The negativity bias is a real bitch. Reading Hope’s latest piece took me right back to second grade - the very first moment I looked at myself and thought, I don’t like the body I live in.

I was seven. We were getting ready for gymnastics, staring at ourselves in her bedroom mirror, two tiny girls in leotards. Hope was long and lean - a string bean. I was small too, just… less so. I remember staring at our legs side by side and feeling jealous. Embarrassed. Ashamed. That was my introduction into the feeling that bigger was bad.

Where did that thought even come from? What told me thinner was better? I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD. God damnit.

Talking about eating disorders feels taboo, or maybe just tired. Oh - you’re a woman who wants to be thinner? Join the club. It also feels like a privilege. Oh - you have time to obsess over your body? You brat. I am privileged, but I can assure you - this is not a privilege. It’s a disease of the mind and when it strikes it’s vicious.

Nearly every person I know wants to change something - thinner arms, smoother skin, bigger boobs, fewer wrinkles. We live with a steady hum of could be better, exacerbated by ads, influencers, and everything else we pass by.

What’s wild is how easily we see the beauty in each other. Some of the women I find most stunning are curvy and soft, healthy and alive. So why can’t that same standard exist for me?

I still feel sad for that seven-year-old version of me. She had no idea what was in store. My anxious brain grabbed hold of that thought and never let go. I was so young. Only 2 years older than my eldest child, who still feels like a baby to me. I wish I could travel back in time to hold her close and tell her just how beautiful she was. And yet I know better than to think that would have changed anything. I know the pervasiveness of the eating disorder brain. I’m not sure any intervention would have stopped it from finding me.

Disordered thinking became my sidekick. Quiet at first. Then louder. By puberty, it was abrasive and opinionated. Ever-present. My hips widened, my body grew, and suddenly I was never without it - comparing, critiquing, self-loathing. My body humiliated me. The remarkable body I lived in - the same one that allowed me to learn, to think, to run, to dance, to explore, to function, to love, to exist - represented shame.

I finally lost weight my senior year of college. Not by another one of my failed efforts - exercising more, becoming vegan, avoiding high calorie drinks, depriving myself of desserts when everyone around me would indulge - but by illness. I got food poisoning in Peru, lost fifteen pounds in a week, and came home ‘thin.’ For the first time in my life I liked what I saw in the mirror. I was comfortable wearing a bathing suit without a towel around my waist. I had never felt so free.

That experience of thinness, of ‘freedom,’ graduated me to the next level of disorder. It became my mission to stay that way. I learned every calorie, every label. I counted, restricted, obsessed. Staying skinny became my guiding light, and I obeyed.

I became frighteningly thin and stayed that way throughout most of my twenties. I was working in fashion at the time, which only enabled it further. I lost my period. People who loved me were more distant, not wanting to be around the energy my disorder carried. I was in denial even though I knew full well what was happening.

Eventually I sought the help I needed. A friend called me out, and I also realized I wanted to be fertile more than I wanted to be thin. I gained the necessary weight. I found physical health again.

I say physical because the emotional piece never left. The thoughts never stopped firing. Maybe millions of them by now.

I’m thirty-seven. Two kids. A life I actually love. And still, that inner alarm goes off unceasingly: you don’t look the way you want to look.

Years of receiving and providing therapy around this issue have taught me that it’s not about silencing or doing away with the thoughts. Our minds can’t be washed of them. Our brains, ironic as it may sound, have minds of their own. Similar to the practice of meditation, the magic is in letting the thoughts go, acknowledging them and moving on. ‘Don’t fixate on the fixation,’ as my therapist tells me, and as I tell my clients.

So I try to do just that. The thoughts show up and I keep living. I eat for health, not thinness. I move because it makes me feel alive, not smaller. I buy clothing for the feel, not the aspirational number 0 or size xs. Some days I like my body. Other days, I just try not to hate it.

And I see this everywhere. Not only in my work with clients, but in conversations with friends, my sisters, neighbors. Almost every woman I know lives with a version of this battle. With a desire to be what they aren’t, or to lose enough weight to fit into their old pre-baby jeans. A yearning for the thinner version of themselves. The irony, of course, is that that version wasn’t thin enough at the time. It never is.

For some it’s a whisper, for others a scream. I sit on the more obsessive end, but the self-judgment feels universal. And yes - it’s a privilege problem, too. A symptom of whiteness and upper-class comfort, of having the time and means to obsess about something so small while the world burns. I know that. But knowing doesn’t free us. I wish it did.

I wish we could stop spending our brilliance and humor and strength on chasing smaller bodies, at war with ourselves. Always wanting for more or better. What a waste.

Like I said, the negativity bias is a real bitch. The term refers to the way our brains evolved to dwell on the negative more than the positive. Isn’t it ironic that the very thing that allowed our species to survive is also what causes some of our greatest pain?

I don’t have a way to tie this up neatly. It’s a mess of a problem - deep, systemic, impenetrable. I’m not sure there’s a fix.

But maybe someone will read this and feel a little less alone in the struggle. And maybe, just maybe, we can help our kids love themselves better.
Though I’m sure our mothers wished the same.

Xx Jaymie

Thumbnail credit: Self Portrait with Cropped Hair | Frida Kahlo