Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

I wish I was skinny so my thighs wouldn't rub against each other the way they do. I wish my breasts could fit into the stringy tops that I love. I wish I didn't weigh my worth on how thin my arms looked. I wish society hadn’t defined what beauty was to me so that I could see myself as beautiful.

I hit my puberty spurt earlier than other girls did. I was taller than them at first, grew breasts faster and was one of the first girls to spot specks of blood in her underwear. As a diligent straight A student and a rigorous Bharatanatyam dancer, I never paid attention to how I looked. Truth is I never had to. I knew I looked good. For the most part I loved how I looked, because at fifteen you don’t stand in front of the mirror - naked - to dissect and tear yourself apart from every possible angle.  

The pandemic hit when I was sixteen. Shut away from the entire world I locked myself up in the gravitas of an over analysing mind and did the worst thing I could imagine - I started an Instagram account. My infinite boredom had found itself a saviour as I naively watched and scrolled through everyone’s perfectly perfect but desolate lives. I saw jaw-droppingly beautiful women with tiny waists and bubble butts while laughing at ridiculous but supremely funny cat memes.

This was how I was slowly introduced to my body; when I started seeing her as a separate entity – a separate person – and I haven't been able to look back ever since. Like that one blind date you go on which grows on to become a toxic relationship you keep going back to. The one that you hate but also the one you can’t escape.

I had never felt ugly or unattractive until the people around me told me so.

Oh, you've gained weight. Did I? You look different now, your face looks different. Oh, does it?

 Well if you say so…then…I guess it does.

I began stripping my clothes to stand naked in front of the full body length mirror that adorns the pink wall in my bedroom. I begin to make my way through my curves and breaks, through my dimples and muscles, and I decide that I am not beautiful. I am not beautiful because I don’t look like the women I see on the internet and that was what beautiful women looked like. I am not beautiful because they told me so. And that is precisely why I must become beautiful. I must change to try and fit inside the beauty standards of a stale, peeling cardboard box, chastising and punishing myself in the process. And so it began, a fervent, crazy, YOU-like obsession to create a body that would please others, which would in turn please myself, without the slightest consideration or acknowledgment for my natural and true self.                     

 At first everything seemed fine. I found a special comfort in slogging out to HIIT workouts on the internet where beautiful women with perfect sized breasts and sculpted abs who wore bubble-gum pink leggings motivated me to do, even though I never felt as pretty as them when I struggled shakily to hold a plank or do a push up. I would feel ugliness ooze and radiate out of my fat cells every time I did a jumping jack or ab crunch. But every time my limbs began to give up I would look at myself in the mirror on my pink wall to remind myself how ugly I looked and how I didn’t deserve the privilege of being called pretty. Unless I went back and finished that workout. Unless I lost some weight. Only then would I become worthy.

Naturally with time, I started getting good at it. I graduated from standing lunges to jumping lunges and fifteen second planks to a whole minute and some more. I began to chase the ecstatic, endorphin high that came after every workout like an insatiable addict. Not only did it make me feel better about myself but also because it became the favourite part of my day. I started to feel stronger and healthier. Exercise taught me discipline and perseverance. The dripping sweat made me feel sexy and somehow successful, but only if the numbers on the weighing scale decreased like how I wanted it to. If not, the high would turn into elevated misery, health would turn into punishment and sexy into gross.

We all know how the saying goes - no pain, no gain - and I lived by that. Since I was voluntarily putting myself through the pleasure of pain, reciprocal gains began to present themself. The scale began tipping in the right direction. But a problem arises when you journey out like a manic hunter into the unknown. You end up running in an infinite loop, thinking you'll get somewhere but you never do. Because you never knew where you were going in the first place.

You look so good Diyaa. No, I don't. I wish my breasts looked like yours. I hate my breasts, I wish they looked like yours. I love your body. No, I hate my body.

When I left home for college, I was in great shape (I didn't know it back then but I was). Did I love my body? No, but I didn't hate it anymore and in my eyes that was still a victory. I had imagined that I would keep losing weight and would eventually end up in a place where I loved myself. But things didn't go as I planned. As months went by I gained weight, pebble by pebble, gram by gram. Jeans started getting tighter and bras smaller. At first I ignored all the signs, not because I didn't notice it but because I didn't want to accept it and if I accepted that I regained some weight I would have to start hating myself all over again and I simply didn't want to relive that.

I hadn't put on some crazy amount of weight but a very normal and healthy amount, and looking back now I don't know why I beat myself so much for it. I would look in the mirror and hate myself, calling myself ugly in pictures and cry at night at how terrible I felt.

I know you're expecting a magical character arc where I realise that I am beautiful no matter what or maybe a fairy godmother waves a wand at me and fixes me. But nothing of that sort happened. It was as if I was sitting under a tree and an apple of “I’m tired of feeling this way” dropped onto my head. Apart from dealing with the general turbulence of life on its own, the last thing I wanted to do was crucify myself over my appearance. I figured I had better things to do with my time and feelings, rather than be self-obsessed and decapitated. I cut all social media out to stop comparing myself to other women and to stop worshipping a certain body type as the norm. I began looking back at my old pictures only to realise how beautiful I was. It took an intense metamorphosis of gaining weight, losing it and then gaining back some of it again to simply discover my self-worth that had been buried in a deep and obsolete pit of hatred - so deep that I was ignorant of its existence. I realised that I had suffered from extreme body dysmorphia and that it had grown like a leech, clawing and sucking on my love for exercise to feed itself. I vowed to never do it again. I chose to do the opposite of what I had done the last time I gained weight - I chose to accept and love myself, simply because I was too tired to put myself through the chasm of self-loathe again. I started exercising again - not to be lighter - but because I wanted to live a healthier and fitter lifestyle.

Since then the numbers on the weighing scales have gone up and down and I have accepted that they will, for the entirety of my life - through girlhood, through womanhood, pregnancy and motherhood. And so relying on a number and the width of my thigh gap to define my self-worth would be enormously impractical. I've understood that if I do so, I will live a very unhappy life and I don't want to do that.

The Indian society I live in has very much normalised commenting and remarking on physical bodies – particularly those of women. From chacha’s and maami’s to neighbours and spouses, everyone has an opinion on what a woman looks like. An opinion on the length of her hair, the crookedness of her teeth, the number of rolls on her belly and the colour of her skin. It saddens me to admit that I have not met one Indian woman who has not had a journey similar to mine, one where they questioned their self-worth because someone else didn’t know what boundaries were.

All bodies are beautiful. Big or small, short or tall, lean or chubby, everyone is beautiful and even though I couldn't apply it to myself, I always knew that. And looking back now maybe the reason I couldn’t do it was because I so very deeply attached the visualisation of beauty to physical appearance. But I've come to learn that real beauty doesn't come from our body mass index or our waist measurements but from our kindness, our actions and intentions. Our ability to remain kind in the face of complete despair and be steadfast to our values are what actually make us beautiful. And no amount of weight or the lack of it can take our beauty away from us.

I know my body is strong. She loves doing HIIT workouts with smiley-faced trainers in pink leggings. They have grown to become her best friends. She loves doing power yoga, even though she's terrible at it but she constantly tries to get better. She's even started running, mile by mile, so she can eventually run a half-marathon one day. She never falls sick and can fight off any illness. She and I both love pushing ourselves to be better, stronger and healthier which is why I love her so very much with her stomach rolls, hip dips and muffin top. It is hard to love her on certain days and just like any healthy relationship we have our ups and downs. But at the end of every single day, I will choose to love her with every fibre of my being because she is mine and I am hers.                                                                            

 I no longer hate who I see when I stand in front of the mirror on the pink wall. I only see a beautiful woman.

- Diyaa Jyothilal (Diyaa is a journalism graduate from Bangalore who wants to be a fancy magazine writer one day.)