In November of last year, I acquired a new chronic illness: sinusitis, or inflammation of the sinuses. It’s surprising how your quality of life can plummet from a constant sinus infection. Sinus headaches, raw skin from blowing my nose every five minutes, loss of taste and smell for months, unable to do any physical activity because you can’t BREATHE; despite already dealing with chronic migraines and other health issues, I can easily say I was never as miserable as I have been dealing with sinusitis.
After trying a multitude of medications in the span of five months, the only one that eased my symptoms was steroids. Prior to this, whenever someone mentioned steroids, the first thing that came to my mind was Baywatch. However, the steroids I was taking were a bit different. They significantly brought down the inflammation, and after being on them for a few months, improved my life dramatically.
However, those same steroids that improved my life so much, also caused me to gain almost thirty pounds due to their affect on my metabolism. This summer, I had surgery to reduce my sinusitis, and while it hasn’t gone away entirely, it’s manageable without prescription medication. However, the illness has left a flood of body insecurity in its wake.
American rhetoric regarding weight can be summed up quite easily: gaining weight is solely a result of your own decisions. If you’ve gained weight, you’re lazy, weak-willed, unreliable; the judgements go on. The messages are so powerful that even with knowing that line of thinking is wrong, even with knowing my weight gain has nothing to do with decisions I made, I felt and still feel shame for my weight gain. Before dealing with sinusitis I had been the same weight from the ages of 15 to 20. I felt comfortable in that body. And now, my body feels foreign to me. It’s crazy how quickly the way you talk to yourself can change. I’ve gone from general acceptance of my appearance to outright disdain practically overnight.
Being a teenager during the height of the body positivity movement had cemented in my brain that I should love myself, that I am beautiful regardless of the size of my body. But right now, loving my body feels like an unreachable goal. How can I love a body that is constantly putting me through the wringer? For now, the goal is indifference (which frankly, also seems like a tall order but at least more attainable). I want my body insecurities to take up less space in my mind; I want it so that when I get dressed in the morning I don’t choose my outfit based on whether or not my stomach is visible. It’s exhausting, and I’m tired of it. Although I didn’t have autonomy over the weight gain, I do have autonomy over what I do now. And Ive decided I’m going to work towards body neutrality. It will be a process, but so is everything else in life.
Unruly Bodies 
I completely understand how you feel. I honestly feel like i started to hate my body more when it came to the whole body positivity movement, it seemed akin to negative positivity. Boy neutrallity helps me realize a body is just a body, sometimes it looks bad, sometimes it looks good.
There is a lot of irony in the judgements made against people gaining weight. While many think that weight gain is always caused by bad, unhealthy decisions I see the very opposite being true here. You made the decision that you thought was the best for your health, and weight gain was just a side effect. All the judgement and projected ideas of what bodies should look like can get to your head, but at the end of the day if it makes you happier, healthier, and more comfortable thats a win!
This really helped me see a new perspective on how people experience and respond to unpreventable/accidental weight gain. We’ve probably all heard people talking about their quarantine weight gain, and I think a lot more body neutrality could be useful in that conversation. (Of course, yours was due to very different reasons, and there really was no other option, but I don’t see weight gain as anyone’s “fault” regardless of how it happens because it’s not a bad thing). It’s really difficult to embrace neutrality about your body when you’re in the midst of a heavily stigmatized process where society’s shaming messages feel louder than ever. I want more people to view weight gain as simply a neutral process. Someone’s body is getting bigger. Bodies do that sometimes. It is no more than a side effect of a medication that is crucial for your health, but I can only imagine the inner conflict created by trying to prioritize your own health and wellbeing in a society that shames weight gain as an inherently unhealthy process, despite the fact that it was part of the medicine you needed at the time.