Writing diverse body types when you have body dysmorphia
This subject can be kind of touchy, but I think it’s important -- and generally not discussed when we talk about books.
Photo by @rsanchescarvalho from Unsplash.
“I didn’t want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was afraid of mirrors, because they showed an inescapable ugliness.”
I don’t remember the title of this book, but I distinctly remember reading the description of the main character’s waist. In the book, she’s eating with her friends, and one of her friends leans over and is able to fully wrap her fingers around the whole of her waist - insinuating that the main character has a waist the size of a dollar coin.
Besides being wholly unrealistic and just horrendous in imagining what that would look like, I think it was damaging for me as a young reader - I was probably in middle school when I read this book. I remember trying to wrap my fingers around my waist and being unable to do even with both hands. Though this wasn’t the start of my body problems (in discussions with my therapist, we’ve determined that started WAY earlier), but it definitely helped inform what society deems the ideal female body type should look like - and that I don’t have it.
In every single book or short story I’ve written (excluding the latest one), the female main characters have been stick thin and gorgeous. I saw it as an ideal - something I wanted and didn’t have - painted as words on page. In the books I’m reading nowadays, I see the same thing, by both male and female authors. Beauty is portrayed as goodness, while ugliness is evil. The severity of a jawline or eyebrows can suggest a snooty character, a fat character is comedic relief or in general a bum, and beautiful characters, women with slim necks and hourglass figures, are the main character’s wants and desires - what they wish to have wholeheartedly.
Obviously, that is so wrong, on so many levels.
Besides the raging fatphobia in our societies, it perpetuates beauty standards too often seen in other media outlets (tv, movies, advertising, etc.), and gives it a seat at a paper table. For someone like me, who doesn’t have a conventionally attractive body/face, it was a means of escape. A way to imagine that this was something I could look like - which likely only made my body dysmorphia worse.
So now, I think we have a need to be conscious about how we write our characters. In my latest book, the main character is a bit chubbier, has messy hair, doesn’t know how to wear makeup, and is dating a man who is also a bit on the softer side. This isn’t revolutionary - it’s just realistic. And something I’m trying to teach myself is okay.
Anyway. I hope you take some time to think about this more deeply and take it into consideration in whatever books you’re reading or writing. Here’s a poem. Chat soon.
The body blessed bent backwards
Someone saw my head off, please. I’m justa chaotic neutral, an ending, or whatever, just
an absurdity dressed as a kitchen knife in a city
built into a mountain wall. I can’t feel my right
eyeball anymore. I douse my goldfish in sugar
water so I suck on them a little less and swallow
them whole, and I could be talking about a snack
or aquatic life, and who would know the difference?
Is this poetry or a confessional, and I haven’t been
on my knees in a minute. We don’t do that shit
anymore, and my jaw is probably better for it, and
I paint my ears with my thighs because it’s the only
way you can finish now. This is how god sees me, I
suppose, a body blessed bent backwards against
a bed frame made from the body of his son, and I
take a bite out of my stomach to stop myself from
hyperbolic collapse. Hi, I’m asking for you to end
it, please, because the bread I just bought expired
two days ago.
