What Was I Made For?
Thoughts on why our bodies matter even if we're not young, thin or moms.
Disclaimer: You’re reading this column because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider, and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.
Q: I’m looking for advice on how to feel good about myself in the space I am in. I am about to turn 52 years old and my weight is really bothering me. I feel like I live in a world where there is no purpose for me. I never had kids, so that’s not a part of my life. I’m a high school English teacher and I feel I am slowly losing my relevance as I age.
What advice can you offer about regaining self-confidence as I move through the world? So many friends and coworkers have lost weight with surgeries and Ozempic. I know this is not my path to follow. I should also add that I hope to leave teaching and do something else, but until I regain some type of self-esteem, I wouldn’t do well on a job interview.
Wow. That was a lot.
Your question came in a few weeks ago, and I have thought about you at least once a day since I first read it. And every time, I levitate a little more with rage. Not at you.
I’m mad—pretty much perpetually, but especially lately—at this world, which continues to tell women that we can be thin, or we can be mothers, or we can be both. But that’s it. (Well, and also, somehow, eternally young.)
We were raised to believe this is our value because we’re told this is what straight, cis men will value us for. We’re told that the alternative —being fat, being child-free, existing without the patriarchy’s approval—would be some kind of desolate, frozen tundra of a life. And that all the warmth and joy is found here, in the nuclear family, when we’re cheerily coming back to make a healthy breakfast after our 5am run.
But if thin/mom/young are our only measures of value, where does this leave anyone who can’t get pregnant, or doesn’t want children?
Where does this leave anyone who was a thin kid who became a fat adult?
Where does this leave anyone who started out fat and stayed that way?
Where does this leave anyone aging? (So, everyone.)
And where does this leave anyone who is neither thin nor a mother and now, no longer young?
I’m not thin, but I am a mom, and I’m ten years younger than you. And reading your letter made me think about I spent years relying on the social currency of those two facts, plus an on-paper successful heterosexual marriage.