Body
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17 February, 2000
I don't remember the year, or how old I was. Probably between 10 and 12. We used to own a caravan, or for a while we half owned it with another family. It was at Paraparaumu, about 40 mins north of Wellington. We'd go up there in the summer holidays, staying for a couple of weeks in our caravan, in the holiday park.
It was a hot summer's day. One of those summers you only have as a child. We had a game of swingball, where a tennis ball is tethered to a pole, and you hit the ball round and round. Sometimes I'd play with my sister, but that day I was playing alone. Hitting the ball back and forth with the racket. No doubt pretending I was at Wimbledon or somewhere.
It was hot, so I'd taken off my t-shirt. Just a boy in shorts and jandals, hitting the ball around the pole. A group of teenage boys walked past, down the road along the camp. The way teenage boys do.
And I heard then. "Look at him, look how skinny he is." And they laughed at me. They laughed at how skinny I was, because I had my t-shirt off because it was a hot summer's day, and I was just a young boy hitting a ball around a pole.
They would have forgotten the incident immediately. I've remembered it ever since. It defined my body to me. Skinny. Something to laugh at. Sunken chest.
Once in a basketball game the other team would yell, "watch out for the skinny guy, who's marking him?" I would have swapped all the points I scored in that game for those words never to have been said.
Ain't it sad how a few moments like that frame large parts of your life? How they scar you because, deep down, you know that somehow you don't measure up.
I'm mostly past those feelings now. I'm mostly ok, and I'm mostly comfortable with my body.
But every time I go swimming, like I did today with Matty, I'll be just a little ashamed(?), embarrassed(?) … every time I go swimming I'll be conscious of my body, and how it might look. And every time I do some press-ups, or sit-ups, like I did last night, I'll go and peer at myself in the mirror, wondering if I've improved how I look just a little.