Cultivating radical self-love in a changing body | Guest Post by Jillian Hanson

It's hard work, and it's not about body positivity (blech)

Amid Life is, at its heart, about resilience. I post weekly about my midlife career and personal reinvention, and each month, I invite others to share stories of personal discovery and transformation.

Today’s story comes from Jillian Hanson, a poet and collagist. Jillian is part of the creative team at Blue Sky Black Sheep, where she leads online writing groups and offers consulting for authors and artists. She lives with her family in southern Maine.

Jillian’s first poetry collection, Everything More Wild, More Humble (which includes the two poems in this post), is forthcoming from Blue Sky Press in December 2024.

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It’s such a paradox, the body. You live in the same body year after year, and yet it is never the same. Think about it — you used to be 30 inches long and unable to sit up by yourself. And then a while later, you could run five miles, give birth, lift heavy things.

Body Song (paper and glue collage) ©Jillian Hanson

Is your body ever not changing?

Decade by decade, our bodies (like everything in nature) shift, adapt, grow, break, heal, decline. We try to deny our bodies, but it’s impossible. They’re our steadfast companions. They are as much us as anything is us. And they’re always changing.

I can’t get over it, this fascination with bodies and the life of the body. The grace with which they hold and carry our stories. It confounds me; it really does. I’m always reckoning with it—in my mind, my poems, my art—especially as my body changes.

Body Horizon (paper and glue collage) © Jillian Hanson

All the ways we try to make our bodies different than they are

For a lot of people, women especially, letting the body have its natural changes feels almost impossible, stuck as we are in a system that tells us our worth depends entirely on our body—size, shape, age, race, ability, gender—and where it exists in the hierarchy of bodies.¹

I grew up learning disordered eating. It was everywhere around me, all the time. My skinny mother taught me to diet at age 11. My friends and I compared thigh circumferences and smoked cigarettes to quell our appetites. Starving myself was virtuous. Low-calorie, low-fat, low-carb, food-as-enemy.

I’ve lived like this, more or less (minus the smoking) for 50+ years, thinking it was somehow my obligation as a woman to be as “attractive” as possible. Until I ran headlong into menopause and the long, long after of post-menopause.

It wasn’t just that my body changed, and it did—of course, it did. It was that society stopped seeing and valuing me because I was no longer a desirable object. Ha! That was a revelation—one of those things you hear about but don’t really get until you go through it (like becoming a parent). It woke me up.

There’s a new movement of change unfolding inside me.

It’s really hard work, and it’s taking a long time. It might take me the rest of my life, I don’t know. It’s not just about recovering from disordered eating and a fractured body image. It’s not about giving up or compromising or “body positivity,” blech.

It’s about cultivating a wild, radical self-love. Not self-acceptance. Love. A love fierce enough to topple the hierarchy and change the world from the inside out. That’s the change, the reinvention, the transformation that really matters to me now.

Unfolding (paper and glue collage) © Jillian Hanson

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Heartfelt thanks to Jillian for sharing her incredible words with us! 💕👏

Jillian’s first poetry collection, Everything More Wild, More Humble (which includes the two poems in this post), is forthcoming from Blue Sky Press in December 2024.

These words—this week, especially—stay with me:

I keep my blood now, use it for ink. / I cast votes with it.

What will stay with you? How are you cultivating “wild, radical self-love”? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Work hard. Be brave. Believe.

Catherine

1. Listening to the poet and activist Sonya Renee Taylor talk about what she calls “the body hierarchy ladder” blew my mind and changed everything. If you’re not familiar with her work, I highly recommend it. You can find her book, The Body is Not an Apology, here, or listen to her interview with Brené Brown here.