Oops, I’m Human: Simone Harouche
“But peace isn't the same as quiet. There is still a voice that wants to restrict, critique, that narrows its eyes at me in the mirror or in photos.”
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 Oops, I’m Human author is Simone Harouche, creative consultant, interior designer, stylist, and author of Many Hats (subscribe immediately). I’ve long been a fan: from her years styling Miley Cyrus and Christina Aguilera, to The Kit Undergarments, to her recent creative work for Love Story.
We met, as I do with so many of my favorite people, on Substack. She’s the kind of person you instantly connect with, nodding along as you realize how much you share, from fashion and beauty to the more nuanced conversations around mental health. I cried when I read her piece, which is hard for me because I’m on Prozac.
Thank you, Simone, for this incredibly powerful piece.
An essay by Simone Harouche
I remember reading a book in high school called Fat Chance. The story follows a girl who is unhappy with her body and discovers bulimia through a friend. What stayed with me wasn’t the cautionary part. It was that the author actually showed it working, the character losing weight, becoming something closer to what she wanted to be. It didn’t read like an after-school special, all consequences and warnings. It read like information. Like a door being left open. I was fourteen, maybe fifteen, and I filed it away in some part of my brain without fully knowing I had.
I was seventeen the first time I really saw my body. Not in a mirror, not in a magazine. On a beach in Hawaii, in a bikini, in the middle of a family vacation. Up until that point, the comparisons I made were mostly unconscious, flipping through fashion magazines, registering the distance between the models and myself, and then turning the page. It didn’t consume me. It was just background noise, the kind every girl learns to live with.
My dad is someone I love without reservation, and he is also someone who, like most of us, carried his own stuff without always knowing it. He grew up in a culture where a woman’s appearance meant something, said something, and those values had a way of slipping out sideways in small comments, offhand observations. I don’t think he meant to leave marks. That afternoon in Hawaii, he pulled me aside. I’m not even sure how the conversation started, whether I said something first or whether it was something he’d been thinking about and chose that moment to bring up. Memory is slippery that way.
What I know is that a father talking to his teenage daughter about her body is not something I would ever recommend. The subject was a little pocket of fat on my lower back, the kind that runs in our family, the kind he had dealt with his whole life and passed down to me. He offered to help. He said it gently, I think.
I stood there in my bikini and felt the world quietly rearrange itself. I can’t recall being consumed with that part of my body, but now suddenly it existed, and it had been seen. I don’t tell this story to indict him. I tell it because it was the moment something shifted in me, and I want to be honest about where things begin. He didn’t create what came after. And he didn’t create what came before.
When I got to college, it was all diets and diet pills, the way it is for a lot of girls. My friends did it and I did it with them without asking too many questions. The difference was that when they stopped, I didn’t. And the reason I didn’t had less to do with my body than I would have admitted at the time. What I had stumbled onto, without knowing what to call it, was speed. I had never taken Adderall. Didn’t know what it was. But I had found my version of it, and what it gave me had nothing to do with being thin.
By the time I was building my career as a stylist, working seven days a week, juggling clients and jobs and the relentless pace of an industry that never really stops, those pills were fuel. They gave me edge. They kept me moving through long days and early mornings and the kind of exhaustion you learn to outrun because stopping isn’t an option. I was good at my job, and I worked hard at my job, and somewhere in there, the pills became part of how I did both. The weight was almost beside the point. I wasn’t chasing thinness anymore. I was chasing that feeling of being completely on top of my life, sharp, capable, and ahead. I took diet pills for about ten years. I stopped when I got pregnant, because suddenly my body wasn’t just mine anymore.
Pregnancy was something I had always wanted, and when it came, it cracked me open in ways I didn’t expect. I loved being pregnant. Both times. But becoming a mother did something quieter and more lasting to me than I anticipated; it made me start to question the standards I had been living by. I looked at my daughter and understood, in a way that was almost physical, that I did not want to hand this to her. Not the hypervigilance, not the unrealistic goals I had always set for myself, not the quiet war I had been conducting against my own body for as long as I could remember. I had always wanted to be thin. Thinner than was probably reasonable. Thinner than was probably healthy. And for the first time, I could see that clearly, not because I had resolved it, but because I loved someone too much to let her inherit it.
I should say, I was always pretty thin. This isn’t a story about being overweight. It’s a story about the space a body can take up in your own mind, the way you can be a relatively lean, active, outwardly fine person and still be quietly at war with yourself for decades. My thirties were about learning to want health instead of smallness. About setting a different example, especially for my daughter. I didn’t want to hand her this. I didn’t want her to inherit the particular damage that gets passed down through careless words on a beach.
Then I did MDMA therapy. I went in trying to work on something else entirely, and came out the other side with no desire for diet pills, just like that, gone. The next morning, I woke up and didn’t want them. Didn’t need the control, didn’t need the edge, didn’t need any of it. They say MDMA can help with addiction and compulsion. Maybe that’s what happened. I didn’t go looking for that healing. It found me anyway.
Shortly after, I went to The Hoffman Process. I was clearly in a season of searching, cracked open, hungry for something I couldn’t quite name. One of the things Hoffman asks of you is to check in with your body. To thank it. To actually listen to it. It sounds simple. It wasn’t simple. It was the first time in my life I had ever genuinely tried. And I’ll be honest, I’m still not good at it. I still have to remind myself that my body is something I inhabit, not something I manage. I’m a work in progress. I think I’ll always be a work in progress.
What I know is that I’m different than I was. I don’t talk about bodies in front of my daughter, not hers, not mine, not anyone’s. The thoughts still come, but they’ve changed shape. What preoccupies me now isn’t weight. It’s aging, the softening, the shifting, the slow accumulation of time on a face and a body I’ve spent so long fighting. And the strange thing is, I don’t mind it the way I expected to. The extra shape I carry now, I’ve made a kind of peace with it. Some days I even like it.
But peace isn’t the same as quiet. There is still a voice that wants to restrict, that wants to critique, that narrows its eyes at me in the mirror or in photos. I am working actively and every day to not let it run the room. To banish it from the kingdom entirely, if I can. Some days I manage it. Some days I don’t.
What helps, surprisingly, is eating. Not in spite of everything, but because of it. I have been trying to be present at meals, to actually think about what I’m putting in my body and what it’s doing there. That it is fuel. That it is nourishment. That eating is not a passive thing to get through or a problem to be managed but something worth savoring, worth slowing down for. The food on the table, the time we take, the way fullness feels when you let yourself feel it.
Because my body, like all bodies, is doing something extraordinary without ever being asked. It carries me. It shows up. It has carried me through pregnancies and grief and MDMA and Hoffman and every single ordinary day I have spent at war with it, and it never once stopped working on my behalf.
I am trying to earn that. I am trying to be worthy of it.
Thank you, body.
Thank you for reading I’m On An Antidepressant! If you enjoy my work (I love you), and want to show your support for the many hours I put in each week:
Post a like or comment or both (even better)
Share this post with someone who might be into it
And if you’d like to partner on an issue of I’m On An Antidepressant, email: jayme@andrepeat.co.