PART ONE

How do you feel about your body? My body and I have had an uneasy relationship: to be honest, we’re not on the best of terms. Throughout my lift, in fact, my body has been the source of no end of trouble, so I have come to be rather wary of it. The only time I remember not being bothered with it was as a young child and this mainly because I never thought about it. I took for granted, for example, that I would be, that I already was, beautiful because all the heroines of the fairy stories I read were beautiful; nothing happened to you unless you were beautiful. Since all sorts of things were happening to me all the time –I was the heroine at the centre of my universe and lots of people (if, not yet, a prince) loved me – it followed I must be beautiful, too. I do recall having a few anxious moments related to the fact that so many of the princesses had ‘golden’ hair, whilst mine was definitely brown; however Snow White was definitely a brunette (‘hair as black as ebony’) and so were Laura Ingalls and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Anne of Green Gables was a ginger, so that was all right then. I didn’t give it another thought until I was at least 10 years old. If I looked into mirrors at all, it was to inspect my new dress or hair slides, rather than the ‘me’ wearing them. The fact that I had a body didn’t occupy my conscious thoughts any more than the fact that it was light during the daytime and dark at night. On the contrary, I ran, jumped, and climbed trees in it as if there was absolutely nothing to worry about

But then, quite early on, around the age of perhaps eight or nine, there were the first signs of trouble. Until that time, I had been happily unaware that I was physically awkward child. It’s true that when I took riding lessons, I fell off; when I took dancing lessons, I couldn’t seem to remember the steps or did them backwards; when I took archery lessons I never hit the target once. However, although I sometimes felt a bit frustrated by my ineptness – especially by my failure in archery (I had a bit of a thing about Robin Hood at the time and had seen myself as a Maid Marian in waiting) it didn’t bother me unduly; children tend to take this as they come. However, as my physical awkwardness continued, I started noticing other people’s reactions to it, and became gradually first self-conscious about and then increasingly distressed by my clumsiness. Other people could climb ropes, run fast, throw and catch balls with some degree of ease and success why couldn’t I? My attempts to throw a ball involved a sort of spastic arm-jerking movement, not the graceful arc that others managed – as a result of which the ball would travel only a very short distance before dropping sadly on the ground. If I saw a ball coming in my direction, I tended to wildly misjudge its speed and angle and would clutch vainly in the air in totally the wrong place. People laughed. Or, if they were PE teachers, or a particular kind of sporty girl I came to hate, sighed and rolled their eyes. Actually, I think I had, and to extent I still have, a sort of dyslexia related to objects in space. I have always performed extremely badly in tests or games involving shape manipulation, for example and I can’t back vehicles round corners or read maps: when I try to, it’s as if there’s a sort of radio interference in my brain, my ears seem to buzz a and it becomes difficult to focus. So, relating to a ball, which, is to cap it all, people a moving object in space was always bound to be a challenge.

Ball games, however, unfortunately for me, were a big part of my English education. As a pre-teen, I soon, to my outrage, discovered that for some totally unfair reason being good at sports was cool and made you popular, whereas being good academically (which I was fairly) wasn’t and didn’t. My relationship to sport it all its forms got off to a bad sport, when overnight, all the other girls in my class seemed, without anyone telling me anything about it, to have learned and memorized the complicated rules of a terrible game called ‘netball’. Either that, or they had somehow been born with an innate knowledge of it. We started playing this game at primary school, I think one of the teachers must have been keen on it, and it quickly became the first of many ball games I learned to hate. I don’t know whether I found it – and, subsequently, hockey, lacrosse, tennis, rounders, volleyball, basketball squash and others – so tedious because I was so bad at them, or that I was so bad at them because I was bored;  but in any case I always had a terrible time. Nobody ever wanted me on their team and, although I found this upsetting, who could blame them. I was clearly a liability, never quite up to speed with what was happening and – even, which was extremely rare, got anywhere near the ball, – I usually managed to do something wrong and break one of the, to me, arcane rules that I never remembered.

Apart from a lifelong aversion to competitive sport and a dislike of bossy people in tracksuits, the cumulative result of all this failure, was a deep-seated and pervasive physical inferiority complex. The hours I spent on sports fields and athletics tracks watching my thighs turn blue, or pink, according to the season and the weather, taught me to distrust my body, but also to distance myself from it as far as possible as the best way of dealing with the shame and humiliation of my inability to get it to do what I wanted it to do. The onset of puberty, of course, made things worse because I discovered that although, as I had learned, I was not entirely mistress of my body, but there was a whole new set of rules and standards to be learned about how it ought to look. I wasn’t a very sophisticated kind of teenager, but the wideness of the gap between my own appearance and how the officially recognized ‘beautiful people’ I saw on films and in the media looked, was disturbing. Under the circumstances, it became hard to see my body as other than the sum of its imperfections – feet too square, legs, too short, eyelashes not long enough, eyebrows the wrong shape, etc. As for sporting prowess or lack of it, the thing I found hardest to accept about my physical appearance was the lack of control or choice I seemed to have in the matter. I have an oddly clear memory fragment from when I was a student of about 19 of staring at my reflection in the mirror of the ladies’ loos between lectures, and of feeling, momentarily, totally disassociated from it. It seemed to me entirely bizarre that this pale, serious face under a dark fringe and the body associated with it were the only available representation to the world of my ‘me-ness’. This arbitrary set of limbs and features was not of my choosing and I couldn’t control or change them, yet this ensemble was what people who knew me talked to and looked at all the time, assuming it to be Anna. This seemed outrageously limiting, and I longed to be able to experience the world in another way. Even though, of course, I was dissatisfied with what I saw – if I had had any choice in the matter, I would have looked like a cross between Audrey Hepburn and Beatrice Dalle in Betty Blue – my overwhelming feeling, at least for the few heartbeats that constituted that short remembered moment, was one of disconnection rather than dissatisfaction. It just didn’t seem possible that my experience of reality could only ever be mediated through this alien and undistinguished set of features in front of me. The very idea was ludicrous.

Watch Out for Part 2 – sex, religion and yoga