When I was 15, I grew nine inches in nine months. My bones ached at night. I grew out of my clothes at a rapid clip, exposing skinny ankles beneath the bottom of my blue jeans. I went from being average height to towering over everyone in my class.
I had been uncomfortable in my own skin even before that. I grew up in the US in the late 70s, and my body type was not in fashion. I was curvy in places that were not celebrated, with thighs and a butt that announced themselves in ways I found uncomfortable. I was a teen when I first started dieting, and women’s critiques of their bodies, and the bodies of others, quickly became a constant refrain of my youth.
I carried the narrative that my body was faulty and needed to be controlled into adulthood. Until one summer, when I was in my early 30s. I was divorced, and my two children were with their father at his home in Europe for the summer. I worked at a demanding job, and rarely took vacations, but a friend persuaded me to drive with him from my home in Seattle to the Oregon Country Fair. We were recovering alcoholics, and I wasn’t sure about attending a three-day music fair in the middle of nowhere, but I figured we would be fine together – he had been sober longer than I had.
I’m not outdoorsy, but my friend and I set up a tent in the performers’ camping area with his friends, who were acrobats and circus performers. For days we lived in the forest, listening to music and staying up late around a campfire. When they were done with their public shows, the performers joined us, playing their instruments and singing. My friend and I, the only sober ones in the group, smoked lots of cigarettes.
The women were strong, acrobats, uninhibited. Being with them changed me. Food suddenly tasted better. I remember a sunny day, walking down a forest path to a booth that sold granola with berries, and experiencing the warm burst of sweetness in my mouth. My shoulders loosened. I felt my feet connect with the ground in a new way, the smell of the campfire in my hair and clothes. I was a writer, unpublished, working on a novel late at night when my children slept. But this was the first time I had spent an extended period of time with other artists, and it was intoxicating. It was like getting a backstage pass to a kind of heaven I never knew existed.
I remember going to take a shower – there was a private stall, but you had to pay money for it, and everyone used the public showers. I was reluctant, expecting flashbacks to the awkward gym class ablutions of my youth.
Try it, people said. It’s magical.
With some trepidation, I took all my clothes off and walked out on to a large open-air wooden platform. We were surrounded by trees, the blue sky, the warm air. Shower spigots, towers with multiple nozzles, rose from the platform every few feet, and there were so many people – probably 50 of us – all showering without a scrap of clothing in sight. No one seemed self-conscious: the deeply hippy vibe of the festival extended to this space; young, old, every type of body, race, gender. We were just human beings, shorn of the cultural signifiers of clothing, for that moment together in the woods.
I lathered my skin, feeling a deep release. A young man who could not walk was carried by two of his friends, all of them nude, to an open space beneath a spigot. I could see on his face that he felt the same freedom and welcome. His body, too, was just another of the many expressions of being human.
It was a deeply spiritual moment for me, and the start of a spiritual practice of honouring my body as a vehicle for connection, understanding, pleasure and guidance.
I’m 62 now, and that perspective has helped me make peace with the ways in which age changes a body. I no longer diet; I enjoy the burst of sweetness from the raspberries that grow in my garden when I pop them in my mouth in the summer sun. I am grateful that my body can still take me through the water like an arrow, swimming strong and far. I have two young grandchildren and I am hopeful that they will grow up with a different refrain: that our bodies are all different, and that is wonderful.
Stephanie Peirolo is an executive coach and author of The Saint and the Drunk: A Guide to Making the Big Decisions In Your Life.
