phd preparation diaries: academia and body image

discipline, catherine of siena, and real butter

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Quick note: This essay discusses body image and disordered eating. It doesn’t contain any photos other than the above one of my desk or any numbers (weights, BMIs, calories, quantities of food) and I have tried to keep the discussion productive. All the same, this might not be a topic you benefit from reading about and I’d encourage you to not read it if you don’t think this is what you need today.

When I dreamed up the PhD preparation diaries series, this was one of the first essays I thought about writing. I kept not doing it, though, and I questioned whether it would be useful to me or anyone else. Just because I think about academia all the time, and I think about body image all the time, doesn’t mean the two things are linked in a way anyone else would find meaningful. I kept nearly starting to write it then thinking I was being silly.

But I kept finding myself drafting sections in my head when I couldn’t sleep. So I’m not sure if this is relevant to anyone, but I’ve got to write it so I can sleep better. Perhaps academia and body image being the two things I think about most is enough reason to link them.

Every time I’ve received any news related to my grad school career, I’ve thought about the academia of it all for a couple of seconds before my brain goes back to my body. My favourite thing to think about is the Middle Ages, medievalism and theory of horror and my least favourite thing to think about is my body existing in the world. Grad school has done a lot of good things for me beyond this, but one particular benefit is that it creates something to fill my thoughts beyond looking at my reflection in shop windows.

Give me any academia news and I’ll run right home to obsessing over my body. I’m speaking at one of the biggest medieval studies conferences in the world this summer, and it’s a really impressive achievement to get in before even starting my PhD, but I wish I could go to the lectern in a comedy ghost costume made of a sheet so no one could see me. In January I found out I’d got in to my dream PhD programme, starting on the first of October this year. My immediate reaction was, ‘I’ve got ten months to look like a real PhD student’. I feel, often, like I’d be a more believable, authoritative, meaningful and promising academic if I looked better. Being older than average, being a part time student, being someone who studies around a full time job — all these things feel like the could be forgivable if I walked into rooms and people thought, ‘that’s what a shining star of academia looks like’.

It’s no coincidence that the place I’m most comfortable writing right now is here on Substack, where no one knows what I look like. If at any point during this essay you’re tempted to imagine me, dear readers, please picture stock images of spinach. It’s how I want to be remembered.

Part of this, I’m sure, is the fact that women in the twenty-first century in all situations are encouraged to hate their appearances, and to want to divert time and resources into achieving being smaller rather than anything more meaningful. Viewed that way, wanting to be thin in academia is no different from wanting to be thin in advertising, thin in government, thin in welding, thin in forest management. I’m vulnerable to the same things everyone else is vulnerable to and a PhD in medieval studies is where I am when I feel it.

I have a history of weirdness in this arena — from eating worryingly nothing as a teenager, to eating worryingly everything in my early twenties. I’ve been a lot of dress sizes. I’ve spent a lot of money on jeans. I’ve tried to exercise and had to stop because I was crying too much, over and over again. I’ve spent years only able to work out in my living room with all the blinds closed. I’m strange about scheduling food, sharing it, being spontaneous about it. I’m picky, I eat at odd hours and have craving that overwhelm me. I dislike people knowing what I’m eating.

I think there’s something particular in the way obsession with thinness manifests in academia, though.

I copied a passage from a book I read about life in the university research/admissions ecosystem into my commonplace book. The book was The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays by Irena Smith. She says:

Now I had grown big with child and become exiled forever, it seemed, from the ranks of literary and literate anorexics to which I desperately wanted to belong. My dissertation supervisor was severely chic and rail thin and had no children; so was Ruth Yeazell, who taught the Virginia Woolf seminar. A life of the mind, it seemed, was not compatible with the life of the body.

This passage got me thinking about the ranks of female medieval figures for whom spirituality, meaning and cleverness were inherently linked to denying the body. I think of Catherine of Siena vomiting up a single bean, unable to accept nourishment from anything other than Holy Communion, and Margery Kempe wailing at dining tables when asked to stop fasting, and Julian of Norwich lying in spacy repose on her deathbed, too sick to eat. Figures like these are some of the most popular in medieval studies and I’ve known a lot of young female medievalists attracted to starving and suffering saints. Everyone wants to sit up very late reading Holy Feast and Holy Fast, and then realise they just happened to skip dinner.

Outside my period but part of the same literary continuum as those writers, we have that one Joan Didion image Substack loves to make me look at, with her bony, bony wrists. I don’t even need to google it to describe it here because I see it ten times a day in people’s essay headers. I’ve memorised her cigarette, her thin fingers, her severe expression. I just spent a weird couple of minutes twisting my wrist round holding a pen trying to achieve the same contours. Guess I don’t have the tendons for it.

There’s something about their ascetic denial, their beating down of the physical body, becoming small and hyper-focused, like a keening arctic wind, that attracts people. When I think about the aestheticised, romanticised version of who I want to be able to be, it’s someone with such intense discipline that I don’t notice being hungry, someone whose only appetite is for learning more dead languages.

I’ve often wished I could be so big-brained I had no body at all. But my body doesn’t like being ignored and it asserts its presence too loudly for me to ignore it.

At Oxford, I had conversations over and over again that circled around the theme of how big and clever it was to be a complete stranger to your body. ‘I worked till 5am last night; I didn’t even realise I hadn’t had dinner; my tutor keeps telling me to get fresh air but I don’t do it’. I felt chaotic, smelly, greasy and undisciplined compared to the clean, poised, effortless girls/women/beings who managed everything I couldn’t. There’s a cast in my head of all the girls/women/beings who I’ve known and idolised from school to now — invariably straight A students who never forgot a book or missed a deadline, ran before breakfast, dotted yogurt bowls with blueberries, took on more work than I could manage. They made me feel like Pigpen from Peanuts standing next to Naomi Campbell. One time one of them said to me, casually and with no idea it could be signfiicant, ‘I could just never eat more than [such and such] calories in one meal’. Now I think of her every time I do that, which is regularly. I did it yesterday.

What do I do with all this, then? It’s not a realistic solution for me to stand on a major conference stage wearing a ghost costume. Probably.

Generally, I don’t like to get these feelings out and look at them, or show them to people. I question how much it benefits me or the people listening. If I get deep with a friend about all this, I end the conversation feeling the same about myself as when we started. That’s hours we’ll never get back when we could have been talking about Bridgerton. I also hate talking about my dislike and distrust of my body in front of others. I don’t want my friends to spend a day marinating in cruel sentences about bodies being bad. I don’t want people my size, or larger, or smaller, or similar but not quite, to hear the kinds of sentences I think about myself and I don’t think it’s a kind or interesting mindset to be comparing, measuring and obsessing over body parts.

The only part of this that I think could be useful or productive is the idea that I want to be part of cultivating a different vision for what a beautiful life in this kind of world is. I’m not sure if I’m ever even aiming to love my body, but I am aiming to enjoy my work and the days I spend alive on this planet. Being this focused on my appearance is really, really boring. It makes me less clever than I could have been. I could have been having better thoughts about the Middle Ages if I’d clawed back some of the time I spent examining my waistline in the office bathrooom mirror. I might be more than two installments into my Gawain translation series if I’d repurposed some of those lost hours.

One of the reasons I’m grateful to be starting my PhD age twenty nine rather than younger is that, even though I still experience these thoughts, I’ve gained enough perspective to at least attempt to attack them with hammers rather than unquestioningly accept them. I don’t want to be someone who thinks like this. I don’t think the sort of person giving into it would turn me into would be productive, or kind, or interesting, or funny. My immune system isn’t fantastic at the best of times and I’d hate to get sick more, do less work, see less life, have fewer plans, due to not taking care of myself.

Doing a PhD part time around work, budget stress and other obligations means I’ll have enough discipline and control in my life before I add more optional extra discipline on top of it.

Getting older, I’ve got better at imagining. I don’t find suffering for the sake of it as beautiful as I did when I was seventeen. I want to at least try to imagine myself effortless and glowing because my needs are met rather than because I don’t have any needs. I might be a medievalist but I’m pretty happy, ultimately, to live in a different era of bodily thinking from Catherine and Margery, where I don’t need to be starved and beaten to be clever.

The planner where all my life takes form is the blue notebook covered in stickers in the header image of this essay. I bought the ‘Butter: Live Deliciously’ sticker because I’d been typing folk horror movies into Redbubble til I found designs I liked. I only bought it as a reference to The Witch. But I’ve come to love it, more and more with time, as a statement that I’m going into my PhD with a sticker on the book I look at most that announces my affinity and loyalty with butter, real butter, full fat farm to table actual dairy cholesterol-containing butter.

There isn’t much luxury and dignity in doing a PhD in a niche corner of the humanities today. So it feels important to offer myself the luxury and the dignity of being warm enough, well nourished, having fresh air, smoothies, pastries, the pleasant muscle aches of having done a run in the sun. It’s taken me a long time to grope towards knowing bodily comfort isn’t the enemy of being clever. Life is hard enough on its own. It makes me think of Audre Lorde’s original, often forgotten or passed over, writing about self care:

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

I’d be deluding myself if I thought my PhD in medieval aesthetics, soil and horror movies was what Lorde had in mind when she wrote this. Her goals, clearly, were larger and deeper, more liberatory for more people, and the circumstances she encouraged (Black) people to preserve themselves through were more profound than me getting a degree. I don’t think applying her words to a wide range of circumstances has to dilute them, though. There’s something a bit important in trying to preserve yourself enough to get through a PhD in an underfunded subject, to keep body and soul together while you create research you think people need to read, to be part of keeping medieval studies from going on the scrap heap of history.

I do think there’s something powerful in doing a PhD in a subject like this not just with grim determination, wasted cheekbones and black coffee, but with some joy and abundance, and love of life, and real butter.