Emilie

“I’ve never understood how people can love their bodies, nor really understood how they can hate them either. I’ve always seen my body as nothing so much as deeply disturbing in its constant variance, a fluctuating, unmanageable thing that has basically nothing to do with me, is not really any of my business at all.
How am I supposed to accept or like or hate or be neutral about a thing that will not stay the same? How can I maintain consistent feelings towards a changing thing like that? Should I concede instead that I can’t, that it's necessary instead to cleave my body – in all its hideous wilful growth and recession and blooming and withering – from myself, from me?
I am told this is impossible. I am told this most often by men. They have studied philosophers I haven’t, but the things they say in dressed-up terms are just like the florid self-help slogans by women they think are stupid. The things they say are: You are your body. There is no divide. When it changes, that’s you changing. You are not just a witness to your body’s vagaries, you are the architect.
People are scared of teenagers having sex but we might think sometimes about the misery of having a teenage body, a teenage girl’s body especially, how tedious and painful and punitive, and remember that sex might be the first time she realises that bodies can be made to feel good. That the million sensitive places which cause you to feel pain can also be sensitive to pleasure. That when you want to cry it will not always be from sadness.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation