What does it mean to have the perfect body?

Undoing – Part I

Undoing is a Bumble x Club Reticent four part series on untangling the lived reality and inert beliefs of a modern woman, then relearning about ourselves from the ground up.

It is a midweek night like any other, where dissatisfaction collides with routine, and we all have our ways of coping. I resort to my favorite therapeutic act – scrolling through my notes app, where most of my life is enclosed in a maze-like terrain. It’s like taking a walk through the periodic table of my past: mementos, grudges, lists, scary email drafts, and even noble acts are collected and chaotically scattered through the years.

The “Things to do this year” notes are a separate genre – a tradition I’ve had since I was a teenager. Sometimes gently, other times tenaciously, I’d get so serious about getting my life together. The list would change based on my life phase, amongst other factors like serendipity or joie de vivre, varying from ‘get promoted to senior copywriter’ and ‘more $$$ this year!!’ to more vulnerable goalposts like ‘quit the X situationship’ and ‘find a good guy.’ A woman’s goals are never static: like our pain points and triumphs, they expand, transform, lose relevance – all beautiful in their transience. Essentially, each of our resolutions ends up being something we stop caring about, either via getting it and moving right onto the next goal, or forgetting about it entirely. But encoded in all of these ambitious projects of the self through the years, all different and unique as they come, one goal remained the same. Every single list, since I turned thirteen, spelled out the same thing:

Lose weight.

The message is clear. Sure, it would go from bold to cursive, from a vague promise to a proclamation of precision, mentioning starting weight, goal weight, and all the methods of torture required to get me from point A to point B. But the goal persists. Like a lace corset stapled all the way down to the small of my back, this curse of needing to alter what exists, to transform what’s been given to me, to achieve a smaller, more toned shape, is a negotiation metastasizing through decades of life, never really leaving me alone. It doesn’t matter what I do. I’m almost sure it will outlast me. How come everything about us evolves and changes except for our longing for a better body?

Why the “Perfect Body” Never Feels Attainable

The longing isn’t the problem. Superficial wanting can be harmless – and useful when needed. The problem is that a ‘perfect body’ is an abstraction with little to no substance behind it, no firmness, and therefore no end in sight. It’s a construct made of permeable fabric, polyester at best. If each one of us were to define the perfect body, the unanimous answer would be that the body must be someone else’s. Arranged next to me is an assembly of women just like myself, running on inertia, dawn into dusk, wearing different outfits, manners, and worldviews; we’re united and separated by our misery in arguing with the scale, with our bone structure, and with the fridge. Hoping for a better, simpler life – one where our bodies are no longer making us upset. Not too much to ask, I hope? It’s a collective misery-infused hallucination that never drives us anywhere because it isn’t meant to evoke anything beyond scarcity within the group it appeals to. It operates on the premises of a woman never being happy with herself. Mostly, it’s just a taunting, boring, thankless party we’ve all been invited to, and we’ve overstayed our welcome.

A montage of every stolen moment stellates. It has robbed me of so much precious time. Thinking about my thighs when kissing on a date. Thinking about my arms when dancing with girlfriends. About my stomach when making a promise. About my boobs when breaking it. He wants to cook a nice dinner. I can’t go out tonight. Can’t wear what I want to celebrate a loved one. I round up the numbers to my advantage, counting the years given up to this madness, always wishing for an alteration in some distant future, for a tailor-made body served on the platter that pleases the most distant of eyes, demanding itself to be seen, then asking to hide. But every day is all there is. Has it ever taken me outside of my own head? Not really – so why is it this hard to let go?

How Body Obsession Steals Time From Real Life

Forgiving myself for not matching the image of a ‘perfectly bodied’ woman calcified on my vision board and resolution list circa hair scrunchie and cola flavored chapstick days, and coming to terms with what I look here and now, would mean succumbing to the colossal agency of my own life. To how much power womanhood holds when it isn’t based on scale numbers or tiny lunches. It would untangle me from the waiting room of expectation and submerge me straight into reality – into what’s tangible and true and where real things happen in real time, real feelings surface upon real pain. It would collide me with the miraculous importance of all the things I’m not ready to stomach. Surely, it would point me to all the love that I have – and all that I had loved and lost. The things that deserve not just my love and attention but labor and incentive, which means laying off my moodiness, putting my pride and feelings on the shelf, knowing bigger and better. The responsibilities to attend to, every day and every moment, putting my head down like it means something – like it means everything. That he needs me and my time, not my waist circumference.

What Happens When You Stop Measuring Your Worth by Your Body?

And I would have to surrender. Surrender to the possibility the desire to get from point A to point B was never quite about weight or getting a body to a certain physique; it was something soaking in gravity and meaning, requiring grit and a handful of wisdom, long-term planning over the bravado of impulse; something that just might take all my life and even then leave me panting and lacking answers and dots. It is my life path, beaming and demanding my undivided attention, only disguised as yet another sprint on the body improvement project. Releasing appearance worries would free up the mental space for a shape of something else to take place: an uncertainty much deeper and scarier than one that arises with the phantom pain of outgrowing your college jeans. That getting somewhere – anywhere, really – requires honesty and presence. Not my best looks at all. We are only as preoccupied with appearances as we’re not tending to our soul.

Is the Desire to Change Your Body Really About Your Body?

And then it hits me, that the lifelong obsession is nothing but a delay strategy, a jukebox of potential, effective in its gratifying and even applauded ways – and how could I not see this? The perfect body is a notion of a static moment – an immobile structure that represents something bigger than us. In our crisis of being ruled by the conceptual, we have been blocking off the vital, the visual, the tactile. The essential. Cutting life off at the root, parting ways with pleasure, what a punishment in the name of big old nothing.

And then I get off my phone and look around my room to find myself in the mirror – the flesh is there, supple and patient against the years of trying to change it, forgiving in its own ways, but it’s been getting a little older and wiser. Time has given it meaning and substance. And I have hope for the girl staring back. Soon she will know her fulfillment is predicated on the goodness of her words and truthfulness of action. And while the moment hasn’t arrived yet, she can feel it hovering over, hiding in plain sight of a rainy midweek. She can feel a better life pending. It means a freer life, of course. Not one where notes app weight suggestions matter.