Oops, I’m Human: Ariane Anusbigian

“I feel comfortable in my body in a way I didn’t before.”

Oops, I’m Human invites women to share their relationship with their bodies—the messy, totally human parts. This series evokes the emotional gymnastics of living in our bodies, rejecting what we’ve been taught while quietly relishing the contradictions of self-acceptance. If you’ve ever felt both empowered and complicit, you’re in the right place.

Today’s Oop’s, I’m Human author is Ariane Anusbigian, marketing consultant, writer, and mom. Yes, she’s another Substacker I’ve become friends with, yes, through Substack. But it was via Courtney Falsey that Ariane landed on my radar. They did this very fun, very entertaining post together and I was wowed by the collaboration. I subscribed to Ariane’s Substack, Just A Splash (and you should too), and never looked back. Ariane is incredibly thoughtful, honest, hardworking and very fun (we’ve had dinner together) and I’m so lucky she’s come into my life. Now I just need her to move to LA.

Thank you, Ariane, for this incredibly powerful piece.

An essay by Ariane Anusbigian

I think I might be one of those annoying people who’s never loved her body more than when she was pregnant. Pregnancy, and specifically struggling with unexplained secondary infertility, shifted my relationship with my body from critical to grateful.

Now, at nearly 37 years old and after two kids, I feel really good in my skin. I’m able-bodied, I’m healthy, I’m building strength. I’ve mostly come to accept, even love, my body for what it is, what it’s given me, and what it allows me to do. I wasn’t always that way, though.

Growing up, I was pretty aware of my body in comparison to others. I had what I’ll call a very average body as a child and adolescent. Not super thin, but not overweight. Average height, average “baby fat,” average athletic abilities. I blended in.

But I remember wanting to be thinner like some of my friends. I remember wishing I looked “better” in my tankini at our neighborhood pool, that my stomach wasn’t so soft, that my thighs weren’t so big.

I feel like I’ve always had a baseline knowledge of my body in comparison to others, of dieting and nutrition, and of exercise. I remember thinking about what I ate from a fairly young age too (”good” foods, “junk” foods, calories, sugars, fats).

It wasn’t until I hit puberty later in middle school that I leaned out. (And in high school that I got a good haircut and my braces off and “blossomed,” as they say.)

I was lucky to grow up in a house that modeled eating well and staying active. My parents cared about how they ate and how they moved. They taught us about protein and fiber before it was cool and adopted an “everything in moderation” type of approach. And like a lot of families in the early 2000s, there was some diet culture mixed in too: South Beach Diet, Splenda, Britney’s abs on TRL, Victoria’s Secret Angels strutting down the runway. It’s a lot to take in for a preteen girl.

I also danced ballet growing up. Overall, I maintain that it was a wonderful activity for me. It taught me patience and camaraderie. It was meditative, disciplined, and quieted other anxieties I had. I was fortunate too in that I went to a low-key studio where all types of bodies were welcome.

But there’s no hiding in a leotard. Every line of your body is right there in the mirror, all the time, next to everyone else’s. I remember leaning out in eighth grade and thinking, oh, I like how I look more now. And I remember the compliments from my teacher too.

The body image hum was loudest in middle school, high school, and college when I really started to think more about how I looked and what foods I should restrict in order to look a certain way. I was never diagnosed with an eating disorder, but I certainly had disordered eating. Are they one and the same? I lived with “food noise,” we call it now, though I don’t remember a name for it back then. The constant internal chatter that was always there, running underneath everything else. I used to wonder if I was alone in it, or if every girl my age was carrying the same static.

Thankfully, as I’ve aged, the food noise has quieted immensely, and the “body noise” (if that’s a thing?) along with it. I think some of this has come with age and maturity, but I think I have my kids to thank for a lot of it.

It’s been a reframe, really. For so long I was focused on what my body wasn’t. Not thin enough, not curvy enough, not toned enough, not whatever “enough” meant that day. That’s what fed the food noise, the body noise, all of it. But now, the focus is on what my body is. What it does.

Kids, as we know, just have a way of putting everything in perspective. And for me, struggling to have a second baby put a lot in perspective.

I went through secondary infertility between my two kids with multiple miscarriages and procedures to go along with them. There was a stretch when I didn’t trust my body at all, when I felt like something was wrong with me that I couldn’t explain or fix. (And if you’re in a phase like this, I see you, and I’ve written more about this here.)

No amount of body noise compares to the distrust that comes with an actual, or unexplained, health issue. That’s when you really start to get angry at your body, not for how it looks, but for what it won’t do. So when it finally worked, when I finally got to have my daughter Hazel join my son Luke, the gratitude was enormous. And it ended up healing decades of not fully loving my body, of not fully appreciating it.

Pregnancy is the most out of control I’ve ever felt in my body, and also the most in awe of it. When it does its thing, it just knows what to do. It grows a person without you micromanaging a single cell of it.

That’s when it clicked. My body hadn’t betrayed me over the years. It had just been waiting for the right moment to do the thing it was built to do. And when it finally did, I stopped needing to control how it looked. I just needed to trust what it could do.

Could my body be aesthetically “better”? Sure. I’m not immune to cultural and societal norms. And I say this fully knowing that I am someone who is naturally thin as an adult, which is its own kind of privilege in how the world responds to my body. Nonetheless: oops, I’m human.

I fantasize about a chest that fills out a T-shirt. ( Maura Brannigan I know you agree.) I’d like to have more definition and muscle tone. And sure, I’d love to have less loose skin on my stomach when I bend over.

But I am no longer consumed by these types of thoughts. They do not run my day.

Overwhelmingly, I think now: how lucky am I to have this body, this previous home to my children, this vehicle by which to enjoy and move about life in the way that I love.

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