I was 8 when my relationship with my mother fractured, and it would never fully be whole again. I didn’t understand it then.
I only understood it twenty-five years later.
Recently, I did an exercise designed to help people understand how they experience life on this planet—how they move through the world inside their body. I’ll share the exercise at the end of this essay because it’s incredibly powerful. The practice begins by identifying core memories: moments that quietly shape how we understand ourselves, love, and our place in the world. One of mine is about body shame.
I was eight years old, standing in the shower, when my mother knocked on the bathroom door. She needed something from inside. When I opened the door, she looked at me with a face of pure disgust and uttered the words: “You’re so fat.”
I remember standing there in shock, not understanding what had just happened. Later that night, she did something she never did again in my entire life: she apologized. But the rupture had already happened.
That night I understood something for the first time. The person I loved the most in the world—the person who was my entire world—could look at me with disgust. At the time, I couldn’t understand that she likely looked at her own body with the same contempt she directed at mine. I only knew this: this is what you think of me.
It wasn’t so much the words themselves that stayed with me, but the look on her face. That look etched itself into my memory in a way I have never been able to erase.
Even today, I get anxious when people look at me for too long. I struggle with being perceived. My body braces for criticism before any words are spoken, because for the first eighteen years of my life, that was the atmosphere I lived in.
And I know my story is far from being unique, unfortunately.
Our bodies—especially the bodies of people assigned female at birth—become sites of commentary from the moment we enter the world. People speak about our bodies as if they belong to public discourse. Sometimes they comment on them as if we are not even in the room. The whole world participates in this chorus. But it hits differently when our caregivers join it, when the people whose gaze forms the foundation of our sense of self become part of the cacophony telling us that our bodies are too much, not desirable, not worthy.
Now that I am 34, I understand something I could not understand then. When a parent attacks a child’s appearance, the child does not experience it as criticism. The child experiences it as
