This essay is part three of my year-long project where, each month, I’ll look through old journal entries by using a random date generator to decide which day of my past to explore. This month’s was January 23rd.
January 23, 2012—2023
2012: In Cardinal Comm, I found out that I have to paint what inspires me, so that is really stressful. But, at work in the DN, we Skyped with Greg! I miss him and his delicious treats a lot.
2013: Kate and I ordered Insomnia Cookies and the cutest guy ever delivered them. But, besides that, most of my day was pretty normal: just class, work (where I taste-tested cookies) and TurboKick.
2014: We had our first Unified Media meeting and it actually went pretty well. I had a mental health day because I was stressed / upset about [a guy who smoked so much weed on our first date that I had to drive him home (editor’s note: LMAO)], so it was nice for something to work out.
2015: After work, I went to the East Village to take a Barre / Pilates class in a really sketchy building, but it was a fun class and it was right next to Brandy’s, [the psychic ZG and I trusted with our lives]. I’m glad that I have ClassPass in NYC.
2016: I woke up in ZG’s [spare] bed, went home to shower, then came back immediately so we could go to Serria’s for the blizzard. We got very drunk; it took us 5 hours to watch a 1 hour show and we played in the snow at the risk of getting arrested.
2017: I started to work on the Super Bowl page which actually seems pretty fun. I’m trying to step up my game more because I really do not want to lose my job.
2018: I stopped by the studio before I went to the office so I could chat with the crew and then was able to have dinner with Dad at the Maritime.
2019: I’m pretty bored because it is Dark Week. After work, Serria and I went to The Class and I am furious I like it so much. It was so fun and such a good workout.
2020: After work, we went to a Cocktails with Cardinals event that actually turned out to be really fun. Serria and I ended up staying out with some of them later than the rest.
2021: I am feeling better today, so we tried to take Charlie on a walk to the woods, but it was way too cold and we turned around. We had a lazy day, but the ceiling in the dining room fell in at night.
2022: Mom and I went to IKEA to get a sense of what we will need for my apartment and it was so much fun — I am having such a great time at home with her and am thankful I am here.
2023: Today was my first therapy appointment and I think it went well — I feel like this big relief that I actually have started going and feel like things are slotted in the right direction.
Looking at these entries all together, you probably couldn’t tell that most of them are about my body. But, because I am me and can read my own subtext, I know they are.
Last year, I got pneumonia and was unimaginably sick — sick enough that, on some nights, I genuinely believed I was going to die. Coming out of that, I no longer cared if my stomach looked a little fluffy or if my arms weren’t as toned as they had been a few years back. I was just happy to be alive. Now, while I like my body most days, the unwavering constant is that on days I do not, I am appreciative of what it can do, rather than how it looks.
But, that was not always the case. I picked apart my body for years and January, a famous time for reinvention of the self, was never an exception. I can see in these entries the shame I’d felt for missing the treats an old coworker would bring to our night shifts, for ordering cookies, for drinking numerous cocktails at an alumni event. A reoccurring theme in my diaries is how I structure almost everything in my life around workout classes. In college, my schedule was dictated around what time Zumba and TurboKick classes took place, a decision that led to spending three and a half hours at Ball State’s gym every Tuesday afternoon for the entirety of my sophomore year. When I moved to New York, it was no different. I joined ClassPass in order to take a variety of exercise classes and explore parts of the city I was less familiar with, but as soon as I rediscovered hot yoga, I cancelled my membership, choosing instead to start going to class twice a day. (I do believe this schedule change is why I thought I would be let go in 2017 — while I was an excellent employee, my main passion was now focused on spending multiple 90-minute sessions a day in that 105 degree room and I feared it could show). Still, now, years and years later, I do the same thing with my 305 classes, with my strength training sessions at Equinox, with my strict stretching regime. These are the first events I enter into my Google Calendar, color-coded based on activity and often scarily inflexible when they overlap with social plans. I struggle between being both proud and terrified of my rigid motivation for movement. I love my commitment to myself and my strength, to pushing my physicality to new lengths, but dislike that I have difficult time letting go of that forever-scheduled mentality.
To be fair, though — it’s almost all I have ever known.
In high school, I was on the dance team, a team I contributed almost my entire personality to and a team that was very strict. We had practice every morning for an hour and, every other day, it was also our first period, 90-minute class. Everything in my life revolved around dance team — how I looked, what I would do, where I could go, what I could eat that day. I loved the rigorous schedule and I loved being part of that team for four years. It gave me structure in my life, but it also gave me a sense of purpose and identity. However, because of this, even though our practices were strenuous (I vividly recall vomiting from exertion on one occasion after running a three minute long kick sequence through multiple times), I didn’t consider them workouts. The physicality of what we were doing was undeniable, but, still, I didn’t register it as exercise, instead attributing the sessions to my identity-building and heading to the gym after school to make sure I got a “real” workout in that day.
Well over a decade later, this is a habit that still feels impossible to break. Last year, I was more often than not taking two 305 dance cardio classes in the morning and immediately going to the gym as soon as I finished work. By the end of October, my Achilles tendon was so strained that I was certain it was going to snap — I got through class by periodically stuffing literal ice cubes down my sock to alleviate the pain — and it was only the fear of being 305’s version of Aaron Rodgers that led me to cool down my schedule as well as start physical therapy.
I struggled with stopping dance completely even if I knew it could help my healing. Dancing brings me joy and confidence in a way other hobbies do not and, while I can recognize the movement is difficult exercise, I still categorize it under identity-building. Despite being injured, it was hard for me to separate myself from that instant dopamine hit of confidence. For me going through this in my thirties, the pause was less about fear of how I physically would look if I stopped, but more of how I would mentally feel. Being able to have this mindset was a gigantic shift for me because, growing up and, to be honest, maybe up until I was bedridden with pneumonia, I was never gracious enough to myself to even consider anything other than how my body looked.
I have always been curvier, an attribute I am grateful for now, but did not appreciate when I was younger. Again, I loved my experience on the dance team, but it was difficult for me to be surrounded by more traditional dancer bodies and feel like I did not physically fit in, even though I’d already had years to get used to that reality. It was in elementary school when I realized my body shape was different than most of the girls I spent time with. I can vividly remember spending a day at the pool with a childhood friend, swimming, playing, running, laughing — a lovely, joyful day right up until the end when we were showering and she commented on the difference between her flat stomach and my softer one, punctuating the point by poking at my belly button.
That was a defining moment of my childhood — to not only realize for the first time that my body existed, but that it was different enough that I was already not hitting “idealistic” standards. I remember getting home that evening and, for the very first time, deliberately turning sideways in the mirror with my shirt pulled up to check my stomach profile, an action I still do to this day without thinking almost every time I pass a mirror.
Right after I became more physically aware of my body, I started creating these unhinged little art projects. I drew hundreds of people, all with different body types and none with hair. After cutting each drawing out and writing a complicated story for each person, carefully taping it to the back of their silhouette, I cut all the hair off every Barbie I owned and glued it to the top of the figure’s heads. The final result was an entire population made of mixed media that lined my bedroom floor, an ambitious and yet, also slightly terrifying project, for an eight year old. (My dad recalls walking into my room to see me surrounded by markers, bald Barbies and glue and thinking, “Now, here is a creative child!” To his delight, I gifted him the only surviving piece for Christmas last year.) When asked at the time, I couldn’t say what compelled me to draw so many different people, to create so many different stories, but looking at it through this lens of timing, I now can see it was just the first experience I had of wanting to escape what I looked like.
There are many anecdotes I could call upon where this feeling would happen again — the time a college friend called me confident for wearing a certain swimsuit and, instead of the compliment it was meant as, I heard it as an insult to my body shape; when I first stood on a scale and felt my self-worth directly correlated to the number shown; even on January 23, 2021, when I was barely recovered from a truly horrific wisdom tooth extraction experience, but felt guilty for “being lazy” and not moving my body — but all of those anecdotes come down to this: I was unhappy with how I looked until I wasn’t. I was always striving to be something different, something I’d thought could be better (though that target was unreachable — it was always, always moving) until one day, I just got tired of wasting all my energy trying to reach an impossible aesthetic that only I could see.
I still put workouts in my calendar and they are still unmovable, but I now also structure in rest days, forcing myself to take time for my body to heal. I do still weigh myself, but just once a week, every Tuesday, and I write the number down with the full knowledge it does not equate to my value as a person. I keep a list of everything I put into my body, but it’s no longer to track how I look, it’s to keep note of how I feel when I eat certain foods. Every time I walk past a mirror, I still automatically lift my shirt up and turn to the side — but when I look at myself now, I try not to see things that in the past, I’d maybe want to change and instead focus on what I genuinely love about my reflection.
And, of course, I still write in my Five Year Diary every day. The entries from 2024 will not be making it into this project, but my hope is that in three, five, 12 years from now, when I look back on what I am writing daily, I can’t find any subtext about my body. I want to be able to read the entries from this time and, instead, see only the confidence I feel now shine through.