Project Body Love: My quest to love my body and the surprising truth I found instead

Project Body Love

my quest to love my body and the surprising truth I found instead

Jessie Harrold

Rebel Poet Press

DISCLAIMER: Project Body Love is the story of my own personal journey toward body acceptance, respect, and maybe even love. No part of this book contains medical advice, nor any formula for success. Readers seeking their own version of body love should consult their intuition, physician or other trusted sources.

Copyright © 2019 Jessie Harrold. All rights reserved. Published and distributed by Rebel Poet Press (Seaforth, Nova Scotia).

Cover photo by DeeDee Morris Photography. Cover illustration by Katika. Cover design by Joanna Price. Author photograph: DeeDee Morris.

eBook layout by Luca Funari

ISBN: 978-1-9995444-0-9

First printing: January 2019

www.jessieharrold.com

Email Jessie Harrold at jessie@jessieharrold.com

"Don’t write to get rich.

Don’t write to get famous.

Write to get free."

— Desiree Adaway

The skin can see… when you take a woman out of her skin and ask her to be something different than she really is, you literally blind her. You literally put out her eyes, her thousands of eyes that are all over the body.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Joyous Body

Worldwide, the first and last steps to enslaving a woman are that she must be pleasing — that she must do as you say so, act as you say so, achieve an impossible norm that was not given to her as a gift at birth.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Joyous Body

For my body.

And for yours, too.

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Preface

Introduction

The Beginning

Part One. Tiny Experiments: Year One

A Paradigm Shift

Part Two. Tiny Experiments Year Two

Part Three. Reclamation

Author’s Note

I wrote this book not as an icon in the body positivity movement or as a fat activist with thousands of followers on Instagram and a flair for fashion.

I wrote this book as an ordinary woman who has, like so many other women just like me, spent the vast majority of my life hating and subsequently trying to change my body.

Well, I’m almost an ordinary woman who has always struggled with accepting, respecting, and loving my body. Almost.

I am also a teacher and life coach, and, in my work, I’m fiercely committed to supporting women to unearth themselves from beneath the expectations, roles, responsibilities and models of success - those externally-defined constructs of What Women Do – and reclaim who they are and what matters most to them – whether that’s in their careers, their relationships, their parenting, their spirituality or, yes, in their bodies. After doing this work for a few years, I created a woman-centred model of change and a coaching methodology based on what I’ve learned about the complexity of disengaging from the personal and cultural narratives that challenge women’s authenticity, sovereignty, and potential.

This book is an account of what happened when I used my methodology on myself in an attempt to disentangle from the impacts of society’s expectations for my body, which I have spent a lifetime attempting and failing to live up to.

This book is, as all of my work is, both personal and political.

And I believe it’s more imperative than ever: women are not just wasting their precious time, energy and money as they struggle to keep up to impossible body ideals. In both my life coaching work and my work as a doula (yeah, I do that too!), I have seen firsthand that, in so many ways, women’s bodies are the seat of their personal power. They are the home of women’s intuition and wisdom, the literal and metaphoric home within which the next generation will be nurtured, and, as posited by ecofeminists everywhere, a pathway to our society’s renewed connection with the earth.

To me, the healing of women’s relationship with their bodies is not just about the reconciliation of hundreds of years of commodification, hyper-sexualization, pathologization, shame and trauma. It is about reclaiming power and possibility, about restoring our culture’s connection with the archetypal feminine, a deeply embodied power source that I believe can change the world.

But we start here. With this. With the thoughtful and compassionate dismantling of everything we’ve been told about our bodies, so that we can make way for what’s possible.

We start here. With us.

Preface

This is the story of a quest – a Heroine’s Journey, if you will – that I embarked on nearly three years ago. It’s a story about my search for body acceptance, respect, and maybe even the elusive body love.

But really, this is the story of a journey that began the first time my six-year-old self noticed the roundness of her belly, and tugged at the fabric of her Rainbow Bright t-shirt self-consciously.

And really, it’s a story of a path that I’m still on.

This is my story, and so much of it is also the story of a million other women.

I decided to write this because salads weren’t working anymore. Because going to the gym wasn’t cutting it. Because I felt like there were deeper roots beneath my complex relationship with my body that longed to be unearthed.

I wrote this because I have wasted too much time trying to change my body into one that I felt like I could accept, respect, and love — a thinner body, to be exact. Because I knew that I was — and still am — a powerful, determined woman, and that if I were able to birth babies and businesses, climb mountains and swim oceans, but unable to successfully lose weight, then something must be up. Something must be wrong with this picture.

I wrote this because my inner feminist was so totally done with this. I’ve led an amazing life so far, and accomplished a great many things, but I can’t help but wonder what might have been possible if I hadn’t spent so much time looking in the mirror. Reading about the next diet I would attempt. Pining over the too-tight clothes in my closet.

I also can’t help but wonder what might be possible for society if the vast majority of women weren’t preoccupied with the skin-bound sack of flesh they were borrowing for this lifetime.

My first hope, when I sat down three years ago to begin this book, was to find healing for the fraught and often painful relationship I’ve had with my body. Writing has always been my catharsis, the way I make sense of myself and the world. My second hope was that by sharing my process and some of what I discovered both about myself and about the concept of body acceptance, respect and love in the context of our modern-day culture, that you may find some healing too. At the very least, you may find insight here. You may find a new perspective to consider.

I have always struggled with my weight, and I have, for the entirety of that always, been ashamed of that struggle. And so, despite the fact that I have often ruminated over meal plans and counted calories and steps and drops of sweat, I have rarely talked about my discomfort in my own body. I have, for many years, had a sort of emotional no fly zone about the issue, even in my own journaling. No Body Talk Allowed.

This book contains all the words I’ve never said. Because keeping it to myself hasn't worked, either.

INTRODUCTION

Why this? Why now?

After years of dieting and exercise propelled mostly by body hatred disguised as the pursuit of health and happiness, the question bears asking: why this? why now? What happened that made the rat race of weight loss finally so unacceptable that this was the time to finally end it?

I’ve spent an entire lifetime wishing I didn’t feel so much loathing toward my body. Subsequently, I’ve spent an entire lifetime trying to starve or exercise those feelings away. And so a great part of this writing, this quest, was propelled by Albert Einstein’s wise words:

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

But the other reason that I felt compelled to change my thinking toward my body was that the discomfort of being in my own skin began to take on an entirely new meaning when I ventured into entrepreneurship, and birthed my second child. My work as a life coach and wilderness quest leader held up a mirror, of sorts, to the way I was feeling about myself, and I couldn’t ignore it, especially after my second pregnancy left me and my body riven with exhaustion and stretch marks.

And so, perhaps I’ll start there - in the moments of despair and disorientation that catalyzed this whole personal quest to begin with.

Like so many women, I spent my 20s pursuing the goals that I believed were worthy based on my socialization within our culture: I had a burgeoning career with the public service, a beautiful home and one kid with another on the way.

But I didn’t like my job and I felt horrible about how little time I spent with my child: I was working to make just enough money to pay for daycare fees so that someone else could look after her while I went to work. Which, in all honesty, wouldn’t have been so bad if the work I was doing felt meaningful and impactful. But it didn’t. I sat in my grey-walled cubicle all day, bored, and making plans for my escape.

My escape eventually took the form of entrepreneurship: I earned my life coaching certification, decided to ramp up my existing doula practice, and started a business. My husband and I decided to simplify our lives so that we could channel more of our personal resources into what mattered most, eventually downsizing to a small oceanfront bungalow and taking our kids out of full-time daycare. In short, I began to feel like I was more connected to who I really was and what mattered most to me; not completely unfettered but far less influenced by externally-validated models of success.

This urge to reconnect with oneself and one’s values is a desire that I have found a great many of my peers and the women I coach with have been feeling. My theory is that there has been a confluence of events in recent years in our culture that has compelled us to question the ways in which we’ve been fitting into the boxes of woman, good mother, sexy, good partner, successful. As I dove deeper into my own experience of this, and began to witness what the women around me were experiencing, I shifted my life coaching practice so I could help women learn to follow their internal compass for what feels true for them and what feels like living somebody else’s life, with somebody else’s goals.

And what happens when you find yourself in the business of seeking truth, of helping others step into greater authenticity?

I can tell you: you get Called to Attention.

All of a sudden, I found myself hyper-aware of the ways in which I was not living in integrity with my own values. I was cognizant of every time I did not speak my truth, every time I wore a facade of some kind. Though I had done so much of the work of shifting in my career and family life so that they better reflected who I was and what mattered to me, I felt a sense of misalignment in other aspects of my life that eventually couldn’t be ignored.

Glaringly and consistently, I kept circling back to the increasing feelings of shame and animosity I was having about my body, which escalated after the birth of my second child.

My childbearing years had taken a toll on my physical shape, and my sense of acceptance hadn’t caught up with that shape yet.

There was still a part of me that assumed I would shed that shape like a warm, maternal cloak, and I would return to the still-soft but much fitter, muscular and more able version of myself that I had come to identify with for so many years.

The other part of me was stymied by the fact that shedding this weight by the means I felt most familiar – eating better and exercising – was feeling extremely challenging as I learned to navigate the realities of having two children. I was tired. Like, really, really tired. Too tired for meal plans, or figuring out how to make grain-free oatmeal. Though I aspired to resume the amount of physical activity I was capable of in my pre-childbearing days, it was hard enough to take a poop by myself, let alone leave the house for an hour or more every day to attend to my physical health.

And so, eighteen months into my postpartum period with my second child, I felt like I was living in someone else’s body – a body I couldn’t recognize and did not want. I had gradually become physically unable to do many of the things I used to pride myself – even identify myself – as being able to do. I also felt bereft of the time and energy to pursue what I felt I needed to pursue to achieve better health.

These postpartum feelings certainly did their job intermingling with the desire to reconnect with myself and what mattered most to me – to my health and my ability and my sense of being at home in my own skin. I felt deeply compelled toward coming to peace with my body at long last.

And, admittedly, it wasn’t lost on me that part of the reason I felt so negatively about my body was that the business I’d strived so diligently to create had me out in the public eye, leading retreats and workshops and women’s circles on a regular basis. The social media presence required of me as a modern-day entrepreneur necessitated a great deal of public exposure. I believe that something happens to us when we see the lives of others on display in this way: we begin to subconsciously (or perhaps even consciously) place them on a pedestal. We make grand assumptions about people’s lives based on what they present to the world as entrepreneurs, or as social media users. I began to get the sense that I was being perceived as someone who had her shit together – more than I felt like I did, anyway. I also began to get the sense that those who saw my outsides, as portrayed to the public through my business and on Instagram and Facebook, were making assumptions about me and my validity as an entrepreneur based on the body they saw I inhabited when I posted pictures of myself.

How could someone who helps other people live in alignment with their values look like that? Doesn’t that sense of alignment in one’s life imply health? Doesn’t thinness imply health?

Aren’t all coaches and online entrepreneurs supposed to be blonde and bikini-clad and prancing in a sun-drenched meadow? (It’s become an unfortunate part of what our society has come to expect that coaches do: here, look at my amazing life, and hire me to help you make your life as amazing as mine).

How could someone who leads wilderness quests in the backwoods be fat? How could I trust her with my life? She doesn’t look like