What an eating disorder taught me about social justice

“It is through our own transformed relationship with our bodies that we become champions for other bodies on our planet.”

—Sonya Renee-Taylor

I was a ballerina in high school. My coaches were my second parents and their studio was my second home. At Studio Roxander, I learned some of the most important lessons of my youth and starting in 2012, some of the most painful ones, too. It was the year I started my period and my body started changing. When you’re fifteen years old and spend 3-4 hours a day in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, you notice. You notice the extra tightness of your leotard, your chest that is suddenly fuller, curves around your thighs and hips that weren’t there before.

My idea of success as a dancer and by extension as a young woman was inextricably tied to the thin aesthetic promoted in ballet. When I pictured athleticism, grace, and discipline, I pictured thinness. When I pictured health, beauty, and respect, I pictured thinness. To me, it was all one and the same. That idea in my head wasn’t influenced by ballet singlehandedly; there were other factors but we’ll just call this thinness-promoting system: “diet culture.” At the time, 15 year old Christine didn’t know diet culture was to blame. When she saw changes in the studio mirror, she saw personal failure and she was determined to turn things around.

I was out to singlehandedly—by sheer grit and determination—lose weight and stop my period from coming back. There were a lot of sprints around my neighborhood at 1am, sit-ups on my bedroom floor and skipped breakfasts. There were a lot of days going to ballet hungry after eating only yogurt and vegetables for lunch and drives home planning how to avoid eating what my mom had made for dinner. Ironically but expectedly, as I fought to regain control, I started to lose it. A chaotic cycle of restricting and binging became my new normal.

In September of my senior year, the Nutcracker audition results came in. The star role of Sugar Plum Fairy had been decided between me and one of my friends I’d danced with for years. They chose her. My immediate thought was:

  If you were thinner, they would have chosen you. 

That Nutcracker season was spent trying to repair the physical damage I believed I had brought upon myself. If I had understood the cost I would pay in my pursuit of weight loss—the social anxiety it would ignite, the isolation and depression I would experience and the psychological and spiritual wounds it would inflict—I would have never embarked on the journey. But there was only one unshakeable thought on my mind:

If you were thinner, they would have chosen you. 

That December, one of my coaches pulled me aside and said “it’s like a light has gone out of you.” 

He was absolutely right.

A light had gone out and I had no idea how to get it back. My eating disorder and my own identity started to blur and I was losing myself in the process. I graduated high school and a few months later I was auditioning for the BYU ballet department. I made it onto the BYU Ballet Showcase Company and attributed it to the grace of God and the weight I had lost just prior to the audition (a week of salad, grapes, and rice cakes will do that for you). The next semester was psychological warfare for me. There was no reprieve from the exhausting, discriminatory dialogue in my head.

If you were thinner, 

you would get more attention.

If you looked like her,

you would be happier.

If you could just control yourself around food,

you wouldn't be such a failure.

You can’t see those disordered thoughts in this picture or the crippling shame and anxiety I felt on that photoshoot day. That's the isolating part about eating disorders and mental illness - oftentimes they're both invisible.

Here’s where I get to the awakening realization I had recently:

It was a narrative of discrimination and injustice.

The culture in ballet and the world at large that valued thinner bodies over larger ones was discriminating against those who fit in the latter group or (thanks to body dysmorphia) those who believed they fit into the latter group. That cultural reality coupled with her innate perfectionism led 15 year old Christine to try anything & everything to change the body she had in favor of one that she perceived as better, more acceptable, and more worthy.

Discrimination. 

I didn’t see it as discrimination then. It took me 4 years after that Nutcracker season in high school to confront this injustice that no one seemed to talk about.

In 2018, I was sitting in group therapy with nine other women my age listening to their stories when I noticed this common pattern:

a growing girl’s body —>

comparison —>

external and internal discrimination —>

shame —>

disordered efforts to meet an ideal —>

falling into the clutches of an eating disorder —>

rock bottom.

I realized that I wasn’t the only one. The injustice was shared. The discrimination was rampant. Something had to be done.

I started to find the courage to talk about it through other people. In November 2018, my dear friend Kyle came out as gay in a beautiful blog post entitled “God doesn’t make mistakes.” His story began with feeling out of place and ashamed in a culture that struggled to understand and accept LGBTQ+ people. When I read it, I cried. I felt so deeply his shame. I felt so keenly his sense of isolation and never being enough. In a way, our stories were the same; we had both experienced discrimination, whether directly or perceived, against the bodies we had and tried to change them into versions society would deem more acceptable and worthy. When I read Kyle's story, I longed to one day have the courage to do what he did: to speak up about my struggle and advocate for other bodies.

Over time, I learned that this desire to advocate for other bodies had a name: 

Social Justice.

“Many of the ills of the world can actually be solved through radical self-love. Racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body. A radical self-love world is a world free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies.”

—Sonya Renee-Taylor

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed when a white police officer knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. This moment sparked what some say is the biggest civil rights movement in history. I found out about George Floyd on social media. I saw several of the eating disorder therapists and activists I follow expressing their concern, anger, and grief, pausing posting their own content for weeks to come. Then I noticed some of my LGBTQ+ and vocal ally friends marching in protests... then minority friends speaking out, including Latino and Asian friends. This isn’t to say that my white friends were silent but my ED, LGBTQ+, and minority friends seemed to be some of the first and some of the most vocal.

Why?

As I've pondered it, the conclusion I’ve come to is this:

Because for them, Black Lives Matter was a social justice issue. And they know all too well what that’s like.

Each of them had been personally affected by an “algorithm created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body.” Whether it was racism, homophobia, or fatphobia, they had all personally known discrimination. They were not born into the kind of privilege that would have spared them the personal experience of social injustice.

They lived it.

And they weren’t about to sit back and watch it happen to someone else. 

I have so much to learn and I am so imperfect. My story of discrimination is a subtle, privileged one in a vast sea of stories of people who have been marginalized because of their body size, color, ethnicity, age, sex, or ability. In his recent conference talk, the prophet of my Church, Russell M. Nelson, pleaded: “I call upon our members everywhere to lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice. I plead with you to promote respect for all of God’s children.” 

Lead out. 

What a beautiful call to action.

God loves all of His children—that’s one thing I know for sure.

What if we lived in a world that sees people through His perfectly compassionate and omnipotent eyes?

What if we lived in a world that celebrates the diversity He so beautifully and intentionally designed?

What if we lived in a world that actively acknowledges and seeks to root out the harmful, implicit bias we all experience because we aren't God and we have limited life backgrounds and experiences?

What if all of God's children enjoyed the same, basic human rights regardless of the body they exist in? 

What if we lived in a world "free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies”?

I don’t have one single answer but I do have a few ideas:

Black Lives Matter

LGBTQ+ lives matter

Women and minorities matter

Diet culture and fatphobia can go to hell

& the core message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ:

Love one another as Jesus loves you.

Since fifteen year old Christine wasn’t able to be a champion for her own body, I’m going to try my very best to be a champion for other bodies on this planet.

At the end of the day, it’s not just a social justice issue—it’s a human issue.

It’s a loving your neighbor issue.

And that’s worth the fight.

ps. #VOTE2020