My Body by Madelyn May

 Sean Benham CC




My Body

        Disembodied VO: 
        In ninth grade, Mr. Johnson was
        Sex-ed and PE teacher, rolled into one. 
        He said: “the fastest way to lose some weight,
        is to simply stop at your plate.” 

        He then waved his hands, a fumbling coup, 
        “which you absolutely should not do.”

        But words are sparks that catch too fast, 
        the magician’s rabbit was already in the hat. 

        Embodied VO: 
     I’ve lived through phases of my body —mildly thin here, mildly heavy there. Curves like old-world cinema, Sophia Loren’s shadow wrapped around the hips my Nana once affectionately called “child-bearing,” like I was some Sicilian peasant waiting to get knocked up behind the town olive grove. 
        I was once a ballerina with D-cups. Discomfort was the only choreography.  
      Kids spat knives: “ugly” and “weird,” yet when I wore a tight shirt, boys stared. So did male teachers. I got used to the uncomfortable silence, the restless itchiness, of growing up in a body that seemed to walk into rooms before I did and left heavy, whispering silences in its wake. 

        When I was 21 I got breast reduction surgery. I didn’t immediately thin down but suddenly I could breathe. I could stand up straight for longer periods without back pain. My bra no longer needed to clock in for grueling 12 hour shifts. My body, suddenly, felt a little more like mine. A little more aligned with who I thought I was. You could even call it gender-affirming care, depending on who’s asking. The scars look almost identical to top surgery. 

      The results were immediate and surreal. I went bra-shopping with my mother for the second-first-time and cried in the Urban Outfitters dressing room, this time not out of embarrassment, but out of euphoria. I purchased a soft, lacy bralette I knew would fit. 

           But, the freedom that came like a train whistle in the dark, couldn’t stop the anxiety brain from its humming, buzzing bite. 
         Boys never saw me and when it did it wasn’t the real part. Boys were never interested in me and the ones that were, to put it lightly, fucking loved my tits. LOVED them. Fucking worshipped them and knelt at the altar. If men only wanted me for my rockin’ rack, what did I just do to myself?! What did it mean to take a scalpel to the one thing that seemed to make me desirable?
        And then there were the scars. Oh, scars. Deep and sprawling, like someone hand-stitched me back together. I’m 26 now and I still flinch a little when I take off my shirt to see the skin that remembers my original sin. 
          I call them “Frankentits.” 

         I’ve always been one to own what makes me uncomfortable. To laugh first. Laugh before they laugh. But humor, inevitably, is excused as an permission to pry: 

          “Can you still feel anything?” Not really. 
          “Why are your nipples huge?” I don’t know, ask my surgeon, he had the scissors. 

       “Can you still breastfeed one day?” Who knows. Probably not. Not that I want kids, but the idea that I’ve preemptively flunked some imagined motherhood exam doesn’t feel good. That I took a body, already hyper-feminized and sexualized since I was 13, one supposedly designed for baby-making, and rerouted it. And now, on soft, hormonal days, the kind where the silence starts narrating, that thought slips in like an unwanted hand on your lower back: 
           You broke the one thing your body was made to do. 

          A few pounds of yellow fat, gone. There’s literally less of me now, anatomically speaking. But the real question, the one that curls up in the lizard part of my brain, is: 
          Am I less of a woman? 
          Society loves that question. It hands it out to all women like party favors at one point or another.
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Less Woman, 2023, pen on tablecloth by me.

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         I don’t regret the surgery. And a smaller chest didn’t shrink the rest of me, not that I ever wanted it to. That was never the goal at the time. In fact, I still look back at photos, even from just two years ago, with my brand-spanking-new tiny tatas and think: 
“God, I look massive.” 

         That is mostly because right now, I’ve drifted into the thinnest I’ve ever been in my adult life. It sounds glamorous when you say it fast, a hushed, jealous whisper in a woman’s bar bathroom, but the truth is, I just wasn’t hungry. Not in some tragic mascara-bleeding-on-porcelain, two-fingered-on-the-cold-bathroom-tile kind of way. I never sat myself down, theatrical and tribunal, and said: you need to lose weight. I just wasn’t hungry. 
       At dinner with friends I could pass for normal: fork to plate, laughter between bites. But, when left to my own devices, I just wasn’t hungry. 
        I wasn’t hungry, and I didn’t notice until I finally was again… and now, even hunger is as loud as a big brass band parading down Bourbon and feels like a feast rolled out on a cedar table. 

      I’ve always been aware of my body the way a traveler is aware of their suitcase. How much space it took up. How it stacked up next to other girls’. How it moved through a crowd. But I truly never cared enough to try reshaping it. I was an athlete for most of my life. My body had a purpose, it had motion. I needed food, real food, to do what I was supposed to do. Feeding myself wasn’t failure, it was sustenance, gasoline. Bread and muscle and gravity were friends back then. 

      And besides, my genetics lean Mediterranean and genetics are a fixed thing, unmoveable, like good bone structure.
     My mother always described people as being either “big-boned” or “small-boned.” She’s “small-boned,” if you’re wondering. Two children later, chocolate on her breath, and still she is the size of a French girl surviving on a cigarette diet. 
      Honestly, the fact that my body dysmorphia is only appearing now and not during my years doing pirouettes next to anorexics and living full-time with a woman who looks like she stepped out from the pages of Italian Vogue, feels like a small miracle. 

     As soon as the weight slipped off me, like a coat slipping from a chair, I got a taste of what it’s like to exist in the world as one of those truly skinny people. Not one of those “slim-thic” people, as I was once described by a gay man in my freshman dorm. 

     God, it’s terrible that it feels so good. People are nicer to you. Softer. Warmer. People greet you with a smile like they’ve always known you. Or maybe it just feels that way. Does it matter? They say: 
     “You look amazing!” and the applause feeds you. 

     It didn’t help that this all lined up with month five of my Accutane treatment. My skin was baby-new and my waist looked borrowed from a middle schooler. I was glowing, in a digestible, wife-material kind of way. Sexualized, but softly. Waifish. 
     For the first time in my life, I was Jackie, not Marilyn. Like someone was imagining me picking out linen sheets and meeting their parents, not fogging up the backseat of a car. 

       Until, of course, the hunger came back. This is where I am now. 

       Disembodied VO: 
       Take the rabbit out of the hat and eat it too. 
       Mr. Johnson, pray tell, I’ll eat you too. 
       And I won’t feel bad,
      I won’t feel bad. 
      I have a never-ending hunger to plan. 

      Embodied VO: 
Guilt is my only second course. I tell myself it’s a money thing. One meal a day, max. Groceries are expensive. The tariffs! It’s all just economics and definitely NOT an eating disorder. 
     I keep thinking about what my high-school sex-ed/PE teacher said. 
     I keep thinking about what Kate Moss said: “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” 
     I keep thinking about what Carrie Bradshaw said: “sometimes I’d buy Vogue instead of dinner. I felt it fed me more.” 
    
    I’m trying not to think about how my brush with thinness is perfectly timed with the death of body-positivity and the quiet return of heroin chic. 
     I’m trying not to think about my accidental weight loss looking suspiciously like recession-era austerity. 
    When I walk through the grocery store and see empty shelves and eggs that are priced like luxury goods, I’m trying not to think about the way scarcity always makes skinniness fashionable again. 

     Cleverness is being able to live a lot off a little, that’s what living in New York teaches you. When no one can afford to live here, restraint is practically a currency. Skip lunch, drink coffee, pretend hunger is elegance. And if you can master it, you can get that $25 dollar cocktail with your rich friends or see that Broadway show. Your heartbeat, more winded than it’s ever been, can beat with the city’s in small, strategic bursts. It doesn’t necessarily make you feel better, but it does make you feel slightly above things, like you’ve figured out a trick other people haven’t. 

    So, when I see people with full plates and full bodies, some reptilian part of me thinks: 
    In this economy? Gluttony, I say!
    And I hate that part of me. That smug, inverted cruelty. 
    I see the curve of their stomachs and feel, briefly and stupidly, like I’ve won something. Some silent competition I never meant to start playing and now can’t stop. 
    The thoughts make me feel hideous and ashamed of how I got here. Not just guilty, but the ugliest I’ve ever felt. Like I’ve peeled back my own skin and found something rotting underneath. If someone else said these things, I’d call them a bully. I’d feel sick with just how unkind it is. 

      But, I think these thoughts anyway. 

    And I know, I know, I know that when I’m picking other people apart, it’s just me slicing into myself with someone else’s body as the decoy. Which doesn’t excuse it. 
     Even if that weren’t the case, I’m still judging people’s appearances. I’m still being a fucking asshole. 
     And I hate, I hate, I hate that I have it in me, that capacity for well dressed meanness. 

    When I compare myself to others in this way, I don’t just see what I’m afraid of becoming again. I see what I think I’ve conquered: appetite, indulgence, and the need to take up too much space because fundamentally, under ever-shedding layers of a disappearing person, I must feel undeserving of it. 

    But, this idea of restraint and discipline and self-control isn’t restraint and discipline and self-control. It’s low esteem dressed up as disordered eating. 
    It’s the art of folding up all the messy, hungry, too-much parts of myself into tiny compartments and labeling them “under control,” when really, it’s just a refusal to believe I’m allowed to take up more space than I already do and still be loved by myself or others. 

      In the other corners of my brain, I look at other people’s bodies and still see my lack, I still feel that envy green: 
     What do they possess in their hearts that I don’t that allows them to carry themselves so completely without apology, to always love themselves? To eat the whole fucking sandwich?

     Because ultimately, I don’t want to stand in front of a mirror and calculate my value. No one does and no one should. 
     I want to eat. More than that. I want to gorge on the rest of my life. 
    I want my thoughts to be consumed by other matters, other hungers. Music, books, love, work, life is all it’s strange, thrilling longness.    Not the mean voice that whispers when my fork is suspended in midair. 
     More realistically, I want to hear it and bite down anyway. 
     This goes for every mean voice, embodied and disembodied.
 
      Disembodied VO: 
      Fullness is an illusion, my dear. 
      Listen closely and it’ll whisper your death in your ear. 
      Open your mouth, reach down, and regurgitate only one thing year after year: 

       That lucky rabbit’s foot, carry me in tow,
       that pale little talisman, etched into my bone.
       Remind me only of the wildest, feral seeds I can sow.

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Madelyn May is an essayist, playwright, and poet based in New York City. She has a BFA in Screenwriting and History from Chapman University and has worked and written across mediums such as television, film, and journalism. She currently works in the Art Department at HarperCollins Publishers. Her work has appeared in Dreamworldgirl Zine, Chartium Magazine, and Raiya Magazine. 

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