Letting myself go
Somehow a thread about nutrition turned into a thread about calories and then someone said, “I just don’t want to let myself go.”
I exited the app with those words in my head. “Letting myself go.”
For some reason, I only hear this phrase from or about women, and it always has to do with whether or not they’ve gained weight. Obviously it's full of problematic assumptions: thin is better (not automatically), fat equals unhealthy (so not true), fat equals lazy (almost never), and that it’s somehow part of the job description that you automatically have if you are a woman in this world. It’s not even unspoken. We’re supposed to not “let ourselves go.”
And instead of walking through this world and enjoying the bounty of it, we’re not supposed to let ourselves go to the dessert counter. We’re not supposed to let ourselves go exploring who we are and what we really want to do. We’re not supposed to let ourselves go above a certain calorie count, never mind that research shows that restricted calorie diets can permanently reduce your metabolisms ability to burn calories. But if we just are disciplined enough we can be forever, thin right? We’re not supposed to let ourselves go get older I guess too, never let ourselves go change, never let ourselves go grow.
Age and change and growth leads to things like cellulite, stretch marks, and scars. Can’t have that, now can we? What’s next? Embracing wrinkles and gray hair?
I’ve avoided all the Barbie movie stuff because so many other people have done it so thoroughly I didn’t see the need, and like all movies that we want to make a point, it has major issues along the way, but the scene that stuck with me the most was after her wild escape into the real world, the men in the company feel she’s causing all kinds of trouble because she’s out of her assigned role. So what do they do? They try to put her back in her box.
And all of us women have found at one point or another that there was a box. Ours have varying degrees of visibility, but at some point someone will point out where the box is.
“You go backpacking alone? And your husband lets you do that?” Yes, because I don’t let him do things and he doesn’t let me do things, we mutually figure out what we want to do together and for ourselves, and then we see what we can make work in the context of our family and the needs of our children and so on. Neither of us get to do everything we want to do, but that’s the way it works when you’re responsible for raising other humans. But the first time I went backpacking alone, I had a moment of wondering if I was a bad mom and a bad wife, sitting out there by myself in the woods, going, “Why the hell did I feel the need to do this?” (Full story in Inward Apocalypse). That was the walls of the box trying to reassert themselves.
But I let myself go backpacking again after that, and I never looked back. Since then, I’ve let myself go climb mountains. I’ve let myself go camp solo on the Appalachian Trail in the rain and then snow. I’ve let myself go swim in a waterfall in my sports bra and shorts and felt fabulous about it. I’ve let myself go and dare to teach other women how to backpack.
And then there’s the other side of the question that popped into my head after I saw this phrase: “Is it even possible to let yourself go?”
And of course, the answer is yes. Women aren’t supposed to have strong senses of self even today. We’re so and so’s wife or so and so’s mother or daughter. Always defined by who we’re in relationship to even when violated by sexual assault and harrassment, we commonly find the plea, “She’s someone’s daughter…” etc etc. Never valuable enough just for ourselves, so we let ourselves go. Not into adventure, but just let go of our strong sense of self because that’s what we were told would make us valued and accepted and good. Even with everything we’ve changed and everything we’ve done, this still exists in spoken and unspoken ways. And regardless if we’re married or single, have kids or not, there’s still all these ideas about things a woman isn’t supposed to do on her own.
Fortunately, that sense of self didn’t go as far as you think, and it’s never too late to get it back. So let’s refuse to let ourselves go, and at the same time, let’s let ourselves go bravely into whatever is calling to us, whatever makes our eyes sparkle and our spirit say, “yes!”
And let’s never again worry so much about what we put into our mouths that we have whole moral categories for it. Life is too short to hate ourselves, to hate what we eat, and to allow food to occupy such a large portion of our thinking.
Because there is no box, and there’s nothing we can’t do if we just decide we’re going to let ourselves go.
What about you? In what ways will you be letting yourself go this year? And how will you be reclaiming yourself?
“I wish I could still believe in God, but I can’t be a Christian anymore because of ______” Fill-in-the-blank with racism, misogyny, homophobia, toxic capitalism, and so on. I’ve had this conversation with different people almost word-for-word over and over. White American Christianity has so defined God that many people cannot separate God from the toxic theology they were taught.
But this isn’t the God I see in the Bible. The Bible shows us a God meeting people where they are and nudging them towards justice and total thriving for all: shalom. The Bible details arcs of justice and societal reform. If we understand how radical those arcs were in the context of the day, we can extend them forward into the future and figure out how to work for justice, total thriving, and societal reformation in our day.
I grew up in that first world view. Come along, and I’ll tell you the story of how I escaped, and I’ll show you a theology that I believe paints a more accurate picture: a faith for the common good where everyone thrives and no one is left out.
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Anna Elisabeth Howard writes highly caffeinated takes on shalom as a lens for everything from her front porch in Hendersonville, TN where she lives with her husband and two sons. She is a community organizer and movement chaplain with a background in youth and family ministry and is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary. An avid hiker and backpacker, many thoughts start somewhere in the middle of the woods, or under a waterfall. She is a regular contributer to Earth & Altar and her latest book is Inward Apocalypse: Uncovering a Faith for the Common Good.
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