'My body could vaporize and I would still exist'

A guest essay from Margo Steines.

I’m so pleased to share the first Body Type guest essay, from author Margo Steines. Margo’s memoir, Brutalities: A Love Story, came out in October. Girlhood and Bodywork author

Melissa Febos

calls it “a perfect book,” and the New York Times says, “What elevates Steines’s book above the difficult, often extreme experiences she shares is her willingness to look honestly and objectively at her desires.” Check out a book talk between Margo and Touched Out author

Amanda Montei

here.

Margo pitched an essay about living in her postpartum body after (mostly) recovering from eating disorders and compulsive exercise. I’m so moved by how she’s pulled at the threads of her experiences and what they mean for her self perception. Hope you enjoy it.

If you’d like to see (or write!) more guest posts, please chip in $5/month or $50/year — that allows me to pay more writers for their important work. Thank you ❤️

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DALL-E

By Margo Steines

When I was young I used to have recurring nightmares about someone throwing acid on my face. I wasn’t afraid of pain, or terror — I was afraid of losing my looks. The impossibly self-centered vanity of this neurosis aside, I now understand those dreams as expressions of a deep fear of loss of what at the time was my only form of currency. 

I did not, as a teenaged and twenty-something person, perceive any difference between the appearance of my physical self and who I was. My face, my body, my style: they defined me, wholly. The degree to which I could mold them into what I understood to be acceptable was the degree to which I succeeded as a person — the degree to which I was acceptable. 

I wonder often how much of this feeling — body image as selfhood — was particular to the circumstances in which I came of age. Born in 1982 in Manhattan, I do not remember a time when I was not appraised on the street as a matter of daily routine. For years, when I left my family’s apartment building, a man who spent the days in Washington Square Park would walk close to me and whisper (when warranted), You gained a little weight. I was a teenager in the ‘90s, and we didn’t have Health At Any Size or body positivity. The metric was very clear back then: “skinny” was a compliment, and anything bigger than a size two was an embarrassment. 

I received other attention for my looks that felt good at the time: being scouted by modeling agents (before they realized that I was too short), being thrown compliments on the street. I didn’t have language for “pretty privilege,” but I certainly benefited from it. What I didn’t understand was that I was building a persona predicated on a very particular kind of beauty, one that was young, femme, and conventional. What I wouldn’t understand until much later was that I was being recruited for a valuation system that required me to remain young, femme, skinny, and sexually available; one that attached all of my value to the way I looked.

I had clinical anorexia by the time I was 12, which quickly developed into a collection of severe eating disorders for which I was repeatedly hospitalized. I received all manner of force feeding and cognitive behavioral whatever, but I don’t remember anyone asking me what I thought about my body in the context of my identity — if they had, perhaps we would have unpacked my belief that they were one and the same. 

I don’t know if conversations like that would have changed my desire to shape my body into what I wanted it to be, at any cost to my physical and mental health. But I do think that an earlier understanding of myself as separate from my physical appearance might have planted a seed for my eventual recovery. If it had dawned on me that I had value in the world beyond what I looked like, I might have been willing to invest my own care and energy into the parts of myself that were not about image and appearance. Because I did not have those realizations, my eating disorders felt in many ways like investments in the currency of beauty, the only one I felt that I carried. 

“Being obsessed with my body felt like the wet part of the water — like, how could you live in one of these things and not be obsessed with it?”

I have been technically “recovered” (meaning that I no longer fit the diagnostic criteria) from my eating disorders for about 15 years, but I have spent plenty of that time doing dodgy things with diet in the name of wellness, and I’ve spent that entire time attempting and failing to divest myself of the thinking that went along with anorexia. After spending so many of my formative years filled with a profoundly confusing mixture of self-loathing and vanity, being obsessed with my body felt like the wet part of the water — like, how could you live in one of these things and not be obsessed with it?

Margo Steines

In 2020, after a decade of infertility, I gave birth to my child. I wanted a baby more than I had ever wanted anything, and finally my body (and my partner) gave her to me. I grew the baby in my body and I make the milk that feeds her with my body, and somewhere in those processes my body went from being a decorative entity that I used as a vehicle for experience, to being an essential vessel for keeping my kid alive, healthy, and fed. There was something about the abrupt transition into that space — a space of bodily utility driven by love rather than money, where the function of my body had nothing to do with its appearance, but only with its capacity — that broke my self-obsession, and now I am 41 years old and live a life that largely has nothing to do with my body or the way I look. 

After two long careers that were predicated on specific qualities and abilities of my body (I was a sex worker for a decade, and then an ironworker), I now work from home in a cerebral field where most of the people I work with have never even seen me or my body. I am no longer visibly an athlete the way I was for many years, and I move through my days without anyone (except my partner — thanks babe!) commenting on how I look. I feel often like my body could just vaporize and I would somehow still exist, which is a big shift from feeling like my selfhood and my physical being were congruent and inextricable. 

For so many years, my ability to earn a living in the ways I knew how to depended on my body, and on my body not changing. In both spaces, this initially felt like a hack (“I can do this thing”) and ended up feeling like a trap (“I can only do this thing, and I cannot change in a way that makes me less able to do this thing.”) When I was a sex worker, I shaved my head, and I had to wear a wig at work to preserve my earning capacity. Years later I shaved my head again before becoming a metalworker, and some years in when I wanted to grow my hair out, I did so with trepidation, knowing that with long hair I would be perceived sexually at work, and would have less freedom to move without friction in the world of men I worked within. 

Most days, my current state feels like a profound relief. I can be pretty or not, femme or not. I could gain or lose X pounds and it would not affect my business. I eat the food that keeps me healthy, I wear the leggings that feel comfy, I keep my face bare and my hair wild. I have in some ways gone feral, and it is not lost on me that I am slowly merging into exactly what my incredible daughter is: a creature unconcerned by the perceptions of others, a creature alive in its body. 

Some days, though, I feel a sense of horror at who I have allowed — encouraged! — myself to become. I look at my beautiful friends, many of whom are very well put together, who blow dry daily and take a lot of care with their skin. My friends back in New York, especially, are so glamorous and MILFy. And that old practice of comparing myself and feeling less than settles in like weather, and I miss being hot, miss having style, miss being seen. But so far, that feeling blows over fast enough that I have yet to do anything more dramatic than ordering high-dose retinol about it. Having a small child leaves little room for self-obsession, and beyond that, on a daily basis I experience my body succeeding in its purposes: making milk, giving hugs, serving as a lap to sit on and a belly for a small person to rest their bones on. I won’t say that these purposes make me not care about how I look, but they are powerful counterbalances. 

I never thought, when I was young and suffering so much in my eating disorders and self-hate, about what it might be like to be middle aged, to be a mom, to be loved in a way that is not dependent on any particular facet of my appearance. The idea that the appearance of my body would one day move into a space of irrelevance would have horrified me, but here I am, making milk in my Birkenstocks and, most days, not giving a fuck. After so many years of my body being the only thing about me that I and the people I surrounded myself with perceived as valuable, it is a huge relief to move into middle age with the idea that yes, this body has facilitated a lot of adventure, but it is not the entirety, or even the centrality, of my identity.

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