feeling along the roundness of my bloated tummy.

But I’m getting better. I’m infinitely better than last year.

I can’t wait to run when I get home, long sleeves or sports bra. I plan for an avocado and chicken bagel on Monday morning or maybe Monday afternoon.

I open Pinterest and see a film photography image of a girl at her birthday party. She’s leaning down and biting into the side of her cake with her teeth.

Icing is smeared all over her made-up face, her pink blush so bright it looks confectionary.

I think she looks beautiful.