Lyndsey Medford

justice + joy

body image

no more avoiding mirrors

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Avoiding mirrors is surprisingly easy. You don’t even register their existence; your eyes just slide on past. You put up a block.

Any time you are unavoidably faced with one, you move on as quickly as possible, because all the mirror shows you is anxiety and shame. Every “not ___ enough” that’s ever attached itself to you glares out from that image: not tan enough. Not clear-skinned enough. Not skinny enough. Not tall enough. Not athletic enough. Not skinny enough, not skinny enough, not skinny enough—and then the second blow falls as you try to turn away. You’re not confident enough. Not feminist enough. Not spiritual enough to trust that this body is good.

How did this supposedly feminist idea of self-confidence become just another impossible quality on the list of things women “should” be, accomplish, perform? Who decided that after a lifetime of gaslighting and abuse, all we’d need to heal would be a poppy lipstick and a peppy media campaign?

I don’t remember a time before mirrors showed me shame on both of these levels: that I couldn’t make my body fit the ideal, and I couldn’t make my heart not care. When shame turned to anger, I turned that anger on myself. This seemed like a simple mind-over-matter problem: if I could only convince myself to believe a better story, I’d take back the mirror’s power, find some way to look into it with grace and dignity and joy.

But when I began to make peace with that too-true image, it wasn’t because I figured out the right tactics. I didn’t change my beliefs through sheer force of will; nor remind myself that others had bigger problems than mine; nor placed myself before the mirror constantly like some sort of self-administered exposure therapy.

Instead, I think things began to change the day I discovered I had a mind-in-matter problem—the day I learned that we are our bodies.

You are your body.

I am my body.

That is the day I began to live a better story.

See, the writers of the Bible didn’t believe in mind over matter. They believed, simply, in matter. To the ancient Hebrews, breath was life. Literally. Your “spirit”—the thing that makes you you, your life-force, is your breath.

They had little to no conception of an afterlife; just the grave. When they argued about eternity, they didn’t talk about heaven, but about resurrection.

The Hebrews knew, as science has only recently understood, that emotions begin in the body.

They understood that creation—the material world, the dirt and air and trees and skin and sweat and fat—was made by God, very good. Not as some sort of testing ground for our spirits or minds; as a work of art. Very good. As it is.

They believed no one exists apart from their body. All that careful Sunday School division between heart and soul and body? Completely read into those texts from our modern viewpoint, inherited from the Greeks.

And because you, according to the Hebrews, are one thing, not hard to pin down, you are just the you that exists at the intersection of your body and breath—because of that, faith for them is not something you believe, it is something you do. It’s not an idea or an old story but a living, immediate thing; it is the way you encounter the world and the choices you make in light of the things your community knows about God.

And so faith that this body is good is not a mind game or a happy feeling, but a choice to inhabit this skin as if it were actually a very good home.

My body was never an image in a mirror, something to look at from someone else’s perspective and pass judgments over. My body is this right-here self, this beating-heart-bundle of today’s emotions and sore muscles—and it exists to worship God like the rest of creation, just by its very existence, exactly as it is. I exist to fill up these lungs, feel through these nerve endings, stretch out these limbs to touch my beloveds, just as much as I exist to think profound thoughts or pray pretty prayers.

I’m not afraid of mirrors anymore, because when I see this body, I see a very good self. If this body is my God-breathed self, the very idea of others’ expectations for us is incoherent. I’ve learned that my body has its own will, once I stop trying to submit it to strangers’. I’m not afraid anymore because when I look in the mirror, I’m no longer encountering myself by surprise, but greeting the fond familiar. I’m living as my body, experiencing myself as matter, loving and being with all of me.

I came here to tell you this whole summer—on the blog, on Instagram, on the Justice and Joy email list—is going to be a manifesto on prayer and self-love, leading up to the release of my guided journal, Making Friends With My Body and God. It’s about how choosing to inhabit our God-given flesh can be a prayer, one that in turn helps us breathe God’s wholeness and shalom into this fractured world.

Because even as my life is moving me slowly and steadily into activism-world, prayer and self-love only become more central to my daily life. The further outward I look in my hopes of making change in this world, the further inward I travel in hopes of staying grounded, humble, and joyful, with God in it all. And the more clearly I see that each one of us has the chance to ripple out love and peace in our own radical way, starting with that inner work.

Besides, if politics is about the organization of bodies, don’t activists deserve to feel at home in ours?

It took years, years of chronic illness and biking through snow and dealing with my weird purity culture hangups. There was quitting caffeine after 10 years of daily coffees, some backpacking in the mountains, my feminist rage at the medical industry, the crippling loss of gluten in my life. And there was a lot of awkward, uncertain, probably-wrong prayer. A lot of fighting and tears, and trying-too-hard and being-too-mad-to-try-at-all, before I came to the quiet places where God whispered to me about how to sit down in my soul, give up control, wait, accept, listen, be.

Oh, and also there was more feminist rage.

Some of those stories are in my book, and some of them aren’t. Maybe some of them will make appearances along the way of this summer’s launch (subscribe to that email list, friend!). Maybe some of them still belong to my body, who hasn’t released them yet.

But what’s most exciting to me is that your story is going to be in this book. It is part essay, part illustration, part Scripture meditation—and it’s a guided journal. It is full of questions and space for scribbles and notes; and each chapter centers on a practice you can use to try this whole embodiment thing. This whole hello-to-myself thing. This God-is-here thing.

It’s never been mind-over-matter. It’s never been you against yourself. Your body is one of your greatest sources of wisdom and strength, and that’s why this world has turned it against you for so long.

It’s time to let go of the stories about what’s wrong with you, and live into a story about what is true: that you are very good. You’re allowed to do it one day at a time. We can do it together.

The days of avoiding mirrors are numbered.

P.S. If you’re as excited about this scary, thrilling, absurd, daily, subversive journey as I am (NOT POSSIBLE, BTW), make sure you sign up for the email list. And the book is looking for a launch team to help share it with the world—if you want an early, discounted, signed copy, send me an email, DM, or comment here (ASAP). I’ll be reading and journaling through the book with the launch team and I would love to see you there!

we need to talk about bodies.

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The middle school locker room. The other 99% of the day, I could generally pretend not to have a body, but in the fluorescent seventh-grade gym, there we all just…were. I remember my routine: find a corner, try to shrink, change as fast as possible, wear an indifferent face so no one will think you’re a baby. Make an exit. Breathe again.

Middle school bodies will never not be awkward and maybe a little painful. But that constricting feeling—the fear others will find out I have a body, and a complicated relationship to it—remains with me well into my 20’s.

How many of us are still trapped in the middle school locker room when it comes to our grown-up bodies? Deeply embarrassed, but trying to seem brave; feeling immensely lonely in a room full of people who actually share our exact feelings and issues.

This tragedy repeats itself over and over because shame breeds shame. It festers in darkness and tightens its grip on its victims day by day. That feeling of unworthiness will suffocate you, feed on your joy, it will isolate you so that you have no chance of hearing the truth.

The only way to break its neck is to gasp out your secret and then wait for the sky to fall, and if it does, well, that’s better than dying silent and hiding.

I thought I knew about shame, but then I wrote a devotional last year about making friends with my body and God. It was surprising, the places I’d feel shame trying to tiptoe back in. Writing about food or stretching would suddenly feel like I was recounting all the details of some terrible, intimate secret. Or a voice would whisper, you’re too small, you don’t have this all figured out, you’re too young to write about this.

On my better days, I realized that voice was a signal I was in exactly the truth-telling place I needed to be.

See, our culture has done alright in the last few years at acknowledging it’s hard for women to love our bodies. But we’ve rushed on trying to muster Girl Power, thinking we could skip over the work of healing. We’ve told each other to be happy, be confident, be yourself—and in the process we’ve failed to make room for one another to admit we’re grieved, insecure, fractured.

So the shame buries itself deeper and goes on gutting us.

Writing my stories and confessions about my body taught me that even though bodies are intensely personal, there’s no use pretending they’re really private. Our bodies are the only site we have for meeting other people. Our weight, our health, our sexuality, our race and gender and ability, our comfort and discomfort with our own flesh affect every person we meet.

When we try to keep our body struggles and victories to ourselves, we’re denying the reality that we need others to share the journey with. I am making friends with my body and God, but I also have to reckon with my parents and grandparents, my pastors, my middle-school bullies, my best friends, every boy I’ve ever kissed and every man who’s ever stolen my smile.

I can’t do all that alone.

I needed late-night stories; safe warm hugs; conversations with my best friend about body hair. I needed to confess my sexual “indiscretions” to friends and hear the same confessions back from every. Single. One of them. I needed to eat and drink and sing and swim and cobra-pose with other people. I needed to hear my own brave, shaking voice, telling the truth, unlock sighs of relief from others who didn’t even know they were holding their breath.

Alone, you can start to rattle your cage. But get a few people together and you can pull down the whole damn prison.

Bread, Sex, and Other Devotions helped me find my little brave voice. Now I’ve created a getting-started group guide to help you find yours by discussing it with a circle of friends. Whether you hope sharing your stories and struggles will help you find deep healing, or you just need some accountability to actually finish the thing; whether you circle up your closest friends, a group you’d like to be closer to, or a few middle school girls—it’s time to end the silence.

Once your group gets started, send me an email, too—I’d love to Skype in on a session (or stop by if you’re in Charleston).

All you need is your people, the free downloads, and yummy snacks (always yummy snacks). So don’t wait. There’s not going to be a “good time” and you’re never gonna get un-scared. And that’s what’s beautiful about it: you get to be brave. You get to decide that today is the day, this year is the year when shame doesn’t win.

2 ways I manage to love my body (90% of the time)

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I first started exercising when I was 18, for a boy. He offered to teach me to box. We met up with a couple of other friends in his spider-y basement and took down imaginary attackers. Until then, my life had mainly consisted of books and music; the idea of enjoying exercise was foreign to me, the idea of playing (and failing at) sports, panic-inducing. But something about boxing worked for me, and that basement became the place where I first felt the joy of pushing your body to exhaustion and beyond.

Later in college, I was studying the doctrine of the incarnation when I began following yoga videos in my room. For centuries two sides of Christianity once battled: the Gnostics—who followed the philosophers in proclaiming that matter was evil—against the orthodox position, which said that Christianity must side with Judaism in declaring all creation good. I would read a passionate third-century defense of Jesus’s bodily realness and creation’s very-goodness; then I would go to the mat and exorcise the Gnostic voices in my own head. Breathing into all the space I could take up, I learned about myself and connected with the world in ways that books could simply not provide. Stretching and strengthening muscles, I experienced my body as more than a case for my brain or a passive, sexualized object. Even placing my hands on my own body was not something I’d normally done before, and by moving into these poses I sometimes felt I was encountering myself for the first time. I began resisting the impulse to live life floating above my body, or to (literally) minimize it. This is me, and I am good.

This was the first thing: to think less of “my body” and to conceive more of “my self,” a philosophical idea that has taken a lot of practical re-training to really absorb. To remind myself that my body and I aren’t separate, I made rules: I don’t berate, pinch, pull, deny, or constantly weigh my body. I don’t envision my future body or train toward a particular physique. I stretch out in public places when I want to. I listen to my body: I rest when I’m sick and eat french fries when I crave them and drink green tea because it makes me feel good.

The other thing is to get a little mad.

I think a lot of us realize that “society” has made us unhappy with ourselves, and we feel kind of sad about that. But as much as we may have pondered and discussed this in a vague sense, how often have we really comprehended the violence that has been done to us? The profit others have gained by encouraging this inferiority complex? The absurd entitlement instilled in men, trained to stare, evaluate, use, and discard? I don’t think we often put it starkly enough. We’ve been psychologically manipulated to reorient our lives around male desire through the physical manipulation of models and stars: forcing them into an unrealistic mold and then digitally slicing off parts of them anyway.

There’s something liberating about realizing you’re trapped. When you finally confront the fact that you will never, ever measure up. You will never look like Barbie or even like Gal Gadot. You will never be comfortable in that swimsuit, because no one has ever been comfortable in that swimsuit. You will never impress a guy who gets his ideas of women’s value from magazines and porn.

If you identify just a little bit with your body, be just a little bit fond of it, and pay attention to the messages you’re getting, it isn’t hard to cultivate a healthy and holy anger. Really think about how the senders want you to feel. The cat-caller on the street? Wants you to feel vulnerable, to remind you that he gets to determine your value. The perfume ad? Wants you to feel not-sexy-enough. The weight loss people? They want you to direct your time and energy toward getting a six pack—and not toward your own dream.

We can’t keep letting these people decide how we feel.

I used to think the “Christian response” to body shame was to pray that God would show me how beautiful I am. But over time, God showed me that my body is more than beautiful—more than how others perceive me. I do work, communicate, pray, cook, dance, serve communion, bike, hug, and love with my body. My body is getting older, and if I only love it when it seems to meet the standards of beauty others have given me, I will forever struggle against it. Now I don’t seek to “feel beautiful” as much as I seek to be free and to sprinkle freedom on others like fairy dust. I actively cultivate appreciation for my squishy bits and—this is really important—cut myself off from judging others’ appearances.

You don’t have to be an Angry Feminist raging around all the time. But once you start to care for yourself, you stop letting strangers poke at all your tender spots. You just get tired of feeling helpless about all this body stuff. You realize it’s a Christian Response to be mad when you’re assaulted by lies. You harness anger and turn it into spirit, because escaping from bondage is a hard thing and the liars and thieves do fight back. You don’t have to hate anybody; but you do have to practice self-defense.

I recommend we all stop being ladylike, and learn to box.

26 things I’ve learned about food

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Y’all, I am 26 now. This sounds like the age of a person who has a career and knows how to accessorize. But I am not that person. I am mostly just a person who loves, loves food.

Some might say that the main achievement of civilization has been to allow most of us to focus the majority of our daily efforts on things other than feeding ourselves. But I would still contend that it is in our nature to treat food as life—to schedule our days around it and to treat feeding each other as an act at once vitally basic and transcendently holy.

Looking at it that way, I’m willing to say that the things I’ve learned about food in 26 years are things I’ve learned about life. Here they are, in roughly the order I learned them.

  1. You have to try it at least once.

    This was such an ironclad rule for me growing up that I am truly astonished to encounter picky adults. Why would you deprive yourself of the wonders of the food world that way? It won’t kill you. Have a chaser ready and try a bite.

  2. Pack a lunch.

    Once you’re in the habit, it’s the easiest way to save thousands of dollars and calories every year.

  3. Anyone who can read a recipe can cook.

    Pretty much all of the foods and a lot of the baked goods you want to eat regularly require no special skills. Here is most recipes: Chop. Skillet. Medium-high.

  4. Grow an herb garden.

    OK so I, personally, have successfully kept exactly one basil plant alive in my life, but my mom’s garden taught me there is no comparison between fresh herbs and dried, especially when the fresh herbs are free.

  5. Cake of all kinds is a breakfast food for the week following any birthday or major or minor holiday, and also on Sundays, or when there cake in the house.
  6. A sharp knife will transform your attitude toward cooking.

    If you don’t like cooking, it could be because all your life you’ve been machete-ing vegetables and fighting with your meat as if it were still alive, instead of slicing them with perfect economy of motion in a blissful dance of color, shape, and flavor. When your pen is out of ink, you don’t keep trying to write; you get more ink. When your knife is dull, you should sharpen it. The deli people at nicer grocery stores will often do this for you for free.

  7. Say grace.

    Just because it’s a ritual doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. Even if you’re not religious, mealtime is a time to cultivate gratitude.

  8. Practice saying “it’s too sweet.”

    Sugar is one of the main ingredients in many “savory” convenience and fast foods (check out the labels on pasta sauce, teriyaki stuff, Wheat Thins, lunchmeat…). The people who make this stuff have us hooked on sugar, but if you get used to eating homemade, you’ll be surprised how much of it doesn’t taste right.

  9. Double the recipe.

    Leftovers are the best lunches.

  10. Less meat isn’t as depressing as it sounds.

    Whether you’re trying to save the earth or you’re just poor, you could probably cut down more drastically on meat, without making huge sacrifices, than you think. Just a couple strips of bacon can add a lot of flavor and heft to even the biggest pot of vegetarian chili.

  11. Double the garlic.
  12. Plan your meals.

    Everything worth doing takes a little planning. Take 20 minutes to find some recipes and make a list before you head to the store.

  13. Food connects us to everything.

    Everybody eats, and everybody eats things that come from the earth. The way we consume and share these resources affects everyone and everything around us.

  14. Don’t throw away food.

    Plan to use up what you have.

  15. Good food is satisfying.

    You know what’s not a good food? Those cheezballs in the giant tub that leave a film in your mouth but somehow you want to eat them all even though they are nothing but air, corn dust, and orange. Put down the cheezballs and pick up a food made from food.

  16. On that note, don’t buy cheap chocolate or cheap cheese.

    You’ll end up using less of the full-flavored, higher-priced ones, so the costs even out.

  17. Don’t diet.

    It’s one thing to cut out sugar  for a few weeks because you find yourself eating the stale plain Munchkins in the office break room after everyone has picked out all the other flavors, and you realize you’re on the sugar addiction train.
    It’s another thing to subject yourself to the rules of any diet for a long time. Those rules create shame and fear and even when you succeed you come out with this weird self-righteous mindset about what a good skinny rule-follower you are.
    Start with this rule: get at least 6 fruits and vegetables every day. Then make a list of healthy proteins and starches to balance out your meals, and you’re well on your way to a habit of eating healthfully.

  18. Pay attention to your eating.

    I eat stupid snacks like Funyuns when I’m bored and lonely. Whenever I want Funyuns, I congratulate myself on another victorious day of NOT eating Funyuns and put a little effort into becoming less bored and lonely.

  19. F*** the patriarchy.

    People sometimes seem to expect women, especially small women, to eat like we are actual fairies, sipping tea out of thimbles and nibbling micro greens while smiling fondly at our men as they devour seconds. That is so incredibly not my style. Only since I’ve gotten a wee bit angry about that have I recognized that my love of food actually helps me eat better. And that it’s one of my favorite things about myself. And that the quest for the perfect buffalo wing is a noble one indeed.

  20. Pay someone else to deep fry things.

    Not worth it at home.

  21. oatmeal + peanut butter + 1 sliced banana + 8 chocolate chips.

    You’re welcome.

  22. If you cut up bird’s-eye chilis for your super-spicy Thai curry, throw all the refuse in the trash and don’t spray it off the cutting board with extremely hot water.

    That’s called pepper spray.

  23. Feed people.

    Even if it’s frozen pizza. Even if they have to sit on the floor. They don’t care; they’ll be grateful. Don’t miss out on the love and life found in sharing a meal just because hosting seems intimidating.

  24. Instant oatmeal is a scam!!!!1!!

    Regular rolled oats microwave in 90 seconds if you use just enough water to cover them.

  25. Be kind to yourself.

    Lots of people make resolutions to cook more often or eat better, but get caught up in a lot of weird food shame when they fail one week. Congratulate yourself for trying. But don’t set yourself up for failure: recognize that these things require you to make time for them.

  26. Fulfilling the Ultimate Quadrilateral of an Excellent Food—cheap, easy, healthy, and delicious:

    Hummus.
    Curried lentil stew.
    Tabbouleh.
    Granola.
    Breakfast burritos.