ISSUE I: P(art) of the Soul

PROSE
d
iabetes, and I have a medical condition which means I am four
times more likely to develop it. I am doing this because I want to
have healthy pregnancies and healthy children, at some point.
Living through the boom of body positivity has made it difficult to
remember that I am not losing weight for cosmetic purposes. It almost feels like a
betrayal to feel happy about the weight coming off. Like I'm somehow selling out
because my body is shrinking. It’s a hard thing to bear in mind. I was ashamed of
my body before, I admit. I didn’t take care of it, and I didn’t enjoy dressing in nice
clothes or giving anyone any reason whatsoever for their eyes to linger on me. But
I came to accept it. It was like a mantra, every morning while I got ready for school:
my body does not have to be beautiful. It houses me and carries me from place to
place. And that was good enough.
The doctor’s appointments forced me to come back to awareness, to be cognizant
of the body that held me. I couldn’t just be a floating mind; I had to take care of my
organs, my skin, my teeth. If I wanted a normal life then I had to care. It was hard
to reconcile with, that constant awareness of my body and what I did with it. In
a time where I was frequently losing my temper, feeling trapped and lashing out,
the last thing I wanted to be was aware. But in time it was less cloying. With the
ending of secondary school and exams, it was college in my mind, and college only.
September, when I would be moving across the country to Galway, that colourful,
salt-sprayed city clinging to the rocks. I could invent a new self, one who wasn’t
pre-stencilled by family or friends or shop assistants who knew my face. And I did. I
became someone else, someone lighter. I went to class, I hung out with new friends
who were smart and bookish and who genuinely liked me, rather than just being
stuck with me. I don’t know that I had ever fully realised just how thrown together
we were in school. The girls there had little, if anything, in common with me, and
in my snobbery, I didn’t care too much to find out much more about them. They
thought me strange, I suppose, and I was fine with that. But university was a new
world. I had been a big fish in a decidedly small pond back in Meath; here, I was a
sprat, milling around with all the other sprats. And it was wonderful.
I’m glad that there was such a leap from my secondary school life to my college life.
A cross-country move and diagnosis will do that to a person. It was good to see
a difference in how I was outwardly, and not just be overwhelmed by the seismic
rupture I felt inside myself. Everything changed within the space of a few weeks;
everything I thought was permanent and unchangeable revealed itself to be just
as passing as the rest of it, and there was suddenly nothing familiar in sight. New
wardrobe, new room, new school, new friends. New me. In the beginning I shed
weight like a snake shedding its skin, and my reflection looked wholly different
to what I’d become accustomed to seeing. It was how an eighteen-year-old was
supposed to appear: I looked fresh. My eyes were clear and alert, and I thought
maybe, maybe, I could finally embrace my body instead of pretending it didn’t exist.
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