When I first started writing this article about a year ago I had just sat in a Zoom call with three other creative practitioners and performers - three women - as we discussed the complicated relationships we had with our bodies. I’d looked down at my broken foot and then across at my desk where my recent bone scan lay as an uncomfortable reminder.
I thought about my doctor telling me only a few hours before, “You have low bone density, your spine is showing signs of osteopenia”. I thought about the last 6 years I’d spent blindly overtraining my under-fuelled body; about how I took pride in testing my limits and pushing myself to breaking point over and over again.
I knew then it was a time to listen, really listen, to these women and to my body.
In their gentle company I faced a confronting truth: I treated my body like a machine rather than a home. And this beautiful, incredible machine was showing signs of wear and tear. After years of abuse it was beginning to malfunction.
That moment triggered a long reflection on all the health advice I had been given when seeing doctors over the years. I’d been told that it was “normal” as a female dancer or athlete to lose my period, and if I wanted to bleed I could go on the pill - essentially ignore or mask the issue rather than fix the underlying problem. One doctor had once told me that if I wasn’t menstruating, I had low oestrogen and this would be weakening my bones. Her solution was to stop training and put on, at the very least, 5kg. But this was a scary thought.
I find it ironic that as a scrawny kid growing up I desperately wanted more curves, but as a dancer I was always given praise for my thin figure. I remember a teacher telling me as I was approaching auditions for tertiary training, “Don’t worry, they’ll accept you because of your body”. It wasn’t what my body could do, it was what it looked like. Only now can I see just how much I had slowly begun to attach some form of identity and success to my adolescent body - not being thin wouldn’t just subtract from my value as a dancer, it wouldn’t be me at all. I was rejecting the change my body naturally needed to move through as a woman.
A Release Photo by Matt Stewart
Fast forward into the rush of tertiary training, I became addicted to the endorphins of exercise and getting “faster, better, stronger”. I was not ready to give up all the hard work just so that I could start bleeding again. I saw the blood as a nuisance and an unnecessary pain. I felt a strange sense of pride in being able to beat my bodily system. So instead of stopping, I listened to the male doctors and told myself “I feel fine, I look fine, no period is convenient, no worries”. I continued making my body less woman, more machine.
I coupled this with the mindset that I should always work harder: whether it be extra training, extra rehearsals or extra work. A lecturer of mine told us in our first year that “dancers always take the stairs”. He was referring to the literal act (because 6-12 hours of training a day wasn’t enough we needed to climb up every flight of stairs we saw) but I had taken on this ethos wholeheartedly. I had heard the resounding message: rest is just missed opportunities.
My body responded in backlash. My stomach would twist into knots, I felt bloated more often than not (not fun when you’re wearing a leotard and tights all day). I went to a GP who recommended a nutritionist to treat what was described as my IBS symptoms. My goal was not to lose weight, but on her food plan I lost 5kgs in less than two months. I told her I was a dancer and I remember her saying she would “adjust my level of intake accordingly” - she specialised in dancer’s nutrition (apparently). The portion sizes were basically half of the amount I was eating at the time. Blindly following this plan in an attempt to do the right thing, the increased stress on my body left me a prime target for glandular fever which made me lose more weight which I couldn’t put back on. Nor did I want to. It seemed my shedding was earning me praise. The most uncomfortable memory of that experience for me was when I was asked by friends for my diet plan so that they too could have this unhealthy but somehow prized thin figure.
To add to the sting, nothing I’d done had worked to ease the painful symptoms, my stomach still twisted. Stress had been the real aggressor. All my food calculations had only worsened it. I became obsessed with rigorously logging in my food diary every day, eliminating and reintroducing foods as suggested. Gluten, dairy, pears, apples… the list seemed endless. I soon felt the impact on my mental health. I longed for the days when food and exercise didn’t consume me but it seemed so far away.
To put into context what this looked like from the outside: I usually ate three meals or more a day. I didn’t specifically calorie count and loathed the idea of crazy fad diets. I wasn’t overly self conscious or ashamed of the way I looked and although quite thin, was never dangerously underweight. My blood tests showed up fine each time (fun fact: calcium draws from the bones to feed the bloodstream). BUT I suffered from an eating disorder. My illness seemed invisible, deemed as normal by my friends, peers and even family who I was living and eating with at the time. On the outside it appeared as just a conscientiousness towards eating healthy and exercising. My over-analysing was masked as motivation. I saw this work as something that was required of a professional dancer or someone who cared about their physical fitness. It was the deal I had signed up for, the burden I chose to grin and bear. I hadn’t once considered it an illness, only a necessity.
I remember learning about anorexia in year nine at school. I particularly remember a powerpoint presentation of young girls that look like skeletons staring into a mirror and believing they were fat despite being only bone. I asked myself how anyone could do that to themselves. Now I understand it more broadly. I see anorexia when I look at fitspo instagram influencers, models or even athletes. People we admire, praise and congratulate for their self harm. We have normalised and even encouraged this unhealthy and unnatural behaviour.
I shudder to think how many girls and women are unknowingly in that same place.
It wasn’t until I really recognised that change would mean more “success” that I began to reconsider my ways. I decided I had to unpack myself, uncoil the spiral, by reconsidering everything I thought was right - my appearance, work output, thought patterns. I would embrace what I called my ‘soft body’. Embrace rest. See success in doing nothing. See achievement in letting go. I took my lust for a challenge and reversed it - what if I don’t train today AND tomorrow? What if today I eat whatever I feel like and be proud of myself for it? What if I take a whole day off and feel damn good about it? Not just because I “deserve it” like consumerist culture tells me, but because I really need it. It didn’t take long at all for my body to thank me in a release of red fluid. My IBS symptoms retreated into the shadows. I watched my body transform with this strange mix of fear and pride. I challenged myself to accept however I looked and instead consider how I felt.
In regaining my cycle, my connection to my body, I noticed side effects I didn’t expect. I could recognise uncomfortable emotions with more clarity and was able to deal with them more effectively. I noticed when I was over-fatigued or anxious. I could stop, slow down, rejuvenate and avoid the stomach turns. I would always feel much stronger and more capable soon after. I was surprised by the great surges of creativity, reflectiveness and profound moments of clarity that followed these inward moments. Most important of all, I felt a confidence slowly grow within me, one that was deep and firm as it came from a place of self-knowing and compassion.
I realised that the person who knows my body best, is me.
Food diaries, bad diet plans, excessive training habits and unhealthy body image ideologies were fed to me by professionals and peers in my formative years. I had absorbed it all like a sponge and now I was rinsing myself out. Along with the anger, fear and disbelief at how stupidly wrong the world, and I, can be sometimes. I came to accept that it would take time to rewire my brain. To sit with myself patiently and embrace the change unfolding in my body, mind and heart.
My doctor said in my final check up for my foot that when you break a bone, the calcification in the healing process means that the bone is thicker for some time afterwards. I see this as how I am now. I’m aware of where I’ve been and where I am. It has now been over a year since I started bleeding again, my bone density is increasing, and I see the injury I incurred at that point in time as life teaching me an important lesson... or lessons.
I know that warped image I had of what I should do, and should be, is far behind me and that I am much better for it. Most importantly, I’m learning to truly appreciate the experience of living within this magnificent human body.
What I like to remember now most from that Zoom call a year ago, was looking at the faces on my screen and seeing three women in completely different stages of life - youth, motherhood and menopause. As they spoke about the challenges they faced, mourning the loss of their previous bodies after pregnancy, ageing and hormonal shifts, I realised that my recent experience of bodily change is one I would meet again.
Like a turning of seasons or a shifting of the tides, we find ourselves in constant transformation. Do we acknowledge this change as beautiful or do we fear it?
I was leaving past frustrations with my body - the inconvenient blood and pain, physical inferiority, emotional turbulence - for a new image of myself. One which realised how its changeable nature could lead to a greater ability to accept, understand and grow.