I walk into the gym most mornings and want, very specifically, to disappear. Three months in, my spinal injury recovery is on track and I’ve lost two kilograms. My confidence, however, has not moved an inch. There are mirrors on every wall and men on every machine, and some old part of my brain insists that all of them are watching, unimpressed. My coach tells me to look straight ahead while I lift. I cannot do it. I look down or up or at the clock; anywhere but at the woman exercising in the mirror. If it isn’t clear already, this is not a transformation story. If anything, I’m learning to use my body for myself again, rather than constantly imagining how it looks to everyone else.
There was a version of me who loved this body without asking permission. Growing up, I ran, cycled, danced and stopped to admire my own silhouette in a shop window without flinching. I liked the way I moved. Other people’s gaze only confirmed what I already believed. That version of me existed until 26 November 2015.
Eight months into my marriage, I was a journalist on deadline when an accident at work fractured my spine. What followed was nearly six months of bed rest so total that my husband bathed me, changed me and cared for me with a tenderness I still don’t have adequate words for. I gained 20 kilograms in a year and gave away bags of clothes I no longer recognised myself in. But the bigger rupture was less visible: the body I had once trusted to run, dance and carry me wherever I wanted had become something fragile, painful and unfamiliar.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how quickly my body became public property. My mother, most mornings, had an observation ready before I left for work. Elephant. Ugly. Not the girl I used to be. Friends turned my big breasts into a running joke I was expected to laugh along with. A hiring consultant for a corporate strategy role at a luxury hospitality company told me plainly that they only hired slim women because thin looked better in saris.
“Comments about our bodies affect us most deeply when they come from the people closest to us, especially our parents, because that’s when we’re first figuring out who we are and where we fit in the world,” says Elsa Joseph, a Bangalore-based psychologist. “Even remarks made casually, without any intent to wound, get woven into how we see ourselves for years afterwards.”
Through all of it, my husband never once joined the chorus. When I asked him, on my worst days, if I looked fat, his answer never changed: “You’re lying!” Once, catching my own reflection and recoiling, I told him the mirror was right. He said the mirror had a problem, not me.
This year, worn down by a punishing job and men who did not care for an opinionated woman, my back pain returned, sciatica included. I couldn’t climb stairs without panting. My husband, two years into his own disciplined fitness journey, gave me an ultimatum I understood as love rather than pressure: join him or he’d let his own progress go, too. I couldn’t watch him give up something that had visibly given him his life back, so I agreed reluctantly.
I went in thinking exercise was another way of correcting my body. Slowly, I’m beginning to understand it as a way of caring for it instead. The goal is no longer to earn the right to look at myself in a mirror. It’s to climb a flight of stairs without pain, strengthen the back that has frightened me for a decade and find out what this body can still do.
