When I wrote about body image as part of this project, it stuck with me. I felt like there was something big there, something that made me feel a little fire in my belly. While writing the post about body image I realized how much of an impact my own body shame has had on my life, how it has reverberated through all of my relationships and interactions like a silent but powerful wave. In every fiber of my being I harbor a hope that it doesn't have to be like this, that people (especially women) don't have to continue slogging through life weighed down by this proverbial anvil on their chests. Making a positive difference to interrupt the prevalence of body shame would be... well, significant.
For the first time in ages I felt ignited by curiosity. My intuition told me that I ought to look first to feminist discourse to get a handle on the topic. Of all the "isms," feminism is one I have avoided exploring. When I took a moment to be honest with myself, I realized that I hadn't been interested in aligning myself with feminism because I had no desire to be labelled a radical; I figured on some level that feminism was inherently political and I have always steered clear of politics if at all possible. But again, if I'm honest with myself, I know deep down that everything is political and feminism is no more radical than any other philosophical orientation out there. It's a classic case of the old adage, that what you push back against is probably something you need the most.
So, I scoured used bookstores for Naomi Wolf and Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan; I searched Google Scholar for articles about female body image; I ordered a handful of things from Amazon that I couldn't get my hands on elsewhere. One of my impulse purchases was a book called "The Body is Not an Apology," by Sonya Renee Taylor. When it arrived on my doorstep I perused the prologue to try and get a sense of what I was getting into. And, there on page xxi, was the best description of significance I could ever imagine, though couched in slightly different words. Taylor compared the notion of significance with the related but different concepts of purpose and destiny. I've inserted the word "significance" where she uses another term, but otherwise she hits the nail squarely on the head:
"Both purpose and destiny allude to a place we might, with enough effort, someday arrive. We belabor ourselves with all the things we must do to fulfill our purpose or live out our destiny. Contrary to purpose, [significance] does not require we do anything to achieve it. [Significance] imbues us with all we need at this exact moment to manifest the highest form of ourselves, and we don't have to figure out how to get it. We arrived on this planet with this source material already present. I am by no means implying that the work you may have done up to this point has been useless. To the contrary, I applaud whatever labor you have undertaken that has gotten you this far. Survival is damn hard. Each of us has traversed a gauntlet of traumas, shames, and fears to be where we are today, wherever that is. Each day we wake to a planet full of social, political, and economic obstructions that siphon our energy and diminish our sense of self. Consequently, tapping into [significance] often feels nearly impossible. Humans unfortunately make being human exceptionally hard for each other, but... the work we have done... is not about acquiring some way of being that we currently lack. The work is to crumble the barriers of injustice and shame leveled against us so that we might access what we have always been, because we will, if unobstructed, inevitably grow into the purpose for which we were created."
And there it is. Significance is not about finding anything. It's about really seeing who I am at the core and enabling that to guide me. Ultimately, it's about authenticity. The work, then, is different from what I first made it out to be. It's actually about dismantling the feelings of shame, regret, and inadequacy that have become a hard shell over the version of myself that I present to the world so that I can access what's underneath. And Taylor was right - I have done some hard work to this end. She also provides some self-inquiry questions to help with the process of accessing significance. Since there's nothing I like better than a good inquiry project, I'm going to use them. The posts that follow will make my journey public. I have a feeling that it might be moderately uncomfortable, but as the kids say these days, whatevs - I'm doing it anyway.
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