on body image

I said I was going to write about this awhile ago, and I did not. Now I think I can speak to it a little better, if only because at this point it may be a bit weird that I haven't really acknowledged some things yet here.

A lot of things changed when I moved to Toronto a year and a half ago. My dance career. My non-dance career. My lifestyle, my attitude, my cat's attitude, my goals. My relationship got even better.

My body also changed. Looking back over the last year, I see it as a sort of physical manifestation of the changes I made to my priorities. It seems natural that as my life changed, I changed physically. As I started to see my body as a tool for my work, for executing movement cleanly, for marketing myself, it became very important that I know everything about what I put into it, and that I treat it a lot differently than I always had.

I have a very wide taste in types of bodies that I find beautiful, I genuinely always have and will. I think one of the most exciting things about this kind of dance is that there is no archetypal body type. Though it does require a degree of agility and fitness to execute well, you don't have to be tall or short or have wide hips or narrow hips or a certain kind of feet to be an incredible belly dancer. The movements can be formed and re-formed to look stunning on not only a wide range of sizes, but even simple body shapes.

So, knowing that I believe that, why did the way I look change? For lack of a better word to describe it, my work is becoming more athletic as time goes on. I find myself wanting to spin and jump and get down on the floor and be able to move with more strength and agility. I frankly couldn't do a lot of those things the way I wanted to before.

So what happened is that as I pushed myself to new levels with my life and my dancing, I lost a lot of weight. Something like a third of my old body weight. It was in some ways a deliberate choice and in other ways a natural progression. From month to month it was and is different things. A lot of what I thought were aesthetic reasons for changing actually ran a lot deeper. The ways that life is different now are surprising and I'm still adjusting, frankly.

It's disorienting to look so different. I have looked almost exactly the same since I was about twelve. Now I very regularly pass over my own reflection without recognizing it, in fact I did it in class just last night.

I do know that I'm stronger and happier and able to run around for a long time and a lot less worried about how I look, which is interesting. I still have "fat days" and feel gross when I eat a ton of junk food and feel like certain movements don't flatter my body, but it gets to me less now. I guess I'd have expected that I'd become really narcissistic if I liked my body, but instead it's mostly just that a lot of the energy I had for that over the past year has now been turned on other things. And things that I changed are mostly habits, so they don't take a lot of time.

I'm not sure which day it was, but at some point in the last year it feels like I woke up a different person, not only physically. Even the thoughts that run through my head all day long are different, and the things that I believe I can do.

I'm still settling in, but I think I like it.