When I was 13, I began a war against my body. It decided to grow taller and wider and rounder than any of the other kids in my class. Like many of this age, I hated even the idea of standing out. I thought: if I couldn’t be shorter, maybe I could collapse into myself like a dying star, fold myself into a version of me I would not need to be ashamed of.
So began my battle. Restricting calories and monitoring food intake and hours spent dreaming of being thinner, of just being like the small and sleek and twinkling girls with their prepubescent bodies not relegated to the back on school picture day. Relishing every little bit of praise I got for being slim. Enjoying myself at a birthday party, chips and cookies and cake, and then restricting again, eating just enough to evade suspicion but never enough to feel truly full.
“If you get any thinner,” Ms. Conti, my 7th grade social studies teacher said to me one day at a very hungry snack time, “I’m going to start worrying about you.”
My chest glowed with pride at this comment.
Little did I know that years later my body would decide to fight back.
The first blow fell at the start of college, when one missed period turned into 2 turned into a whole semester. I was told it was my life changing, the stress of college. And was I sure there was no chance I could be pregnant? My blood and urine samples were tested just in case I was lying (because how dare we take young women at their word, trust them to be truthful about the things they do with their bodies).
When my period finally did come back almost 5 months later, it was hot and horrible, cramps like daggers stabbing at my uterus, an unending cavalcade of pain.
And so began a new cycle. See a doctor. Have an exam. Have an ultrasound. Be told that sometimes these things happen. It’s just ovulation pain. Bad cramps. Take 600 Mg of Motrin, that should help.
Meanwhile, my period continued to be irregular, lasting for 8 mind numbingly painful days of dark, heavy bleeding. It arrived every two weeks, or 36 days, or not at all for months. And in between these erratic visits, this burning, twisting pain would bloom in my pelvis, spreading its thorny vines down my right leg and up my side, stabbing deep into the tender flesh.
Predictably, I began to gain weight. Always active, I now had days I could barely walk. I became depressed and anxious, worried about when the pain would hit, what I would miss this time. Before I knew it, I had to buy bigger pants. For so long, I had tried to control my body, to make it conform. Now, I was being ruled by it. And it terrified me.
I tried almost every type of birth control. Pills and IUDs and arm implants. I found one that gave me a brief glimpse of relief, only to learn it actually increased my chance of a stroke due to the type of chronic migraine I experience, a detail the (older, white, male) gynecologist I had been seeing failed to mention to me when prescribing it. Another stopped my periods but worsened my depression to the point where I was walking around so numb and empty I would dig my nails into my thighs and scratch just to feel something. Five days after stopping that pill, my mood returned to baseline.
Each temporary relief a brief glimpse at a sense that maybe this time, maybe this fix, maybe now the pain would stay away. But then, it always evaporated like water on hot pavement, replaced by the steam of new uncertainty. And not a small amount of rage.
Again and again. Cycle upon cycle with no answers.
“You have a beautiful uterus,” the doctor who conducted my first laparoscopic surgery told me, after the procedure had revealed no longed-for hidden truths.
But I had already learned that beauty could mean gnawing pain.
I graduated college and moved to New York City. The pain followed. I was told, as my face streamed with tears and I begged the female doctor in the fancy Upper East Side hospital to please, help me feel better, please, that I was just going to have to learn to live with this. I left feeling demoralized and dramatic with a prescription for yet more painkillers that barely took the edge off.
I began to think maybe I was just weak. Maybe this was just life. Endless cycles of pain and judgment and hope and disappointment.
The worst part was that it was nameless. A hidden terror that lurked always, the time and location of its attacks unknown. Through all of the tests and the medicines and the injections and insertions and imaging, no clear diagnosis had appeared.
I began to realize that doctors don’t know nearly as much as you think they do. Especially about women’s bodies.
“I’m flummoxed,” my pelvic pain specialist said at our first appointment.
“You’re a medical mystery,” another doctor told me, looking over my imaging results.
There were days I felt I was my body’s partner, days of long walks with no hip or back pain. Days of vinyasa flows and meters swam and mountains climbed.
And days I knew that I lived only at its whim. On those days, curled up on my couch, my beloved heating pad pressed to my stomach, I laughed at the idea I thought I could ever have controlled it. It almost felt like payback for the years I didn’t give it the nutrients it needed. Now, my body was exacting its revenge.
A body in pain is a wild thing, an isolated and injured wolf huddled in the dark of a dank cave. Unchecked, uncultured, whimpering and lonely. Liable to lash out at even the kindest of hands.
No one tells you how isolating pain is. Not just physically, but mentally. One section of your brain’s always monitoring, always on alert, always counting down the seconds until you can take your next dose of painkillers that barely touch the pain, wondering if this time it will be bad enough to send you to the ER. Again.
In high school and my late teens, my mind was preoccupied with food. When did I last eat and how much had I consumed, how much exercise did I do that day, could I have this cookie because I hadn’t eaten in 5 hours, would skipping lunch tomorrow make up for the snacking binge at the sleepover. Would it help me lose the elusive 10 pounds I so desperately thought would transform me into the girl at ease in her own skin I so desired to be.
Now, my thoughts were a swirl of pain. From the moment I woke up in the morning, before I even opened my eyes, I could tell how bad a day it would be based on how much my right pelvis around my ovary ached. Would I be able to walk up stairs today without my hip hurting. Can I make it through the 20 minute lecture I’m giving on Ancient Greece without needing to sit down. Will I need to use my cane when I run errands. When did I last take Tylenol/Motrin/Naproxen. Is my TENS unit fully charged or is it going to die on me half way through work again. Do I need to buy bigger pants for bad bloating days. Should I give up on trying to wear pants all together.
Now, there were days I didn’t eat because of nausea. There were days I could only eat carbs.
Pain is another type of hunger that gnaws at you, that makes you feel feral and frayed. I used to stand in front of my mirror and cry because of the curve of my hips, the width of my shoulders, the roundness of my thighs. I still cry in the mirror, when the soft landscape of my stomach is distended into a boulder, hard and tense with knotted muscle in spasm. I cry to see the bruises left from digging fingers in to relax those muscles.
And still I cry when my jeans don’t fit, my once lean dancer’s body now thickened with age, the ravages of hormonal contraceptives, and many days’ melding with my couch. The old sadness still lingering beneath this feasting pain.
Can I tell you the truth? Sometimes the two combine and I am secretly thrilled when I can’t eat, waking the next morning when the pain has eased to run a hand over my stomach, testing for a millimeter more flatness. I kept my IUD in for months longer than maybe I should have because it helped me (finally) lose the 15 pounds I’d gained my senior year of college. I have refused to take medicines because the key side effect is weight gain. One sickness does not preclude another—I am a woman in this world after all, and to be a woman here is to be told you are beautiful despite the pain it is causing you, a pain other’s simply refuse to see or name.
Last summer, almost 10 years since this war began, I received a diagnosis. Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) that had caused my right ovary to become so inflamed it was the size of a lemon.
“I see this all the time,” my doctor told me. “Women come into the ER thinking they’ve got a torsion or endometriosis and they have ovaries that look just like yours.”
Those 4 letters didn’t fix anything. They gave no instant cure or even a temporary one. The naming of my enemy did not make their attacks any less gruesome or incapacitating. But they gave that enemy, so long unidentifiable, diminished, derided, a name. A clear, simple term to use, to blame. A way to, if not snare, at least attempt to lure in the beast, perhaps befriend it, one day.
This war is not won—far from it. My body, like most women’s, follows the rhythm of its own war drum, beating on and on to the tune of pain. I’ve learned to treasure the days we can come to an easy truce. When my body and I can move in tandem, take each other’s hands and dance to that rhythm together. Peek out of our dark cave and howl at the moon in two part harmony. To relish in the space we occupy, the ease with which I can gaze over the heads in a crowded gallery, how my love’s head nestles in just right beneath my chin when I stand behind her and wrap my long arms around her waist. These days are made sweeter for the times they seem impossible, the days they seem far away.
I want to scoop them up in my palms and offer them to the wounded girl who still lives inside me, dreaming of being bones, and show her the richness of taking greedy bites of life. I want to dig down even deeper to the girl she was before, to have her hold me in her arms and show me how to run wild once more, to scream to the heavens from joy instead of internally from rage and pain.
Our bodies were made wild things. They break and bend and bloom and age in ways we can’t possibly know or predict.
We can try to tame them, but we will always lose.
We are animals, after all.
Sarah Levine 
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