This Summer Is Getting Whatever Body I Give It

This week a couple different things happened: the CDC shifted its stance on wearing masks (fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear them in most situations) and the dreary cold spring weather New York has been having finally broke, resulting in a streak of actually sunny 70-degree days. With the caveat that there is still very much a pandemic happening, it feels like…normal spring again? I can’t believe it either. But I did what one would do to mark such an occasion: blew off the dust on my Resy app, opened it up, and booked a patio table for my friends for dinner Friday night.

Friday afternoon rolled around and I found myself standing in front of my closet in a familiar state, trying on every dress I own to determine what I should wear for an ultimately inconsequential gathering. But this time felt regressive, even bad — I felt utterly adolescent in my body insecurities and had a silent little pathetic breakdown about how the dresses I’ve worn every spring and summer for years seemed to fit differently on me after 14 months in quarantine. I mean, they mostly still fit, and I’m having a hard time distinguishing how much has actually changed about my body, versus how much my body dysmorphia is simply working overtime after a year of mostly being perceived through my laptop camera in Google Hangouts meetings. Regardless, after one calendar year spent mostly living in leggings, putting myself into normal clothes doesn’t really feel good.

Part of why I never talk about my body online is because several years ago the worst people in the world spent a few weeks doing that, so I don’t really feel the need to contribute much to that conversation. But what I will say about my body: It’s about average-sized by US women’s standards, and I fluctuate from a size 12 to 16 in pretty much anything I wear. You could classify me as “small fat.” For the most part, I relish the autonomy of wearing whatever the fuck I want, “dressing for your body type” be damned, and not second-guessing it. Outside of this specific blog post I try not to spend a lot of time meditating on or contemplating my body (for reasons why that may subconsciously be the case, see the top of this paragraph). It mostly does what it’s supposed to and I’m mostly fine with it.

Except for times like this when I revert back to the abject horror with which I regarded my body for much of my adolescence, forgoing meals during the day, learning appetite suppression techniques from pro-anorexia blogs, squeezing into a…