Tomorrow Will Be Different: On Body Image, OCD, and Learning That It Doesn't Have to Be Perfect
“I have no right to call myself one who
knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars
or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me.
My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented
stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the
life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.”
—Hermann Hesse
Have you ever
woken up one morning and suddenly decided that you were just so sick and so
tired of being so critical of what you see in the mirror? Earlier this year, I
had such a moment.
Remember when I said that my internal need for perfection had also manifested in other ways than just being a perfect student? At this point in time, it’s hard for me to remember a time when I wasn’t so critical of my appearance. Maybe it was because, as a young teenager, I realized very quickly that boys and men are not generally expected to be so consumed with their appearance (plus, what they call boys who merely take the slightest bit of concern or pride in their appearance practically speaks for itself). It’s because, when it comes to appearance, the bar is so low for boys and men and so high for girls and women. That’s why boys and men who take issue with or put a lot of effort into their appearance stand out, and the same goes for girls and women who aren’t consumed by their looks or appearance. All of this to say, I took pride in the amount of concern and effort I put into my appearance because I figured out very early on that it set me apart and I’ve subconsciously clung to that ever since. But, just like how I was given a work ethic award in first grade and everyone interpreted that as also setting me apart, it doesn’t mean that it helped my need for perfection or my recurrent symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In fact, it made them worse.
My real issues with body image started around my preteen years. I probably wouldn’t have grown to hate my body and, by extension, my appearance if I had not subconsciously internalized the message spread by toxic masculinity that just because I was not and never have been athletically inclined, I had no value among other boys. I tried sports. Believe me when I say I tried them. I played soccer in the summer just like every other suburban millennial preschooler and, despite what my parents might tell you, I did enjoy it for awhile. Plus, by that age, it wasn’t like I wasn’t already physically active otherwise—I played outside with my neighborhood friends, went on bike rides, and attended weekly swimming lessons, which I always liked. In first grade I attempted hockey, much to the enthusiasm of my dad and cousins, and everyone knew that it was definitely not my thing. My dad never took issue with this; he was always very accepting when anything, let alone a sport, was not for me. Second grade brought us my attempt at basketball, which is perhaps where my current, lifelong disdain for organized sports and exercise was solidified. By the ages of eight or nine, boys have already heard, seen, and internalized toxic masculinity, and they very quickly learn that the social protocol is to ostracize and laugh at the boys who don’t fit the status quo of liking and being good at sports. It didn’t help that, when I attempted basketball, I was somehow placed in the novice group instead of the pre-novice one, despite having never played the sport before. As a result, everyone on my team was nine turning ten, and I had just turned eight. Top it off with I was terrible at the sport and not to mention the coach did next to nothing when I was bullied by the teammates, so my turn with basketball ended as swiftly as it did with hockey (my mom still tells a story, however, about how once I was sick as a dog with the flu and I still insisted on showing up to that weekend’s basketball game because ‘my team needed me’… sounds like it was the perfectionist inside my head talking on that day rather than myself).
I feel the need to stress that my parents never forced me to play sports or forced me to continue playing sports when I didn’t like them. It was always presented to me as merely an option for an extracurricular activity, and I was always told I didn’t have to continue if I didn’t like it. But being the ever vigilant student and ever vigilant perfectionist that I was, I knew quitting until the end of a given session or season was not an option. I stuck things out. That’s what I was taught and that’s how I was raised, but I don’t think anyone—myself included—realized the extent to which I had internalized so-called pressure to stick things out or continue to endure things that caused me undue stress. If we put together my own need for perfection with the need that most children feel to satisfy their parents or to put someone else’s satisfaction above their own, I guess I can connect the dots. By third grade, I had taken up theatre and acting as my new extracurricular and it was to no one’s chagrin that this was a better creative outlet for me than sports. Nobody complained, it just made sense. But that didn’t mean that I had already internalized what we can call society’s pressure to conform. Like I said, boys are considered to have no value if they don’t like sports or aren’t athletic. Laws of masculinity and femininity are transmitted to children very early on, and it doesn’t help that masculinity is both more valued and the most toxic and fragile. So when I wasn’t good at any sports and everyone on the team—and the entire gym class—let me know this, or when I couldn’t run as fast while playing a neighborhood game of hide and seek, it made me feel not good enough because in this context, I wasn’t good enough. And being the perfectionist, compulsive person that I am, I internalized this very deeply.
It was only by the time I had reached my teenage years that my lack of athletic ability—and therefore my dislike of most physically active activities—would connect with issues of body image. I suppose by the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I much preferred staying inside and watching reruns of Three’s Company than going on bike rides or joining the local outdoor pool. It also didn’t help that, in a midst of other hormone-induced symptoms of puberty, my metabolism slowed down and I gained weight much easier. I had always been off the charts in terms of percentiles of growth for kids my age so it was never easy for my pediatrician to chart my growth accurately or make accurate predictions, especially by the time I was a teenager, much to my mother’s frustration. I remember I came home and cried for hours after an eighth grade visit to the doctor where he declared me overweight, and I filled a notebook with things I would no longer allow myself to eat or drink (suffice to say it was basically anything with sugar or fat in it which didn’t last very long since not only is that wildly unrealistic but I’ve never had much self-control when it comes to food). My first inclination was to immediately change my diet since the thought of becoming more physically active repulsed me. I had grown up in a world that praises young boys who like sports and are therefore physically active and ignores and bullies the boys who are not. I had, therefore, grown up to hate sports and any physical activity because it made me feel bad about myself and reminded me that I’ve never felt like enough. And, at this point, I was nowhere near as confident in myself or in my appearance to start doing physical activity to get in shape for me. Soon after that doctor’s appointment my mom told me I was joining a gym, and although I gave it every ounce of effort to go once a week during ‘teen time,’ it never felt like I was doing it for me. It felt like when I was younger and did sports as extracurriculars to satisfy somebody else, because a boy playing sports satisfies the minds of most people. But it never satisfied me, which is why going to the gym at that age never felt like it was for me, despite the fact that it was.
Much like the rest of my attempts at organized physical activity, ‘teen time’ at the gym dissolved faster than the others. I shielded my supposed lack of physical activity for years thereafter behind claims of “I go biking a lot” and “I like swimming,” because even by the age of sixteen or seventeen, not doing any physical activity is widely frowned upon. It’s frowned upon for fully grown adults, too, but since then I have embraced that my apparent lack of physical activity doesn’t make me less of a person. It also helped that by the time I turned eighteen my metabolism began to speed up again and I didn’t feel as chubby anymore. It took a long time to unlearn what had been instilled in me, a boy, growing up because it’s not necessarily true. Listen. Good for you if you like playing sports, or working out, or jogging, or any other acceptable form of adult physical activity. Go you! It’s just not my thing. It’s allowed to not be my thing. I understand that it’s vital to my health and it’s not like I don’t choose to walk somewhere instead of driving when it’s a nice day. But I just don’t understand the fascination with being excited about exercise, especially when it’s not your thing. It’s like being excited about going in for a route canal. I’ve often compared how physical activity is not my thing to how books and reading are not other people’s thing. Reading is just as important for your health as exercise is (in different ways, of course), but because being physically active, extroverted, and happy about it is still the widely accepted norm, lots of people don’t see this as a fair comparison. And that’s fine. But it’s been one of the things I’ve had to embrace in order to love myself, my body, and my appearance just the way it is.
Since I had already become concerned and put daily effort into my appearance by the time my period of being considered overweight arrived, it very quickly began to coincide with my internal need for perfection. Since I thought I was fat and it had basically been told to me by a doctor that I was fat, I hated any kind of clothing that I thought looked baggy. Baggy clothing, I felt, immediately made me look fatter and larger than I was. I became very particular with any piece of clothing that I wore since it had to make me look at least a bit nice and presentable, since I had already convinced myself I was atrocious. I was also already subconsciously obsessed with standing out. It’s not like I was confident enough in my appearance (or my identity yet, for that matter) to wear pink tank tops that said queer as folk on them or anything, but I insisted on developing my own unique sense of style. It is what’s on the inside that matters, but appearance is what people see—that’s how I thought. I still kind of think that way. I had become such a perfectionist over my appearance that I avoided any and all reflections of myself after leaving the bathroom in the morning. I had spent the necessary amount of time that morning ensuring that my appearance was perfect, and the thought of seeing myself in a mirror by chance throughout the day physically repulsed me. It took most of my teenage years for me to perfect this obsessive-compulsive control over myself and my appearance that I didn’t even realize how critical I had become over not only my appearance, but myself, too. It was only earlier this year, when I was staring at myself in the mirror one morning did I realize that I’m twenty-one years old, I’m not that chubby anymore, and yet I would still tend to be so critical of my appearance. I asked myself, why? I’m an adult now, and yet I’m still holding myself to these ridiculous obsessive-compulsive ticks over my appearance that I developed as a teenager, based on childhood insecurities? Don’t you think it’s time to let that shit go? I still cringe if I see a reflection of myself on the subway or in a store window, but I’m trying my best to unlearn these tendencies. I’m trying my best to embrace bad hair days because I know there is more to my identity than having perfect hair. It’s hard, but I am trying.
I’ve never liked using the acronym OCD, let alone admitting that I have it. Obsessive-compulsive disorder has largely fallen into disrepute since a lot of its symptoms merely align with anal retentive personality traits. But there is a difference, and it has always bothered me when people use OCD as a noun, adjective, and verb, despite the fact that I’ve often used it that way myself. I’ve always been an anal retentive control freak. You can ask literally any number of my family members and they will probably have a story or a memory of me being anal from a young age, since most three-year-olds don’t shoot judgemental glances at adults who don’t hang their coats up. My parents both have anal retentive personality traits and are both control freaks in their own way, so it was never a mystery where the inclination came from. But it manifested in me quite differently and more severely, since it goes hand in hand with my perfectionism issues. It’s easy to make this link since, nine times out of ten, I would adopt an obsessive-compulsive behavior as a result of experiencing some sort of failure. Failure is the opposite of perfect, so I would be so hard on myself for not being perfect that I would develop a compulsive ritual that would somehow ensure that particular failure would never occur again. What’s crazier in retrospect is that my bar for perfectionism was so high that literally the slightest mishaps were not planned and therefore not allowed. I had been like this from the time I was a child, but it was only in college that it got out of hand. Since I was unaccustomed to the rigors of anxiety—something I was now feeling in full swing—I developed so many new compulsive behaviors, all in the name of ensuring perfection and ridding myself of this feeling of unease. When I first entered therapy around this time, one of my biggest issues was letting clean dishes dry on the counter overnight. I had reached a point where, clearly taking out larger issues on simplicities like washing dishes, I could not leave a room without everything being put away and everything being cleaned to my standards. And yet, I still didn’t think I truly had OCD! I knew there were people who couldn’t leave their houses because their obsessive compulsions were so bad. Flipping a light switch thirty-seven times or your family will die; that sort of thing. I didn’t have that, so I couldn’t have had OCD. But I do have OCD and I have always had it. It’s been like this, to varying degrees, for as long as I can remember. And the only way I can ever expect to make any progress is by labelling these symptoms and occurrences for what they are and discussing them honestly.
This year, I’ve been working on forgiving myself for not being perfect. It took a long time for me to realize that perfectionism and my need to achieve it, regardless of the cost, has cost me a great deal of undue stress, anxiety, worry, and even bouts of depression. It also took a long time for me to realize that my need for perfection has been the route of a lot of other issues and struggles. Another thing I never truly realized or faced during all these years of perfectionism and compulsive behaviors is that it has prevented me from loving myself as much as humanly possible. I’ve never thought of myself as someone who has hated himself because I don’t hate myself, but being so critical of your appearance and your thoughts and your mind is not loving yourself, either. Life is really too short for that. Try your hardest to work on why it’s happening, and let it go when you are ready. It won’t happen overnight, but chances are you will get there eventually. Life is too short to be anything but kind to yourself, and life is too short to not love yourself as you are, every second of every day. I know it’s hard. I know it’s uncomfortable. But it will start to make things so much easier.
“ You don’t have to trust me, I already trust myself
Nobody can judge me, the way that I judge myself
Life can get ugly, when it turns upside down
You don’t gotta love me, as long as I love myself ”
—Olivia O’Brien & Jesse Rutherford, “Love Myself”
(Recommended listening for this essay: “Love Myself” by Olivia O’Brien and “Thursday” by Jess Glynne)
Follow It's Not That Deep on Instagram — @areyouthereanxiety — and listen to my playlist of mental health songs on Spotify and Apple Music
Remember when I said that my internal need for perfection had also manifested in other ways than just being a perfect student? At this point in time, it’s hard for me to remember a time when I wasn’t so critical of my appearance. Maybe it was because, as a young teenager, I realized very quickly that boys and men are not generally expected to be so consumed with their appearance (plus, what they call boys who merely take the slightest bit of concern or pride in their appearance practically speaks for itself). It’s because, when it comes to appearance, the bar is so low for boys and men and so high for girls and women. That’s why boys and men who take issue with or put a lot of effort into their appearance stand out, and the same goes for girls and women who aren’t consumed by their looks or appearance. All of this to say, I took pride in the amount of concern and effort I put into my appearance because I figured out very early on that it set me apart and I’ve subconsciously clung to that ever since. But, just like how I was given a work ethic award in first grade and everyone interpreted that as also setting me apart, it doesn’t mean that it helped my need for perfection or my recurrent symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In fact, it made them worse.
My real issues with body image started around my preteen years. I probably wouldn’t have grown to hate my body and, by extension, my appearance if I had not subconsciously internalized the message spread by toxic masculinity that just because I was not and never have been athletically inclined, I had no value among other boys. I tried sports. Believe me when I say I tried them. I played soccer in the summer just like every other suburban millennial preschooler and, despite what my parents might tell you, I did enjoy it for awhile. Plus, by that age, it wasn’t like I wasn’t already physically active otherwise—I played outside with my neighborhood friends, went on bike rides, and attended weekly swimming lessons, which I always liked. In first grade I attempted hockey, much to the enthusiasm of my dad and cousins, and everyone knew that it was definitely not my thing. My dad never took issue with this; he was always very accepting when anything, let alone a sport, was not for me. Second grade brought us my attempt at basketball, which is perhaps where my current, lifelong disdain for organized sports and exercise was solidified. By the ages of eight or nine, boys have already heard, seen, and internalized toxic masculinity, and they very quickly learn that the social protocol is to ostracize and laugh at the boys who don’t fit the status quo of liking and being good at sports. It didn’t help that, when I attempted basketball, I was somehow placed in the novice group instead of the pre-novice one, despite having never played the sport before. As a result, everyone on my team was nine turning ten, and I had just turned eight. Top it off with I was terrible at the sport and not to mention the coach did next to nothing when I was bullied by the teammates, so my turn with basketball ended as swiftly as it did with hockey (my mom still tells a story, however, about how once I was sick as a dog with the flu and I still insisted on showing up to that weekend’s basketball game because ‘my team needed me’… sounds like it was the perfectionist inside my head talking on that day rather than myself).
I feel the need to stress that my parents never forced me to play sports or forced me to continue playing sports when I didn’t like them. It was always presented to me as merely an option for an extracurricular activity, and I was always told I didn’t have to continue if I didn’t like it. But being the ever vigilant student and ever vigilant perfectionist that I was, I knew quitting until the end of a given session or season was not an option. I stuck things out. That’s what I was taught and that’s how I was raised, but I don’t think anyone—myself included—realized the extent to which I had internalized so-called pressure to stick things out or continue to endure things that caused me undue stress. If we put together my own need for perfection with the need that most children feel to satisfy their parents or to put someone else’s satisfaction above their own, I guess I can connect the dots. By third grade, I had taken up theatre and acting as my new extracurricular and it was to no one’s chagrin that this was a better creative outlet for me than sports. Nobody complained, it just made sense. But that didn’t mean that I had already internalized what we can call society’s pressure to conform. Like I said, boys are considered to have no value if they don’t like sports or aren’t athletic. Laws of masculinity and femininity are transmitted to children very early on, and it doesn’t help that masculinity is both more valued and the most toxic and fragile. So when I wasn’t good at any sports and everyone on the team—and the entire gym class—let me know this, or when I couldn’t run as fast while playing a neighborhood game of hide and seek, it made me feel not good enough because in this context, I wasn’t good enough. And being the perfectionist, compulsive person that I am, I internalized this very deeply.
It was only by the time I had reached my teenage years that my lack of athletic ability—and therefore my dislike of most physically active activities—would connect with issues of body image. I suppose by the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I much preferred staying inside and watching reruns of Three’s Company than going on bike rides or joining the local outdoor pool. It also didn’t help that, in a midst of other hormone-induced symptoms of puberty, my metabolism slowed down and I gained weight much easier. I had always been off the charts in terms of percentiles of growth for kids my age so it was never easy for my pediatrician to chart my growth accurately or make accurate predictions, especially by the time I was a teenager, much to my mother’s frustration. I remember I came home and cried for hours after an eighth grade visit to the doctor where he declared me overweight, and I filled a notebook with things I would no longer allow myself to eat or drink (suffice to say it was basically anything with sugar or fat in it which didn’t last very long since not only is that wildly unrealistic but I’ve never had much self-control when it comes to food). My first inclination was to immediately change my diet since the thought of becoming more physically active repulsed me. I had grown up in a world that praises young boys who like sports and are therefore physically active and ignores and bullies the boys who are not. I had, therefore, grown up to hate sports and any physical activity because it made me feel bad about myself and reminded me that I’ve never felt like enough. And, at this point, I was nowhere near as confident in myself or in my appearance to start doing physical activity to get in shape for me. Soon after that doctor’s appointment my mom told me I was joining a gym, and although I gave it every ounce of effort to go once a week during ‘teen time,’ it never felt like I was doing it for me. It felt like when I was younger and did sports as extracurriculars to satisfy somebody else, because a boy playing sports satisfies the minds of most people. But it never satisfied me, which is why going to the gym at that age never felt like it was for me, despite the fact that it was.
Much like the rest of my attempts at organized physical activity, ‘teen time’ at the gym dissolved faster than the others. I shielded my supposed lack of physical activity for years thereafter behind claims of “I go biking a lot” and “I like swimming,” because even by the age of sixteen or seventeen, not doing any physical activity is widely frowned upon. It’s frowned upon for fully grown adults, too, but since then I have embraced that my apparent lack of physical activity doesn’t make me less of a person. It also helped that by the time I turned eighteen my metabolism began to speed up again and I didn’t feel as chubby anymore. It took a long time to unlearn what had been instilled in me, a boy, growing up because it’s not necessarily true. Listen. Good for you if you like playing sports, or working out, or jogging, or any other acceptable form of adult physical activity. Go you! It’s just not my thing. It’s allowed to not be my thing. I understand that it’s vital to my health and it’s not like I don’t choose to walk somewhere instead of driving when it’s a nice day. But I just don’t understand the fascination with being excited about exercise, especially when it’s not your thing. It’s like being excited about going in for a route canal. I’ve often compared how physical activity is not my thing to how books and reading are not other people’s thing. Reading is just as important for your health as exercise is (in different ways, of course), but because being physically active, extroverted, and happy about it is still the widely accepted norm, lots of people don’t see this as a fair comparison. And that’s fine. But it’s been one of the things I’ve had to embrace in order to love myself, my body, and my appearance just the way it is.
Since I had already become concerned and put daily effort into my appearance by the time my period of being considered overweight arrived, it very quickly began to coincide with my internal need for perfection. Since I thought I was fat and it had basically been told to me by a doctor that I was fat, I hated any kind of clothing that I thought looked baggy. Baggy clothing, I felt, immediately made me look fatter and larger than I was. I became very particular with any piece of clothing that I wore since it had to make me look at least a bit nice and presentable, since I had already convinced myself I was atrocious. I was also already subconsciously obsessed with standing out. It’s not like I was confident enough in my appearance (or my identity yet, for that matter) to wear pink tank tops that said queer as folk on them or anything, but I insisted on developing my own unique sense of style. It is what’s on the inside that matters, but appearance is what people see—that’s how I thought. I still kind of think that way. I had become such a perfectionist over my appearance that I avoided any and all reflections of myself after leaving the bathroom in the morning. I had spent the necessary amount of time that morning ensuring that my appearance was perfect, and the thought of seeing myself in a mirror by chance throughout the day physically repulsed me. It took most of my teenage years for me to perfect this obsessive-compulsive control over myself and my appearance that I didn’t even realize how critical I had become over not only my appearance, but myself, too. It was only earlier this year, when I was staring at myself in the mirror one morning did I realize that I’m twenty-one years old, I’m not that chubby anymore, and yet I would still tend to be so critical of my appearance. I asked myself, why? I’m an adult now, and yet I’m still holding myself to these ridiculous obsessive-compulsive ticks over my appearance that I developed as a teenager, based on childhood insecurities? Don’t you think it’s time to let that shit go? I still cringe if I see a reflection of myself on the subway or in a store window, but I’m trying my best to unlearn these tendencies. I’m trying my best to embrace bad hair days because I know there is more to my identity than having perfect hair. It’s hard, but I am trying.
I’ve never liked using the acronym OCD, let alone admitting that I have it. Obsessive-compulsive disorder has largely fallen into disrepute since a lot of its symptoms merely align with anal retentive personality traits. But there is a difference, and it has always bothered me when people use OCD as a noun, adjective, and verb, despite the fact that I’ve often used it that way myself. I’ve always been an anal retentive control freak. You can ask literally any number of my family members and they will probably have a story or a memory of me being anal from a young age, since most three-year-olds don’t shoot judgemental glances at adults who don’t hang their coats up. My parents both have anal retentive personality traits and are both control freaks in their own way, so it was never a mystery where the inclination came from. But it manifested in me quite differently and more severely, since it goes hand in hand with my perfectionism issues. It’s easy to make this link since, nine times out of ten, I would adopt an obsessive-compulsive behavior as a result of experiencing some sort of failure. Failure is the opposite of perfect, so I would be so hard on myself for not being perfect that I would develop a compulsive ritual that would somehow ensure that particular failure would never occur again. What’s crazier in retrospect is that my bar for perfectionism was so high that literally the slightest mishaps were not planned and therefore not allowed. I had been like this from the time I was a child, but it was only in college that it got out of hand. Since I was unaccustomed to the rigors of anxiety—something I was now feeling in full swing—I developed so many new compulsive behaviors, all in the name of ensuring perfection and ridding myself of this feeling of unease. When I first entered therapy around this time, one of my biggest issues was letting clean dishes dry on the counter overnight. I had reached a point where, clearly taking out larger issues on simplicities like washing dishes, I could not leave a room without everything being put away and everything being cleaned to my standards. And yet, I still didn’t think I truly had OCD! I knew there were people who couldn’t leave their houses because their obsessive compulsions were so bad. Flipping a light switch thirty-seven times or your family will die; that sort of thing. I didn’t have that, so I couldn’t have had OCD. But I do have OCD and I have always had it. It’s been like this, to varying degrees, for as long as I can remember. And the only way I can ever expect to make any progress is by labelling these symptoms and occurrences for what they are and discussing them honestly.
This year, I’ve been working on forgiving myself for not being perfect. It took a long time for me to realize that perfectionism and my need to achieve it, regardless of the cost, has cost me a great deal of undue stress, anxiety, worry, and even bouts of depression. It also took a long time for me to realize that my need for perfection has been the route of a lot of other issues and struggles. Another thing I never truly realized or faced during all these years of perfectionism and compulsive behaviors is that it has prevented me from loving myself as much as humanly possible. I’ve never thought of myself as someone who has hated himself because I don’t hate myself, but being so critical of your appearance and your thoughts and your mind is not loving yourself, either. Life is really too short for that. Try your hardest to work on why it’s happening, and let it go when you are ready. It won’t happen overnight, but chances are you will get there eventually. Life is too short to be anything but kind to yourself, and life is too short to not love yourself as you are, every second of every day. I know it’s hard. I know it’s uncomfortable. But it will start to make things so much easier.
“ You don’t have to trust me, I already trust myself
Nobody can judge me, the way that I judge myself
Life can get ugly, when it turns upside down
You don’t gotta love me, as long as I love myself ”
—Olivia O’Brien & Jesse Rutherford, “Love Myself”
(Recommended listening for this essay: “Love Myself” by Olivia O’Brien and “Thursday” by Jess Glynne)
Follow It's Not That Deep on Instagram — @areyouthereanxiety — and listen to my playlist of mental health songs on Spotify and Apple Music
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