Still thinking about bodies

In an astrology there are three main parts of your personality: the sun - your ego, identity, or role in life; the moon - who you most think of yourself as; and the ascendant - your mask, or who you appear to be to others. With the release of the Barbie movie the conversation around how the Barbie doll has affected our body image and cultural body ideal has been renewed. The main argument says that the doll negatively impacts girls’ body image and therefore she is bad. Meanwhile the body positivity movement would have us all love our bodies. Both of these are well intentioned and protective. But not all of us have such a tight relationship with our bodies.

I’ve lived in this body for 45 years now. I’d like to say I’m pretty used to it by now, but I’m not. It regularly does things I would never fathom if I were making up a body for a fiction story. I’ve learned to interpret many of its signals, but they can often feel like just aches and pains, or like something is trying to kill me. Regardless, I am not my body. I am not happy in it, or love it for itself, as the body positivity movement encourages. But neither am I at all interested in making it fit into our cultural ideal female image, whether that’s heroine chic or big butts. My body is like my astrological chart, correlations that reflect parts of who I am.

The sun sign of my body is reflected in my scars, the weight I gained when I started eating after 27 years of not. My climbing and rowing and skiing strength, and the weakness of long COVID. The moon sign of my body is reflected in how a pain in my