The Body as Public Property

I was 8 years old when I first learned that my body didn't belong to me.

It happened in the building where I grew up — two apartment blocks, shared courtyards, children everywhere. Boys singing in that particular way children sing when they want to wound: gorda, baleia, saco de areia. Fat, whale, sandbag.

I remember the anger more than the shame. Even then, at 8, I knew it was wrong. That a person's size was not an invitation. That my body was not a comment waiting to happen.

But knowing something is wrong and being protected from it are two very different things.

The body, I learned early, is public property.

Especially a woman's body. Especially a Brazilian woman's body. Especially mine.

It gets commented on at family gatherings. Measured at reunions. Evaluated in the silence between a hug and a hello. You know the look — the one that travels from your feet to your face before a single word is spoken. It says everything without saying anything.

And the cruelest part?

For years, the voice that judged me loudest wasn't theirs. It was mine.

I had learned the song so well I no longer needed anyone to sing it. The bully moved inside. And she knew exactly where I was most vulnerable.

I am 48 now. I take medication for bipolar disorder that can cause weight gain. My body is also navigating perimenopause. Two uninvited guests who arrived without asking and rearranged the furniture.

When I think about visiting Brazil — my mother, my godmother, my father, the people I love most in the world — I sometimes hear the imaginary sentences before they are spoken.

She's gained weight. Meu Deus, how different she looks.

Sentences that may never come. Sentences I have already said to myself, preemptively, just to get there first.

That is what decades of being watched does to a person. You become your own surveillance.

But here is what I also know.

I love swimming.

Not gracefully. Not performatively. I love it the way you love something that asks nothing of you except to be present.

Before I get in — the swimsuit, the poolside, the walk from the changing room — there is hesitation. Fear. The old shame rising like a reflex. The body bracing to be seen.

And then the water.

And inside the water, something extraordinary happens. I forget.

Not forever. Not completely. But for a while — suspended, moving, held — I forget to judge myself. The body becomes functional again. Alive. Mine.

The water doesn't care what I weigh. It just holds me.

I am learning, slowly and with more compassion than I used to have for myself, to be the water.

To hold myself without conditions. To stop being the boy in the courtyard. To stop rehearsing other people's cruelty before they have a chance to deliver it.

The trauma is real. The fear is real. The hesitation at the pool's edge is real.

But so is the freedom on the other side of it.

I have one question I wish we could all agree to retire.

Not "how are you?" — we already know that one is complicated.

But the other one. The one disguised as concern or surprise or affection:

"You've changed."

What if, instead, we arrived at each other and said:

"It's so good to see you."

And meant just that.

The body passes. What we lived in it — doesn't.