After reading a similar blog post about bodies changing after sports, I wanted to share my personal experience. My whole life I have been involved in many sports. I started club soccer when I was 6 and played up until high school, while also playing a variety of sports alongside soccer. Then in high school I played a sport in the fall, winter, and spring alongside club volleyball outside of school. I was always seen as the “skinny” kid because I was constantly active. The biggest change for me was when Covid-19 hit and put a pause on all sports. Being left stationary at home with no sports was a huge change for me. I saw a huge change in my body, going from this “skinny” girl to a girl who was not as skinny. This created a huge hate in my body. I would try to skip meals and look up quick weight loss meals. I was one of the many people who tried doing Chloe Ting workouts from YouTube during Covid. If hating the way my body looked was not already detrimental to my mental health, when we were finally allowed back to sports, that’s when I realized there was more about me, I hated. Stepping back on the volleyball court for the first time and realizing I was not the same player was hard to come to terms with. For a while I blamed it on being “rusty” and “not in season”, but as time went on, I realized I would never play the same. There are still days that I get really self-conscious about my body but then I realize, I can’t have the body I had at 14 because I am maturing, and my body has these natural changes. Body image is a detrimental thing that a lot of people deal with, and everyone’s experience with it is different. 

In class we talked about if being pregnant was a disability. I think when it comes to what a disability is I do not fit pregnancy under this category. I feel like pregnancy can present some limitations but does not disable you. The woman’s body is created so strongly that it gives us amazing abilities, like being able to grow a human in us. With any other thing in life, everyone experiences things differently, pregnancy is no different. I do understand that each pregnancy is different, and each experience is unique. I feel like periods and the menstrual cycle is in this same argument if it is seen as a disability. I feel the same way about the menstrual cycle as I do with pregnancy, that it poses limitations but does not disable you. Is every woman who gets a menstrual cycle disabled, even though it is experienced differently in every female? In my opinion the idea pregnancy is not a disability, but it can pose limitations. I feel like there are experiences that shape how you view this topic.  

To also relate this post into talking about reproductive bodies and pregnancy, I want to shift the attention to who is “in charge” during pregnancy. In history, we see woman not being “in control” because men overruled us, even when it came to our own bodies, as we sometimes did not have a say in what happened to our bodies. Today, as women have more rights, I have no clue why men feel like they have a say in our bodies. Women are the ones created to carry and grow a baby in us, which is an experience only women go through directly. With that being said only women should be seen as “in charge” during a pregnancy. 

When we think of our job and what labor it entails, do we think about the toll it will take on our bodies? I did not think of the physical toll my body would face when I accepted my job. I did not think I would be expected to do the job that they specifically hire men for due to the physical demand of the position. Due to the lack of employees that can fulfill the position, I am expected to do this position where my body takes the toll. I have physically been injured by this job, but my employer does not care, and expects me to come back to the job and do it again. Jobs and the working field is a demanding but necessary field we have to deal with. We are all chasing a paycheck and sometimes we are killing our bodies in the process. Not only are we dealing with the physical demand of the job, but we also have the emotional labor that comes with it. At the end of a shift, I am always beat whether it be physically or emotionally. The emotional labor is especially hard when you work in retail because people tend to treat you poorly, but you have to act in a certain way to meet their needs. I hate the idea that we as employees have to treat the customers nicely regardless of how they treat us, because if I was not working and someone treated me the way they would if I was working, I would not approach the situation the same way, I would be rude back. When we apply for jobs and are accepting job offers, we tend to overlook the physical and emotional labor demand because of the paycheck or the benefits from the job. We can see that some jobs that require more physical demands can pay more to make the job seem “worth it”. For me personally, working at a young age and as someone who has had jobs in multiple fields has seen firsthand how jobs can take a toll on your body physically and emotionally, but have also had a strong impact on what my body is today. 

There are so many different factors that go into consideration when trying to understand our bodies. After talking in class and talking about how others are seeing your body and creating this sense of meaning that they give you. I had never thought about how others may see my outfits as a political or cultural statement, when really it is just the first thing I found in the morning to wear. I can also understand how we dress to make a statement. Today we can see how political movements are expressed through clothing. For example, it was common to see people wearing a shirt that said “BLM” or even a shirt that would support Trump or Biden at the time of elections. The purpose behind saying that is to think that some people may try to pass a cultural or political message through clothing but sometimes people are not trying but a message about how you dress will be created by people who see you in passing. Talking about what shapes our understanding of bodies like fashion and beauty. We may see certain fashion and beauty standards that we feel we must follow the trends, but they do not represent who we think we are. There are beauty trends to do full faces of makeup and understanding that not everyone wants to fit the standards. We see other things like religion trying to persuade us how you should dress and act. You can see religion as shaping what you wear or being judged if you do not. I personally dress for what environment I will be in, whether it is hot or cold. I do not take into effect how people may read my body based off what I wear when I am not dressing for them.