Having a Body Is Hard

Note on bodies, shame, and staying

This is a longer post and a bit of a reset. It’s about bodies, shame, and what it’s like to live in the middle.

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Having a body is hard. It’s fucking hard.
No one really tells you that.

Throughout life, there are stages, and each one comes with its own kind of discomfort. When you’re young, your body is changing constantly. For the first twenty years or so, it feels like just when you get comfortable with one version of yourself, it shifts again and you’re back at the beginning.

That’s also when you start to notice how much your body is seen and judged. By doctors. By family. By friends. By strangers. Your body gets evaluated, commented on, measured, and compared, often before you have any say in the matter.

Then you get older. You settle, at least a little. You learn what it means to be an adult in the world. For some people, that transition feels natural. For others, it takes time. You might still feel invincible, so “taking care of your body” isn’t really a priority. You do what you want because you can.

And then, slowly, your body changes again. Things start to slow down. Some things get harder. Some things get easier. You notice abilities shifting. You might feel proud of how you’ve taken care of yourself, or you might start regretting not doing a “better job.” And eventually, whether we like it or not, there’s the reality of death. Our bodies will stop. For some people, that thought is terrifying.

But no matter the stage, having a body is hard.

What no one really prepares you for is how lonely it can feel to carry all of this quietly. Who do we talk to about these changes while we’re actually living them?

For me, it wasn’t until my 40s that I really learned how to talk about my body. And even then, it felt awkward and uneasy. Mostly, I realized there weren’t many places where I could talk about it honestly, especially with other dudes.

No one prepared me for how hard it would be to live in a body over time, to change, and to keep accepting each stage as it came.

For a long time, it felt like everyone around me was doing this better than I was. Like taking care of yourself just came naturally to them. You go to the gym regularly. You see the doctor when something comes up. You stay disciplined. You succeed. It all looks so clean and straightforward from the outside.

Meanwhile, I was avoiding things. Avoidance has always been an old friend of mine. And I suspect I’m not alone in that, even if we don’t talk about it much.

Shame has a lot to do with that.

Shame is a motherfucker. I hate it, and it still lives in me. It hides in small spaces. The kind you don’t even notice until it pops out at exactly the wrong time and messes with your head. I write about shame often, and I also live with it. That doesn’t make me less qualified to do this work. If anything, it reminds me how real it is.

The middle is where this gets especially hard.

We live in a world that loves extremes. Before and after. Winning or failing. Discipline or giving up. But most of us live somewhere in between. The middle is uncomfortable and often lonely. It’s knowing you’ll never be perfect, no matter how hard you try. It’s also knowing that you’re probably not going to fail catastrophically either. It’s living between those two stories while your body keeps changing anyway.

I wish someone had told me earlier that it was okay to struggle. That failing wasn’t a verdict. That therapy and vulnerability weren’t things you used only when everything fell apart, but something you might need at every stage of life. I don’t know that I would have listened at 25. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have. But I wish the groundwork had been there. I wish shame had been named. I wonder how learning to normalize anxiety and worry earlier might have changed things for me. Those two have always been closely tied to shame in my life.

So this is what I’m writing about now.

• I’m writing for someone who feels lost in this journey.

• For someone who knows something is off, but can’t quite name it.

• For a parent thinking about how to raise their kids differently from how they were raised.

• For the person who’s tried the culturally approved answers and knows they don’t really touch the deeper stuff.

• For the dude who knows more muscle or another way of eating isn’t the solution.

• For the dude who wants to embrace the softer parts of himself but is scared, because we’ve been taught that soft is bad.

I’m writing so you don’t feel alone in this.

I don’t have all the answers. I won’t do this perfectly. What I do know is how to sit with people in the hard parts, and how to stay when things feel unclear. That’s the work. And that’s where I’ll be spending more time here. I invite you to join me there.