The Body I Couldn’t See

I have been petite, plus-sized, and all the things in between, and no matter where in the size spectrum my body was, I looked down and saw the same thing.

Soft, round tummy. Thighs that spread when I sit. A body that needed to be smaller, tighter, more contained. The number on the tag changed. The story didn’t.

I was an active kid — well-muscled in the way girls who climb things and run hard get

muscled. Soft in the places girls are supposed to be soft. But I couldn’t see any of that

clearly. I saw my belly and called it wrong. I watched my thighs flatten against a chair and felt ashamed. I was a child, and I had already learned to look at my own body like a problem to be solved.

That’s not an accident. That’s a culture doing its job.

The military didn’t help. In uniform, your body stops being yours — it becomes a vehicle, a tool, an asset to the mission. You learn to push through pain, ignore signals, override discomfort. You get very good at not listening to your body, because listening slows you down. I was good at that long before I enlisted. The military just gave me a framework and called it discipline.

What nobody tells you is that you carry that framework home. You carry it into every room, every relationship, every mirror. The body-as-tool lens doesn’t turn off when you take the uniform off. You just start applying it to different missions — and one of those missions, for a lot of us, is shrinking.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then: the brain maintains a map of the body. Not a photograph — a map. And like any map, it can be outdated. It can reflect old terrain. It can keep rendering a coastline that eroded years ago.

My nervous system learned a story about my body when I was young. Big. Wrong. Too

much. And it kept telling that story with remarkable consistency across decades, across

sizes, across a life that changed in almost every other way.

I’ve dropped about 5-6 sizes this past year. A substantial shift by any measure. And I looked down and still saw the same tummy. Still felt the same way sitting in a chair. My brain had a map, and it was not updating in real time. That’s not vanity. That’s not being ungrateful. That’s neuroscience — the body image lives in the nervous system, not in the mirror.

I see this in my treatment room constantly. People who apologize for their bodies before they’re even on the table. Who tense when I approach their body, bracing for a

judgment that was never coming from me. Who say, ‘I know I need to lose weight’ the way you’d confess something, like the softness of their flesh is a moral failing I need to be warned about.

I want to tell them: I’m not looking at you the way you’re looking at you. I’m looking at tissue.

At tension patterns.

At the places where you’ve been holding things for a long time.

What I see in my clients, what I’ve lived in my own body, is disconnection. Not just from

physical sensation — from the right to inhabit themselves at all. We learn early that certain bodies are acceptable and others require apology, and that lesson gets wired in deep.

There’s something worth naming in the feedback loop too. When I believed I was wrong — truly believed it, couldn’t see anything else — that belief shaped how I moved through the world. What I reached for, what I avoided, what I gave up on. The distorted image didn’t just cause suffering. It participated in shaping the physical reality it feared. That’s how powerful these stories are. They don’t just live in our heads. They live in our choices, our posture, our relationship to nourishment and rest and movement.

I don’t have a tidy ending for this. I’m a bodywork practitioner who has spent years helping people come home to themselves, and I am still making that same journey. I hold both of those things at the same time, without resolution.

You’re not broken for not being able to see yourself clearly. You were taught not to. That’s different. And it’s worth knowing the difference.