My Body is a Temple
Or, "Lies My Preacher Told Me"
My mother hates her body / We share the same outline
—Lucy Dacus, “My Mother & I”
Godhood is just like girlhood: a begging to be believed.
—Kristin Chang, “Churching”
I have been sensitive to the sun since I was an infant. Light blue eyes come from my mom, and her mother before that. My skin blisters in a Texas summer, despite having lived here all my life.
I’ve always been relatively thin through no great virtue of my own, just genetics. The women on my mom’s side of the family share a similar body type, which changes in a similar way as they age. “We carry our weight in our stomachs,” my mom told me, and my grandmother before that. Of course, we also share a history of breast cancer.
My mom spent hours upon hours reading to me when I was a baby. She would record stories on cassette and let them play in my nursery when she wasn’t there. We practiced letters in the bathtub. The first thing I “wanted to be when I grew up” was a teacher, I think because I wanted to be like my mom. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I learned to read when I was three, though my dad’s parents didn’t believe me. They promised my mom that I had just memorized the words of the picture books.
When I was in fourth grade, every classroom had to sit together at the same cafeteria table for lunch. At those long cafeteria tables, a group of girls in my class would taunt me because I didn’t want to recite curse words with them; because our overwhelmed public school teacher had recruited me to help teach reading to another student in our class who barely spoke English; because I was uncomfortable when they made up names for each of our teacher’s breasts. They created an “I Hate Eliza” club at recess.
I was bullied so badly that I transferred schools—but before that, my mom successfully lobbied the elementary school principal to let me eat lunch with the neighboring fourth grade class, despite our staggered schedule. When my class was released to lunch, I walked to the classroom next door and sat in the corner with a book, hoping no one would notice me or ask why I was there.
I became estranged from my body at an early age.
I wasn’t allowed to have my own Instagram account until I turned 13 years old, which means that last year’s birthday marked a full decade on the app. The first person I ever followed on Instagram was my female youth pastor at the time.
Writers smarter than I am have written about a “sea change” that I’ve sensed in my own relationship with the platform and with social media in general. But I also never used Snapchat or TikTok to any great extent, and Twitter (no one is calling it “X”), only during the pandemic.
When I redownloaded Instagram recently for an obligatory end-of-year “photo dump,” I realized just how good I am at the social rituals of posting. I know how to edit photos cohesively and choose an ironic caption. My best friend’s dad joked, when she got her first job out of graduate school as the social media manager for a really cool art agency based in London, that she was finally monetizing her years of posting on Instagram.
Thirteen was a particularly horrible age to suddenly be inundated with photoshopped pictures of supermodels, the likes of which had previously only stared out at me from the pages of People magazine and Us Weekly in line for the grocery store checkout.
Adults my age are still lucky in that we didn’t have smartphones for the first decade or so of our lives. Still, we acquired almost against our will a very unique skill set that will surely become obsolete one day. Hopefully that day comes when the billionaire class under Donald Trump’s thumb runs their trillion dollars’ worth of businesses into the ground, following Elon Musk’s lead with Twitter. More likely, our understanding of what “social media” is will only expand, until the next generation is using Apple Vision Pro headsets like adults my age use disposable cameras. Kids born into Generation Alpha, as they have already been named, will have videos of the earliest moments of their lives.
My family’s home videos were all stolen in a home robbery because my parents had stored them in a weatherproof safe in case we ever had to flee a hurricane, and the burglar mistook this for a signifier of value. When my dad found a video of me at 9 years old, from the earliest days of his Facebook account, I was almost alarmed to realize that some of my mannerisms have stayed exactly the same.
About three weeks into 2025, I realized that all of my New Year’s resolutions involved restriction: No more drinking. Less Instagram. No more credit card debt. Invest a certain amount of money in the stock market—which means tightening my budget even further. No impulse buying books at work. No more ghosting my Hinge matches (or at least less ghosting, if I’m being realistic). I started to wonder why all of my goals have to be negative instead of additive.
There is pseudoscientific language now about “dopamine detoxing,” which involves taking prolonged breaks from social media at certain times during the day or week, when you wake up or before you go to sleep or on Sundays. I wish this felt feasible for me, but I have managed to significantly reduce my Instagram use since deleting the app from my phone and accepting that cold turkey is never going to stick for me.
My social media platform of choice is Goodreads. There’s only so long I can scroll on that software, which has not changed in any meaningful way since the early aughts. Books have always been a shield and a salve for the messiness of my and others’ bodies.
I started doing Pilates last summer—the first fitness routine I’ve kept up with voluntarily. Though I refuse to step on the scale for the sake of my mental health, I would guess I’ve lost ten pounds. My jeans and belts don’t fit anymore. More importantly, I’ve gained strength and skill that would have been unfathomable to me when I was first fumbling around on the reformer (the machine that looks a lot like a medieval torture device, on which Pilates is taught). But what I revel in more often—though I wish I didn’t—is the foreign figure in my mirror. In fact, I’ve tried to actively avoid thinking about this new reality because I know how quickly, with so little effort, I can fall out of an exercise routine. But when I’ve just woken up in the morning and haven’t eaten anything yet and flex my fledgling abs, I feel a rush of—what? Femininity? Sensuality? No. Desirability.
The “Pilates princess” is a body type and aesthetic that has gained popularity online recently. It invites legitimate critique about the fetishization of thin bodies, because Pilates alone is never going to be the most beneficial exercise for most people. That would be heavy resistance training, or weightlifting, which is instead associated with “muscle mommy” body type.
Motherhood is notorious—though some recent media wants you to know better—for extinguishing one’s sexuality.
My mom met some of her best friends through our church, whose daughters became my best friends. When we were growing up, we watched our moms drink wine together. Wine seemed to signify not only friendship, but also maturity. Though I don’t regularly attend church anymore, so many of my moral and aesthetic sensibilities are still sneakily influenced by those of evangelical Christianity. One stage in the Christian childhood is first communion, which is taken with grape juice. Eventually, I would transition to dipping my fragment of cracker in red wine instead.
When one of my friend’s moms was on Weight Watchers—because whose mother hasn’t tried a fad diet or two—she would count the number of almonds she ate in a single sitting so that she would be sure to have enough points left over for a glass of wine at happy hour.
After a very boozy holiday season this year, I was eager to kick off Dry January. About a week in, just as my resolve was starting to flag, the outgoing surgeon general closed his term with warnings to the public about the carcinogenic risk of even moderate drinking. The risk is especially pronounced for alcohol-related breast cancer in women. The more I think about it, the less I can justify drinking in the long term, despite whatever immediate pleasure it gives. The most surprising thing was how little I missed it.
There’s about as much embarrassment as there is self-righteousness in telling people that I’m trying to give up drinking altogether. With something that is so ingrained in our culture—and in my socially anxious life in particular—it becomes conspicuous to willingly opt out. But there is also undeniably a rush of superior feeling, even if just from the attention one earns.
A few weeks ago, on a first date, I had my first glass of wine of the year. After I also turned down a proffered cigarette as a chaser, the guy I was with said (without any judgement) that I seemed to be very strict with myself. In the moment, I couldn’t help but agree with him. “I’m actually working on an essay about that right now,” I said. In the days following, however, I cringed at the thought that this character trait had somehow made me less desirable.
Breast cancer and alcoholism both run roughshod through my family tree. My brother has always said that “alcoholism doesn’t run in the family; it gallops.” The eldest daughter going back at least four generations on my mom’s side of the family has been diagnosed with breast cancer—almost always premenopausal, almost never fatal.
As I was falling asleep one night a few weeks ago, I couldn’t figure out why my head was hurting so badly, despite (probably too many) combined doses of Advil and Excedrin. I ran back through the day in my head to make sure I’d had enough caffeine and taken my antidepressants that morning—when I realized belatedly that I had not eaten nearly enough for activity I had undertaken that day. I’d held in-person interviews for an internship opening at work, walked across campus to interview a source, carried four loads of laundry to the laundromat, and taken an advanced Pilates class.
Though I’d eaten a solid lunch, I only let myself have a salad for dinner because … why? I couldn’t really remember. It was a treat, my favorite salad from my favorite restaurant. Instead of ordering their pizza, maybe this had felt like one final triumph after an already productive day. I have intentionally avoided learning much of anything about dieting—because who hasn’t been traumatized by MyFitnessPal—but I know vaguely that calorie deficit equals good. My understanding of nutrition amounts to indiscriminate restriction.
One of my good friends asked on her Instagram story whether anyone else had ever chosen to go to sleep instead of eating a meal—“sleeping off the hunger.” I’ve done this countless times, often in the name of budgeting. I’m a night owl, so I will most often eat something midday that I count for both breakfast and lunch, then an appropriately timed dinner portion. But even if I’m hungry by the time I go to bed at 11 p.m. or midnight, I almost never allow myself a “midnight snack,” unless it’s drunk Whataburger or Cane’s at 3 a.m. with friends after a night out. I don’t keep ice cream in my freezer for this reason, and I justify it as saving $7 on groceries every trip. Like so many girls learned through whispered “life hacks,” I had the bad habit in college of not eating enough before I went out because I could save money and get drunk faster from fewer drinks.
When I started talking through the earliest version of these thoughts, my friend pointed out that the pressure we felt growing up to be thin—from peers, celebrities, our mothers—was inextricably connected to its utility as a tool for desirability. Desire might seem impossible to disconnect from sexuality. But somehow, we had learned to take great pains to not talk about sex beyond abstinence. I didn’t talk to my childhood best friends about guys until we were in our final years of college. I tell my mom everything, but I still refuse to talk to her about guys in anything more than innuendo and vague detail.
I transferred to a tiny, private Baptist middle school for fifth grade. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I can’t remember getting any type of sex education there. Maybe the hope was that if we never talked about sex, we would never have it. We were taught to seek moral superiority in our self-denial.
If nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, why did God make pistachio soft serve?
“Take this, and eat,” he said, “sprinkled with flaky salt and drizzled with olive oil.”