When I was 10, a doctor pointed to a chart on the wall in his office and told me I was here, obese. From the way he said it, I took this to be a bad thing. I didnt want to be bad. That summer, I discovered diets do work the first diet, anyway. By following his strict instructions, I returned after the summer holidays to find the world had changed. Now, I was thin.
The rewards were immediate and shocking: friends, attention, approval. When friends mothers asked me for a photocopy of my diet, it felt as though, suddenly, I mattered. And I wanted, more than anything, to keep on mattering. I felt guilty for wanting this it was against the values my parents had taught me, about how its our insides that count. My head, however, said I needed to stay thin, and I bought it.
Still, I did not allow myself to swim. Thin, but not thin enough so said the voice in my head. I believed it. First as a child, then as a young women, what followed was a decade of vicious ping-pong trapped in the dieting cycle. I had no idea there were other options available.
I am a grown woman now, a woman who, once again, rather likes her jiggly little body. In my childbearing years first a daughter, then twin sons my body has continued its dance up and down the scales, yet I no longer think of its waxing and waning as a thing I did wrong. Instead, I think of my body as a walking, talking piano accordion, just here, playing its song. That, I believe, is what can happen when we learn to tell ourselves better stories.
I took a while getting here. The stories Id internalised about size and power are not ones I made up on my own. Society really does hold in trust certain rewards for women who appear to know how to control their weight (their wrinkles, their feelings). One doesnt need a PhD to explain how this privilege plays itself out, to this day, in the arenas of career, romance, politics, the arts.
But my life today is dedicated to a different theory. What if life also rewarded those of us who show up boldly and confidently despite the stories the world tells us? What if we just count ourselves in, regardless of our size, and what we take it to mean? What might happen then?
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I have two pairs of bathers now a navy one-piece with white polka dots, and a red two-piece, also with white polka dots. Old-glamour-Hollywood-style cuts. Just my size. For a girl like me, online shopping is the miracle Ive been waiting for all these years.
My local pool is the very same pool around which Helen Garner set her seminal 1977 novel, Monkey Grip. Its bleachers are full of beautiful, golden people living the Offspring dream (yes, the TV show I once acted in this irony does not escape me). Im tempted sometimes to compare my body to theirs, but I resist, make a practice of reminding myself as many times as I need to that my body does not have to impress anyone. It is mine to be enjoyed. Bowditch, I say, get in the water. So I get in. It feels delicious.
Clare Bowditchs memoir, Your Own Kind of Girl (Allen & Unwin), is on sale tomorrow.
Follow this link:
'One day, tired of all the teasing, I stopped wearing bathers' - The Age
