We were heading to a river on the outskirts of Berlin. I asked Moya to get a picture of me when we got there because I knew I looked good. My hair was at a perfect length, swinging just below my jaw, and I was wearing this new bikini I’d wanted for ages, dark green with orange smudges and these silver rings by the hip bone and chest. But by the time we got there, I was too distracted by how beautiful it was: the dappled light filtering down between pine trees, the inky blue water, and all of the people, most of them naked, their bodies all so different. There were fake tits, tribal tattoos, wobbly bellies, skin so pink it was almost purple. I was looking, but I also wasn’t looking—curious but wholly unbothered at the same time. When you’re around so many different body types, bodies start to mean less and less. And somewhere in between all of these other bodies was my own.
I waded out to the point where the water hit my belly and stood there holding my breath, trying to get used to the cold. In the distance, I could see Moya dipping down into the blue, and I screamed a bit and then reached out and swam. As the water rushed over my arms, I felt myself let go of something I couldn’t quite articulate yet, except that the thought of getting that picture now seemed like the most ludicrous idea in the world.
In the run up to the holiday, I’d been doing lots of pampering so that I would look my best. I’d been to the gym three times a week so that there were rough patches of skin where the bar bell sat, drank lemon water in the morning, used a jade face roller and wore charcoal sheet masks that scared my flatmates whenever they came into the living room. And I enjoyed it. I think that’s something people forget when they talk about beauty standards, that a lot of the time it’s fun sticking to all these routines. I have a nerdy fascination with skincare and what all the ingredients do. The possibility and promise of reinvention that each product or procedure holds is so exciting. On some level, I really do believe that if I buy the mascara, the serum, or the cream, I will be reborn, shiny and new, with no lines around my eyes and lovely, bouncy hair.
The problem is, when you cater to your body in this way, doting on it and babying it, the whole architecture of it starts to feel fragile and weak, and everything you do while living in it seems to damage it. When I frown, I think about the grooves sinking in between my eyebrows; when I clench my teeth, I worry that my masseter muscles are growing too big so that my face will become too square. It’s suffocating, because you want to feel things and show those things on your face. You want to run around and scrape your skin, let things hang and break. When I exercise or drink or go in the sun or on an airplane, the hormonal acne around my jaw flares up red and sore. It’s like everything I do in my body wounds it, tugs it slowly down towards the ground.
A while ago, I was wrapped up in a towel on my bed and I was in one of those pleasant dazes you enter after a particularly long shower. I sat up after a long time and went to search for something on my laptop when I noticed from my reflection on the screen that my boobs weren’t sitting where I thought they did. I thought the laptop screen must have been bent slightly, obscuring their position, because I remembered them being higher than that, but then I moved the screen and they stayed in the same place. So I googled, “Does wearing a bra stop your boobs from sagging?”
At the river, worries like this seemed to evaporate. I wasn’t thinking about preserving myself. It was less important what my body looked like and more important what I was doing with it. Wading out of the water, stones scraping under the pads of my feet, curling up on a towel eating pineapple and strawberries from Tupperware, I thought what a good picture it would make. But I didn’t want one anymore because that would have made it about how things looked, and that wasn’t the point.
The rest of the holiday, I let myself go in ways I don’t usually. I forgot to take my make-up off after nights out, stung my teeth with sugary soda, went on walks until my shoulders stooped, slept badly squished up against Elliot in a double bed with a too-soft mattress, my skin on my jaw getting angrier and angrier until it was sore when I touched it. And I didn’t care as much, because our bodies are meant to be broken, whittled down, like when you pick a scab and the skin forms over again. Bodies are not who we are, they’re what we live in. It’s like my friend Bex always says, “The way you look should be the least interesting thing about you.”