The Long Road Back

Happy New Year! And if you’re in Baltimore and have a school-aged kid, happy another day at home with them after a long winter break courtesy of a snow storm. Blasted winter. I am scheduling this post ahead of time in case of the unlikely but not altogether impossible chance that this winter storm knocks our power out.

I have a new flash fiction piece up in the latest issue of Five on the Fifth. “Woman Lost” is a story about postpartum bodies and mental health, and the question of how much blame we are meant to shoulder for our actions and inaction. This story, like the essay included in today’s newsletter, deals with issues of body image. Please just be aware if that is a sensitive topic for you.

If you’d like, you can read “Woman Lost” here. I really like this story and hope you do too.

As always, thanks for reading and for all of your support!

The Long Road Back

On December 14, 2014, I ran the Honolulu Marathon. On December 14, 2024, I downloaded a Couch to 5K app because I am so out of shape, so wrecked by what two pregnancies and a chronic pain condition have done to my body over the last decade, that I need to treat myself like a person who has never run before.

I really want to run again, long substantial runs that feel like both a challenge and a reward each time you do one. I don’t know how else to go about this apart from starting at the very beginning and then refusing to give up. I have been vocally anti-New Year’s resolutions in the past. January is a terrible time to start new goals if you actually want to stick with them. How can we expect to remake ourselves while slogging through the doldrums of winter? I still firmly believe this, but I also think that maybe what we could all use right now is the audacity to assume we’re capable of more than we’re currently doing. Maybe we need a greater sense of urgency and resolve heading into this year and the next three that will follow it. To be willing to kick our own asses a bit and push ourselves to actually get some shit done. At least I do.

A couple of months back, I was looking through my jewelry collection to find something for a friend, and I realized that I have lot of great jewelry that I never wear. I have always been a casual person, a tomboy through and through, to use the vernacular of the 1900s. A friend once told me that I had a casual sexiness and it is the best compliment I have ever received. Yes, thank you, that is exactly what I was going for. I have never been a heavy makeup or jewelry wearer, but when the pandemic hit, I completely stopped wearing either. No one was going to see me, so I figured it didn’t matter what I looked, and that felt liberating. Then after enough time, how I looked when it didn’t matter felt like a perfectly fine way to look all the time, so I stopped caring about my appearance entirely, congratulated myself for not caring, and then I kept right on not caring for years until there I was staring at all of these awesome earrings that I barely remembered owning and I suddenly felt very sad for myself. When I mentioned to my mom that I had rediscovered all this jewelry, she pointed out that she too never has an occasion to wear jewelry anymore. We are both waiting around for a reason to be a little bit dressier than usual, but maybe the reason can simply be wanting to look nice. Just because. Just for ourselves. Whenever I’ve been deep in a period of depression, I’ve similarly not cared at all about how I look, but I’ve never patted myself on the back for it, shouted “You go, girl!” and acted like I’ve been liberated by my inability to muster the energy to change out of my pajamas. There is something to be said for giving enough of a shit about yourself to care how you present yourself to the world.

I spent over a decade working in the wellness industry so the idea of self-care is one I’m very familiar with, especially in its softest forms: rest, relax, restore. But perhaps the things we often label as “self-improvement” can be a form of self-care too. Here is the raw, ugly truth: I hate my body in its current form. I am old enough to know that I should know better. I am also old enough to not care what anybody else thinks about my body. That’s not what this is about. Nor is it about anyone else’s body, or what bodies should be—I am also old enough to not care about anyone else’s body, and to have developed a deep appreciation for, admiration of and attraction to bodies of all types. This is about me and my opinion of myself. This is about all the fucks I give, which are overwhelming in their magnitude and intensity.

I miss my younger body. I didn’t love it enough at the time, and for that I largely blame growing up when eating disorders were considered diets, Special K encouraged you to make three bowls of cereal the entirety of your daily food intake, almost literally everything marketed to you had a low fat label, and at one truly awful point, eating bread—my favorite food!—was basically considered worse than smoking cigarettes; these are hard messages to erase. Looking back now, though, I marvel at all the things my body could do, how beautifully it moved and rebounded, how capable it was of doing something hard or new.

I just want to do some of those things again. I want to move more easily and be more fit. I want to run and not feel like every inch of me down to my very organs is jostling and jiggling with every step. “I feel like a sad, wobbly mess of flesh,” I told a friend recently and bless her (bless her! I could kiss her!), instead of telling me that my body is perfect just as it is or some similar bullshit, she said that’s exactly how she feels too. We are all imbalanced and out of alignment, tight in places where we need more flexibility, loose in others where some strength and tension would be helpful. We’ve been blown apart by babies cocking their heads to the side when they’re halfway down the cooch shoot, or from spending years bouncing and rocking restless children late into the night. When you have kids, your body becomes so utilitarian, caught up in the physical efforts of growing, birthing, feeding and nurturing the lives you created. It is easy to marvel at these things too—look what this body made! Look at the exhausting, difficult things it managed to survive!—but it is harder to figure how they sit alongside a sense of yourself as the person you were before all of that and the person you’ll be after. The trouble with loving your body as it is, especially after your body has gone through experiences and changes that have taken you far away from what you once knew, is that finding a sense of satisfaction in yourself is almost as exhausting as just working to move closer to the body you used to have.

I don’t talk badly about my body in front of my children because I don’t want them to talk badly about their own bodies, or about anyone else. But I have precious little energy these days and I don’t want to spend it constantly pretending that I love my body in its current beat-up, broken-down, tired out form. I want to actually feel good about myself, not try to convince myself that I should feel good about myself. It’s not fair to have to make peace with increasing wrinkles and gray hair, loose skin and saggier breasts, pesky chin hairs and the deepening color of the hair on my upper lip, aching joints, a bad back, a batshit mess of hormones, a weakened core, and an absolutely obliterated pelvic floor all at the same time. Give me one or two major physical changes to contend with and I will rise to the occasion, overcome the messages of my youth and shine in the triumphant glory of self love. But all of this all at once is too much. It’s enough. I’ve had enough. So I’m doing something about it. I’m resolving to do something about it. And if that means going back to square one, treating myself like a beginner and taking it step by step from there until I reach a point where maybe I don’t exactly love my body, but I feel more at home in it, more like myself in it, then so be it. That is what I’ll do.

I gave my body over to my children for a period of time, became a home for their many needs and desires, but I’m over that now. I am done growing, birthing and nursing children. My uterus, which, granted, gave me my two beautiful boys but otherwise gave me nothing but strife, is gone and I don’t have all the physical limitations it created standing in my way anymore. I am thankful for what my body has provided and endured in the last decade, but I am ready to lead it somewhere new, to have it serve my needs and desires. This is my body and I want to at least try to bring it closer to what I want instead of just accepting it for what it is. I can acknowledge what it has been through and what it is and is not capable of in this moment, while still pushing it to become something different, stronger and more energized, healthier and more active. I have no illusions that this will be easy. I know the road will be long, but I am going to run it.

You can find more of my writing & contact information at clairemtaylor.com. If you’d like to further support my work, please consider purchasing one of my books, or a copy of Little Thoughts Press. I also have a ko-fi page.