“After many years of dissociating from my body, I now feel like this body exists, this body can do things, and it’s acceptable to have this body.”
[image description: (Image 1, above) - an image of a young woman standing on a rock at the top of an Icelandic fjord. Her back faces the camera and she is without clothes. She has long curly hair that blows in the wind and several tattoos cover her body. In the distance, the summer solstice is occurring and the sky is filled with colors: orange, purple, pink and yellow. The golden light from the sun is lighting up her whole body as she stares off into the distance.] ~Photography: Laura E. Swanson
Becca, 28 - Michigan —> Iceland
Becca often finds it challenging to reconcile societal expectations with her lived experience, sometimes feeling like she has fallen between competing ideas. She was raised in a loving and stable household, but as an adopted child, she doesn’t look anything like her family. Noticing those differences growing up created feelings of alienation and inadequacy, exacerbated by her exposure to a culture of sex-negativity and a traumatic experience with childhood sexual assault. As a result, she disassociated from herself and began to feel trapped in a body that she believed was somehow wrong and could do nothing to protect her.
Sexual assault can drastically impact how survivors relate to their bodies; some feel detached, some become hyper-aware of their appearance, some gain or lose weight and try to wear baggy clothes to hide their bodies. Some survivors become hyper-sexual while others shut out sex entirely, like Becca.
Becca chose to channel all of her energy towards pursuing a career as an astrophysicist. Her career led her to a graduate program in Iceland, where she almost immediately sensed dramatic shifts in her worldview. She began to notice differences in the ways people highlight, discuss, and relate to bodies. Society in Iceland felt less shameful and more human, so she decided to reconnect with her body on neutral ground.
Becca’s story serves as anecdotal support for a more profound commentary on toxic purity culture -a movement that pretends to hold bodies as sacred spaces but instead ultimately champions sex-negativity, shame, and rape culture. This idea, framed within a society that commodifies bodies for profit, communicated to Becca that her body didn’t meet the requirements to be useful or even fully human.
But because Becca had the privilege of experiencing a culture so different from her home, she began to understand how she, too, could accept and appreciate her body. So now, she is working on understanding her worth through a different lens, one shaped not only by trauma and purity culture but by lived experience, travel, and a new worldview.
Share Becca’s Story
#SeeBodiesDifferently #MidwestBrokenMirror
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