Fear of the Pier
The myth: maintaining the peak of youth
Illustration: Paige Chiusolo
I can’t bring myself to go to the pier on a warm day. I am not opposed to socializing, and I swear, I don’t mean to waste away in the boiler room of my September bedroom. I just know myself well enough to admit that I can’t wear a bikini around my university peers without feeling disoriented. Logically, I know that these feelings are just the chronic residue of a disorder I left at 18, but the truth is that the body rewires years before the brain does. I also know that I am not the only person at this university who has an exhaustingly dysmorphic image of themselves. I could turn to the statistics, but realistically, I don’t need to.
Everyone is so concerned, conceited, and desperate for parts of themselves to be concealed. I mean, it makes total sense – young people are taught to cling to all attributes of youth; beauty and thinness are the motifs of our twenties. We have been told by those our senior to appreciate this time simply because it is fleeting. There is some truth to this sentiment – it is important to feel grateful for the health and opportunities that youth offers. However, living to maintain something as fleeting and constructed as beauty is negligent.
I am not preaching to the choir that we should all wear burlap sacks and say “fuck you” to the man. I’m just saying that this “peak” people speak of is arbitrary, and therefore shouldn’t matter. But we are people, and people tend to produce meaning out of nothing to romanticize harmful behaviours. When you are told that this is the “hottest” you will ever be, then yeah, I understand why you would want to live up to that potential. But if living up to that potential involves turning down dinner in favour of a drink for “liquid confidence”, is your “potential” really worth it? I suppose what I’m trying to say is that cutting corners comes at a price. Those sharp edges pile up and will evidently cut you in the ass. We have seen it firsthand with Ozempic and fillers. At first, receiving “Ozempic allegations” just implied that someone had lost weight. Then, as it grew more popularized, the internet would scrutinize the faces of these men and women, saying they looked “old”, “uncanny”, and downright undesirable. We also saw this with filler. At first, lip filler was desirable until maintenance grew synonymous with migration. Now, I am not trashing plastic surgery (trust me), but I am just using these examples to show that these corners we cut, and these standards imposed on us, do not lead to body satisfaction. It leads you down the path of perpetuating the cycle.
I am not blaming anyone, and I pray this does not read as vindictive. I just know how common it is for women and men alike to assess their bodies quantitatively in pounds, inches, and sizing; and qualitatively by comparison to others and to our 16-year-old selves. We can’t help but implement culturally founded metrics to evaluate the worth of skin, bone, and hair. All so that we can justify the time we spend thinking about something that we logically know doesn’t matter. More than this, we ascribe a functional purpose to our body in what it should do for others, how it should perform, the reason it should exist, and the way it must be maintained. We ascribe an ontological definition to our bodies by configuring ways to classify our existence and categorize the spectrum of insecurities. These assertions have led me to believe that we think of ourselves as products, rather than as organisms. Our bodies are thought of as something to be, to sell, to inhabit, rather than something that we are. I believe we do this so we can intellectually separate ourselves from our physical flaws. So if I criticize my waist, I am merely criticizing a part of a product rather than a part of myself. The problem is that you can’t actually separate yourself from your body for the same reason you can’t separate yourself from the aging process. It is physically impossible. The only thing you can do is spend each day painstakingly separating your value from your body, and your desirability from the aging process.