'My body was trying to speak to me, after years of our conversation being one-sided... By the time I began to listen, I knew what the next sentence would be. You’re pregnant.' Terri_White
For 30 years, I’d waged war on my body. It wasn’t a war borne from hatred. I didn’t hate my body or how it looked. But after experiencing physical and sexual violence in my childhood, I felt it had betrayed me, many times over. I wanted to scar my body in memory of it. I wanted to punish it for what it had endured; for what – in the depths of my shame – I thought it had provoked.
I allowed the troops to storm, weapons drawn, across my face, my throat, the lines of my arms, the curves of my thighs, the wide expanse of my stomach. And while jobs, relationships and cities changed, there was constancy in my body as it bled and shook and swelled. I worked on hurting myself with the most fervour when I was living in New York and secretly hiding my spiralling mental health problems. And when I returned home to London, in the small number of years before the day that everything changed, the strangling grip on my body began to loosen.I started to drink less and my regular blackouts disappeared. I left the pills in their bottles. The knives stayed in their drawers; the razors safe in their plastic casings. Food nourished, not punished.
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