I used to struggle with my body. I tried to make it thin, and it fought back. Now, I struggle with my mind, trying to convince it not just to surrender but to renounce the battle.
My body is fine just the way it is, I tell myself. It always was. The real problem was the fatphobia that convinced me to trade my time, energy and ambition for carb-counting, hunger and self-loathing. (My mind doesn’t believe me. Why should it, after all these years?)
Both struggles feel futile. Losing weight is a battle I can win, but a war I will absolutely lose. Likewise, even backed by brave comrades and armed with ample ammunition, I don’t expect to defeat my lifelong dissatisfaction with my body — not while opposing forces try to sell me off-brand Ozempic and laud the new “Bridgerton” star’s “bravery” for not being a size two.
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It’s exhausting, this fight. But I know one way to take a break. One place I can go to stop feeling bad about not having the “right” body — and to stop feeling guilty about feeling bad.
The beach.
Follow this authorKate Cohen's opinionsYeah, I know: Going to the beach is exactly what we’ve been told we can’t do unless our bodies meet certain specifications. “Beach-ready,” adj., in popular parlance, does not mean being in dire need of a vacation, sporting a thick layer of sunscreen and possessed of a day’s worth of canned cocktails. It describes “someone’s body when they have been preparing it to look good on the beach, especially by exercising or eating less.”
Instagram posts insist from the first hints of spring that it’s time to get your beach body back, for which purpose there is, luckily, a system of online workouts called “Beachbody” and gym instructors who warn about the approach of swimsuit season as though it were shark season. “Just three months left,” my Pilates teacher informed us, in March, assuming no doubt that fear would deepen our plié squats.
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What’s so scary about swimsuit season? Is a swimsuit not simply a lightweight article of clothing that dries quickly and allows you to move freely?
No, I’m afraid, it is not. It’s a featured event in beauty pageants and the subject of its own annual magazine. It’s why people watched “Baywatch,” why they watch “Love Island,” and — just maybe — why they watch women’s beach volleyball.
To consume American culture about the summer is to swim in the notion that if your job is “beach,” your abs come in six-packs. Even aging won’t relieve you of the apparent responsibility of looking as athletic as Tom Cruise in a touch football game or as slender as Martha Stewart in the pages of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
It’s all so depressing, don’t you think?
You know what will cheer you up? The beach.
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Any beach will do. Any stretch of sand or rock, as long as it abuts a body of water large enough to fill your visual field and opens to the sky.
Sun, as we know, makes people feel better. Our bodies need it. Too little and we suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder or a vitamin D deficiency that gives you rickets. Unlike love handles or cellulite, these are actual problems.
And that expanse of blue — blue sky, blue water — soothes the brain. No, really, it’s (sort of) science.
And then there are the people.
After you trudge to your spot and do that little wiggle-press to anchor your beach chair in place, glance around at your fellow beachgoers. They will quickly dispel the notion that only pageant contestants are permitted. You might see fit-looking lifeguards surveying from their perches, but fear not: They won’t blow their whistles at hip circumference infractions. Big bellies and butts — and skinny teens and roly-poly toddlers and wiry grandpas and even Ken and Barbie look-alikes — are everywhere, all mixed in together.
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Speaking of which, have you ever noticed the way people cluster at the beach? We might want our own little patch of sand, but we tend to choose one right near someone else’s. Maybe we’re just too lazy to lug our snacks and sunscreen farther down the shore. But I think the proximity of other bodies, other voices, other lives is comforting. Where else do we dig purposelessly with plastic toys or stare empty-headed at the horizon just a few feet from total strangers? It’s a blessing, this collective indolence. It washes away distinctions of age and size and leaves only humans, mutually being.
And if you put down your book or shake off your nap and get in water, well then. Congratulations. You are officially released from your body: its weight, its appearance, its meaning. You are instead totally in your body: its movement, its senses, its life. Your body floats or it swims or it sinks slowly before your toes touch bottom and push you up again in a dramatic burst that is in the grand scheme — which suddenly you can sense, bobbing like a bottlecap between land and sea — completely, blissfully insignificant.
You are a mouse. You are a whale. You are a grain of sand. You are a molecule of salt suspended in water.
A piece of the universe. At peace.
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