Shavin: Everything I know I learned from my Spanx

Several weeks ago I did something I've never done before. I bought a pair of Spanx.

In case you aren't familiar with them, the Spanx undergarment is the modern-day equivalent of the girdle, repackaged with a cute name and without the medieval metal hooks. They come in all sizes and lengths, so you can theoretically sculpt your unruly female torso into any shape you like, using only the sheer unrelenting force of fabric.

Belly too protuberant? There a Spanx for that. Rear assets too jiggly? There's a Spanx for that. And in the case of both, well, there's a Spanx for that, too.

Interestingly, what motivated me to buy the Spanx was an invitation to a party thrown in my honor to celebrate the upcoming publication of my book, "The Body Tourist." This is a memoir which takes an unflinching look at the aftereffects of anorexia nervosa, at the lingering issues of food and weight mismanagement and the myriad conflicts and compulsions that are endemic to it, most of which center around the attempt to rein in your body. Are you starting to see the irony here?

I bought the Spanx (I told myself) to camouflage my little problem of post-menopausal bloating which in any given week can range from cosmetically and psychically minor with relatively little pain, to cosmetically and psychically excruciating with lots of pain. This constant flux I monitor with the laser-focus attention of an air traffic controller (which, my husband might ever-so-gently suggest, possibly exacerbates the condition).

The night of the party, I struggled into my magically bloat-flattening Spanx, a feat of strength and acrobatics not unlike attempting to pull on a suit of atomic-grade rubber bands. Then I slunk into my form-fitting black and white knee-length dress and turned sideways to assess my profile in the mirror. What I saw horrified me. My Spanx, while only slightly cancelling out my midsection bloat, completely nullified my backside.

This was not the agreement I'd entered into at all when I bought my Spanx. The agreement was that they would give me the flat, taut belly of a 20 year-old boy and the backside of Beyoncé. With great disappointment, I removed the Spanx and tucked them away for return.

Only I didn't return them right away. Instead they rode around in my car for two weeks after the party, during which time I alternately decided to keep them for a later outfit and berated myself for not getting rid of them immediately. And it was precisely during this back-and-forth argument in my head that I finally saw it: how neatly the narrative of the Spanx mirrored the narrative of the anorexia of my early twenties. It was all there: the flattening versus the rounding, keeping versus divesting, contraction versus expansion, control versus letting go.

Anorexia itself is a narrative of opposites, of black and white thinking, of losing versus gaining, of "no" versus "yes." The story of my Spanx is the story of my bodily discomfort, the story of my wish to both hide out and be seen, the story of my desire both to grow and to shrink. It is this story that was riding around in my car and, like a soul that can't rest until the body is buried, I couldn't return the Spanx until I saw the connection.

There's more, of course. The upcoming publication of my book has fanned the same fires of approach/avoidance, expansion/contraction. I dreamed of the day the book would go out in the world, but once the contract was signed, I stopped sleeping, so terrified was I of the exposure. Like the laser focus on the ebb and flow of my abdomen, I can still, at times, see only riches or ruin.

True healing - true mental health, for that matter - is the ability to live in the gray areas, to tolerate the uncertainties, the what ifs, the I-don't-knows. It's the recognition that everything we do is a mirror, a reminder, an affirmation and sometimes a warning. What anorexia left in its wake - the grasping for finites, the search for certainty - is the ongoing narrative of my life, and this I'll be forced to see, in obvious and obscure ways, until such time as I fully get it.

So thanks Spanx. I'm somewhere between hating you and loving you.

Contact Dana Shavin at Danalise@juno.com. "The Body Tourist" is due for release in October from Little feather Books.

Upcoming Events