For a long time, I felt as though I was under observation. Nothing dramatic. Nobody was following me with a notebook.
It was worse: the committee was already in my head.
My body. My age. My clothes. My work. My home. Money. Even the person beside me.
Too fat. Too old. Too emotional. Not muscular enough. Too available. Too confident. Not enough.
The curious thing is that, once someone has decided to judge you, you can almost always be too much of one thing and not enough of something else at the same time.
The body enters before we do
The body enters a room before our words do. It is seen. Measured. Compared. Sometimes a few seconds are enough: a photograph, a T-shirt, a belly, a wrinkle.
Ageing, meanwhile, is often treated as a lack of discipline rather than the fairly predictable result of staying alive.
I know that feeling well. Not being thin enough. Not being athletic enough. Not having the body that, in certain circles, seems to serve as proof of identity.
The right body opens doors. The wrong one has to explain itself first.
And the body is only the first page.
Behind it, we have built an entire CV: age, height, profession, income, neighbourhood, home, followers, relationship history, perceived masculinity. Preferably with no emotional needs, because apparently those go on the CV too.
Sometimes we are not meeting a person.
We are assessing an application.
We have turned the body into a CV
Apps have made the mechanism more obvious, but they did not invent it. They simply organised it very well.
Desire becomes a sequence of photographs. Complexity becomes a few lines of bio. A person becomes a list of negotiable features.
Tall. Masculine. Muscular. Sorted. No drama.
That last one still makes me smile. People who write “no drama” are often the ones who have left at least three seasons and a Christmas special behind them.
Preferences exist. Desire cannot be imposed.
The problem begins when a preference becomes a moral ranking.
When a muscular body is no longer simply a muscular body, but proof of discipline, worth, control.
When a belly is read as a diagnosis of someone’s character.
When a wrinkle looks like a loss of market value.
We have turned the body into a CV and then pretend to be surprised when everyone feels they are being assessed.
Before a body is seen, it needs to be lived in
For years, I looked at my body almost entirely from the outside. How does it look? How does that T-shirt fit? Can I post this photograph? Do I look older? Fatter?
Ordinary questions, up to a point. Except that, meanwhile, there was another, much simpler question I asked far less often:
how do I feel inside this body?
Because a body is not a shop window. It is memory. Age. Fatigue. Pleasure. Fear. Desire. Change.
It is the place where life has happened to us.
It can be cared for, trained, adorned, shown. Of course. But it should not have to present its credentials every time it enters a room.
Before a body is seen, it needs to be lived in.
The jury enters before we do
The most insidious part comes when nobody actually needs to judge us any more.
We do it all ourselves.
We enter a room having already imagined the looks, the comparisons, the rankings. We have already decided which part to hide.
And so external judgement becomes internal work.
Unpaid, too. Impeccable service.
And here I have to be honest with myself as well: I have judged people too.
It would be very convenient to write this article pretending I had always been on the right side of the lens.
I have not.
I too have dismissed someone too quickly. I too have read meanings into clothes, a body, a way of speaking.
The difference, today, is that I at least try to catch myself doing it.
Because if you build your worth on comparison, sooner or later someone will always come along who makes you feel inferior.
The right to feel at home in yourself
For years, I wondered which part of myself I needed to correct. My body? My emotions? My appearance? Being too available?
Then I realised something rather liberating: I could have changed everything, and the jury would still have found something else.
Juries are like that. They have to keep themselves busy.
The problem was not being imperfect.
It was having accepted the idea that I had to pass an audition to deserve attention, desire or respect.
The duty to perform.
The right to feel at home in yourself.
Feeling at home in yourself does not mean neglecting yourself. I can want to lose weight, exercise, dress better, like myself more. There is nothing noble about pretending that appearance never matters.
But changing something because I want to is one thing.
Living as a permanent correction project is another.
The jury has not disappeared. There are photographs I dislike. Rejections that hurt. Days when I notice what is missing first.
I simply try to remember one thing: that jury has no official authority.
And, on closer inspection, it consists of people who are just as exposed, just as insecure and often too busy hiding their own CV to read ours properly.
Perhaps the real luxury is not having a body everyone approves of.
It is managing, at least sometimes, to feel at home in your own.