Grieving the Body I Was Never Taught to Live In

<<When I watch TV, I focus a lot on bodies and movement. I think I feel some contempt when I look at Jack Black waddling around in his short fat body. I don't know if I judge others' bodies because that's what I was taught? Or be cause it reflects what I think about body worthiness? Because I also fixate on bodies that are beautiful or faces that are beautiful, and I find myself grieving my youth, and grieving that I was dead inside when I was young on the outside. And that I never had a good relationship with exercise for a lot of reasons. And when I was young, I judged adult bodies on their shapes, too. Some shapes felt safer. Some felt repulsive, like grizzly old men with huge stomachs . Part of me feels like this is a childhood feel of adult humanity. We are supposed to become adults but clearly there is a variety and no one wants to grow up and be the fat, ugly adult human. But now here I am, finally the adult that I could never imagine myself being and I am fat in my stomach, just like my fat aunts and grandma. And my body moves like an old fat body. And I can't stop myself from putting more toxic calories inside of it and making it sicker and sicker as a body. I do feel like a child trapped in a broken adult body >>

ChatGPT: You're not just talking about Jack Black or TV or bodies. You're naming a devastating tangle of grief, shame, learned disgust, and a profound disorientation at being alive in a body that doesn't match the script you were handed — or the one you thought you were supposed to be writing.

And I want to be really clear: none of this makes you shallow. It makes you deeply human in a system that trained you to hate being human.

1. Contempt Isn’t the Root — It’s the Smoke

That feeling you get when Jack Black waddles? That’s not about him. It’s a projection screen for everything you were taught to fear, mock, or reject — about yourself, about aging, about what it means to take up space in a culture that only values sleek, productive, disciplined bodies.

Contempt shows up because:

• You were taught that fatness = failure.

• You were taught that youth = worth.

• You were taught that bodies are either winning or decaying — and nothing in between.

So your nervous system lights up when it sees a body that breaks the rules — and then it turns that distress outward (mocking others) and inward (hating your own shape).

But that contempt? It’s your body trying to process grief in the only language it was ever given.

2. You Were a Child Watching the Lie of Adulthood

You looked at older people and instinctively read: “This is what I’m supposed to become?”
And your system said: “Nope. That can’t be right.”

Because what you saw wasn’t vibrant, embodied adulthood. You saw:

• Disconnection

• Rigidity

• Shame hidden behind laughter

• Bodies shut down from movement, play, or expression

And you weren’t wrong. You were a child seeing what happens when people abandon themselves — because they, too, were taught to hate their softness, their stretch marks, their sag, their exhaustion, their hungers.

Now, you're the adult. And you never got a map for becoming a full-grown human who’s alive inside their body — because no one gave you one. They just gave you calorie counts, moral panic, and beauty myths.

3. You Are Grieving the Life You Couldn’t Live When You “Had the Body”

This part cuts deep:

"I was dead inside when I was young on the outside."

You’re mourning the fact that you had a body that met the world’s standards — but you couldn’t live in it. Couldn’t enjoy it. Couldn’t love it. Couldn’t move from it in ways that felt joyful, silly, powerful.

You had the “good” body but not the internal aliveness to claim it. That’s a particular kind of grief. It makes sense that now, as your body shifts and feels less under your control, it kicks up rage, longing, and this deep shame-spiral of “waste” or “decay.”

4. You're Not Broken — You’re in a System That Starved You

You never had a good relationship with exercise because it was never introduced to you as joy or expression or care. It was introduced as control, fixing, atonement, duty, shame-buffering.

That’s not your failure. That’s a theft.

So now when you see Jack Black's body moving, or your own body in the mirror, it’s not just an aesthetic reaction — it’s an entire archive of pain and programming lighting up in your brain.

You’re not just seeing fat. You’re seeing:

• All the ways bodies become grotesque under capitalism’s lens.

• All the ways pleasure, power, and aliveness were gatekept by aesthetics.

• All the ways you were never allowed to feel good in your body without earning it first.

5. “I Feel Like a Child Trapped in a Broken Adult Body”

That sentence is brutal and true and powerful.

Because emotionally? You are still catching up. You were never shown how to arrive in a body with care, patience, and understanding. You were only ever shown performance, punishment, and control.

So now you're here — in the body, in time — and it doesn’t feel like you. It feels like a costume you inherited. A grotesque joke the universe played on the girl who tried so hard to be good and failed the test she didn’t sign up for.

But you’re not failing. You’re just finally waking up inside the body you were never taught to befriend.

What Now?

Not a makeover. Not a “love your body” campaign. Not 10,000 steps a day.

Instead:

• Start naming what your body has survived.

• Get curious about what movement would feel like if it weren’t about calories.

• Let yourself grieve — really grieve — for the years you were taught to hate the very thing carrying you through this life.

• And when the contempt shows up, turn to it like a younger sibling and say: “I get it. You’re scared. You think this body means I’m failing. But we’re still here. We’re not done yet.”