I hate how much power it has over me. Some mornings it’s just a number and I move on with my day without thinking twice. Other mornings it’s the first thing I think about before I’ve even properly woken up, before my feet hit the floor, and depending on what it says, my whole mood is basically decided before breakfast. It’s ridiculous when I say it out loud like that. A number, on a small piece of plastic and metal, deciding how I get to feel about myself for the next twelve hours. But that’s genuinely how it plays out, more days than I’d like to admit.
A good number and I feel like I’m allowed to be confident. I’ll wear the thing I actually want to wear instead of the safe thing. I’ll say yes to plans without doing the mental math first. I’ll let someone take a photo of me and not immediately ask to see it and delete it if I don’t like what I see. I feel, for lack of a better word, allowed — allowed to take up space, allowed to enjoy my food, allowed to just exist in my body without narrating it to myself the whole time.
Photo by Joachim Schnürle on Unsplash
A bad number and it’s like a switch flips. I spend the day feeling like I need to apologise for existing. I cancel plans I was looking forward to a day earlier. I avoid mirrors and photos and anything with a reflective surface, basically. I get snappy with people I love over things that have nothing to do with any of this, because the discomfort has to go somewhere and it usually comes out sideways. I catch myself sucking my stomach in during ordinary conversations, like anyone is even looking, like anyone cares as much as I do in that moment.
The frustrating part is that I know, logically, a single measurement doesn’t say anything about who I am. It doesn’t measure what kind of friend I am, whether I’m good at my job, whether I’m a decent parent, whether I’m kind, whether I’m someone worth knowing. I know all of that, and I could argue the case convincingly to anyone else who felt this way about themselves. But knowing it hasn’t stopped me from handing over the steering wheel every single morning, first thing, before I’ve had a chance to decide anything else about how my day is going to go.
I don’t know exactly when my sense of worth got so tangled up with my body. It feels like it’s been there so long I can’t remember a version of myself without it running quietly in the background. I don’t know how to fully untangle it either, or if that’s even realistic at this point, or whether it’s more about learning to notice the switch flipping and not letting it drive the whole day the way it currently does. I’m not looking for a neat fix. I’m just tired — tired of a number having that much say over how I feel about myself, and tired of pretending on the good days that this isn’t something I’m actually dealing with underneath it all.