“Do I look man enough?”

As someone whose body falls outside the societal ideal, I have struggled to establish a positive body image. Skinny, lithe, and lean, my body might fit the mold of a long-distance runner, but one would hardly consider it stereotypically masculine. One might even say it’s feminine. And if there’s one thing men are taught to reject, it is femininity.

I have spent years painstakingly overanalyzing nutrition and exercise and appearance, trying to decipher whether my body was a body I wanted, a body I felt proud of. I’ve tried to balance my daily miles with my daily calorie intake, a strong lower body with a comparatively weaker upper body. My exercise accomplishments —hikes, long runs, marathons, personal records—can sometimes feel less valuable when I consider my frame.

While trying to make sense of my body, I’ve grappled with the rigid definitions of masculinity and femininity: what constitutes a “good” body versus a “bad” body? The construction of these illusive categories show deep-rooted problems in the way society understands health, gender, and individual expression.

In the United States, the ideal male body is muscular, athletic, formidable, and toned. I don’t have bulging or sculpted muscles. I’m not tall or broad-shouldered. And for so long I focused on how my body failed to meet standards instead of defining my own terms for body satisfaction.

My time at college is marked by small steps forward in my journey towards establishing healthy body image. It has involved coming to terms with the ways in which my body does not meet the dominant standards of masculinity. This progress is largely due to students and faculty initiating conversations and posing important questions about body image and campus culture at Boston College and other campuses across the country.

While exploring my body image, I have grappled with questions like:

“Do I look man enough?”

“Do I look masculine?”

“Do I have a good body?”

“What is a good body anyway?”

What I’ve come to value—and what has helped so much—is having space to explore these questions with others, whether in class, at a lecture, or in a friend’s living room. So many people are exploring these questions!

June was Men’s Health Month, and advocates across the country created space for discussing issues like preventive health and mental health. After long being solely cast as women’s health issues, body image and body satisfaction have become increasingly vital topics

in men’s health as well. For instance, during Love Your Body Week at Boston College, there is always an event that addresses issues of masculinity and body image.

This chiseled ideal of masculinity narrows the range of male bodies deemed acceptable, attractive, or desirable and casts an impossible mold for men and boys. If you deviate too far from that standard, you might just feel out of place. For example, restricting the ideal body to an impossible healthy and muscular standard has produced an unhealthy culture of workout supplements and bodybuilding. The body is often a source of concern and dissatisfaction, and this kind of scrutiny can have debilitating consequences for mental and physical health, as in Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Muscle Dysmorphic Disorder.

Stories about body image are necessary because they reveal the cracks in the impossible model of embodied masculinity. Even starting these conversations can be difficult because stereotypical masculinity dictates that we show unwavering confidence in the face of adversity, that we hide vulnerability. Instead of engaging honestly and critically, we keep quiet.

Against the odds, while in college, I began to embrace my own body and celebrate the remarkable and beautiful diversity of all bodies. At college, we’re encouraged to examine the way our bodies affect our relationships with friends, classmates, partners, mentors, and professional connections. What’s less talked about is how this obsession with idealized bodies affects our relationships with ourselves.

Taking part in the campus conversations about body image and learning to celebrate difference provided the momentum I needed to move forward.

I had many difficult days and experiences, like runs not intended to celebrate my body but to punish it, restrictive eating habits, and experimenting with protein supplements. But I’ve come to focus less on how my body looks, and more on what it can do. I might have a slight frame, but my accomplishments are sizeable. I’ve raced two marathons and run countless miles. I’ve hiked difficult trails, culminating in the most spectacular views. I’ve become an adventurous eater, and I’ve embraced food as nourishment and cooking as an opportunity for building connections with friends and family.

Taking a holistic approach to body image—realizing that I am more than my body as much as I am my body—has helped me recognize the value and worth of my own frame. Instead of focusing on the stereotypically masculine features I don’t have, I focus on what I do have: an agile body that supports my everyday activities, an efficient and powerful stride that powers my long distance running.

I’m only one man, but this body is man enough for me.

Christopher Kabacinski is a recent graduate of Boston College, where he studied English and medical humanities, co-founded the Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College, and led the public speaking and storytelling group Word of Mouth. Originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania, Chris now lives in Boston and works in global public health.

Each fall at Boston College, the Women’s Center hosts Love Your Body Week (LYBW), “a week of programming dedicated to promoting healthy body image on campus.” The Women’s Center, in collaboration with other organizations, aims to give students space to reflect on their relationships with their bodies. Inclusivity is a key feature of this week, as many of the events of consider how body image intersects with race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class. This year events ranged from lectures on body image and the media and panel discussions on colorism, to a performance of Eve Ensler’s Good Body andEmbodied Expression, a therapeutic painting session.

The week kicked off on Monday, November 9 with the opening reception for Embodied Stories, a photography exhibit by Ben Flythe, a student photographer. Flythe photographed students and their bodily identifiers—tattoos, scars, burns, skin color, and birthmarks, for example. Accompanying the portraits were quotations from interviews with the students, who discussed what their bodies mean to them. Although the portraits highlight the specificities of each body, the students never become just bodies: their identities shine through; the photographs celebrate the dynamic and complex ways identities align with body image. In his gallery talk, Flythe emphasized the diversity of the stories he captured. These individual stories, he noted, speak to our own stories of embodiment. We each have an embodied story, and putting our own stories into dialogue with the stories of others—those portraits, for instance—is to understand that we are all connected.

This year I was fortunate enough to have a small hand in LYBW, as I helped to bring two student speakers to the opening reception. Leading up to the event, Marwa Eltahir—a Women’s Center staffer and co-coordinator of LYBW—and I sat down with Erin Sutton and Justin Kresevic and heard their stories; we were struck by how their stories spoke to the goals of LYBW and the complexity of body image. My work with Health Story Collaborative prepared me well for this task, and I adapted the Healing Story Session guidelines and questions for the purposes of the event. What’s more important, however, is that Health Story Collaborative taught me how to listen, to be present as someone shares their story, to accompany them. What mattered most was letting them tell their stories that needed to be told.

At the reception to Embodied Stories, Erin told her story of living with bulimia and her difficult, continuing journey to recovery. She spoke to the difficulty of coming to love her body at Boston College, where body image and appearance issues so often go unnoticed, unsaid. She expressed her gratitude to the people who have supported her, and spoke to the daily challenges she faces in coming to love her own body. Justin spoke to the difficulty of being short, when masculinity is associated with being tall and muscular. This dissonance has affected his personal relationships, and he works everyday to accept his own body. Justin emphasized the need to work against the problematic ideals of men’s body images: masculinity is as individual as each of our bodies.

Erin and Justin challenged all of us in attendance to understand truly what Love Your Body Week means. Loving one’s body isn’t something to be taken for granted, to be considered easy. When so many images and ideals of bodily perfection and worth hold up problematic and impossible standards, coming to love one’s body is a challenging and harrowing experience. By sharing their own stories of embodiment and acknowledging their continuing journey towards loving their bodies, Erin and Justin asked us all to consider our own stories.

I am so grateful to have been a small part of LYBW and to have heard these stories. Erin’s and Justin’s stories, along with the stories of students photographed by Ben, speak to how important it is to talk about these issues and how valuable it is to enter into meaningful conversation with others. These stories have stayed with me, in my own process of coming to terms with my own body. Sharing stories, at the end of the day, is about building community, starting conversations, and realizing that none of us are alone, that our stories all matter. I look forward to hearing more stories, perhaps telling my own, and continuing the worthwhile conversations around body image happening both at Boston College and beyond campus.

Erin ended her talk with a powerful statement about our selves, our bodies, and our stories: We are all worth it.

In the weeks leading up to the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, social media was abuzz with disability stories. The National Museum of American History even organized an international Twitter conversation on #DisabilityStories on July 15, 2015. For the remarkably successful daylong event, people from across the globe engaged in conversations about representations of disability in art and popular culture, the lived experience of disability, and historical accounts and artifacts.

For people with disabilities and disability rights advocates, this anniversary occasions both celebration and reflection. Accessible spaces, biomedical technology, and assistive services have made the world a more habitable place for people with disabilities. At Boston College, where I attend school, student have rallied around the cause of disability, fighting for a campus as accessible as it is beautiful. The Disability Awareness Committee of Boston College has made accessibility a critical issue on campus, documenting the ways in which the built environment and institutional policies at Boston College—for instance, steep pathways marked as wheelchair accessible—disempower them.

Disability advocates in Boston marked the anniversary with a celebration in Boston Common.

The ADA has been a remarkable success, but we must not forget the work left to do. William Peace, who attended the event, perhaps sums it up best: “[The ADA] has succeeded legally, but socially it has a long way to go.”

Securing the civil rights of and equal opportunities for these citizens is, bottom line, an issue of representation. People with disabilities are daily disempowered and isolated by institutions and individuals that pass over, erase, or ignore the realities of disability. It happens when a conference is held in an inaccessible building. It happens when a path is marked as accessible but is, in fact, unnavigable. It happens when a vision resources workstation provides no resources, when the sign for the workstation isn’t even in braille.

People with disabilities are often invisible in some parts of everyday life, such as in the workplace. In 2012, only 33.5% of working-age people with disabilities were employed. In the media and popular culture, individuals with disabilities appear less often than able-bodied individuals. When they do appear, their portrayals are often limited.

The unflagging stigma and underrepresentation of disability halts the progress of the ADA. If people with disabilities continue to be forgotten or perceived in problematic ways, then the ADA will fail to achieve its ultimate goals of accessibility and inclusion.

Stories are the answer to this crisis of representation. Which stories get told and how those stories are circulated determine how disability is understood socially and culturally.

We need to move away from disability as burden and the “super-crip” stereotype. While these two overarching narratives seem compassionate or inspiring, they both portray disability as a tragedy, and life with a disability as inferior and unsatisfying.

Disability cannot be reduced to a single narrative of pity, overcoming, or empowerment. Disability, as with all lived experience, is complex, multi-faceted, rich, individual. It resists a single story.

As a society, we should listen more to the stories of individuals with disabilities. To the stories of their everyday life, of their successes and their struggles, the minutiae and the monumental moments. Disability is an innumerable range of stories—told, retold, to be told.

Telling stories of disability is vital to making visible and giving voice to individuals with disabilities. Hearing stories is a way of acknowledging the reality of disability and empowering people with disabilities. By acknowledging similarities, differences, and singularities, we connect ourselves with stories.

So let’s keep sharing #DisabilityStories beyond the 25th anniversary of the ADA. The success of the ADA is about more than ramps, web accessibility, or public services. It’s about making everyday life accessible, inclusive, and fulfilling to people with disabilities. It’s about changing our attitudes and assumptions toward disability once and for all.

What makes up the world, for me, is language. While the natural sciences contend that the world is made of matter—atoms, molecules, cells, genes, tissue, organs—I believe that language accounts for what happens between people. We don’t just pass down genes. We inherit the words we speak. We don’t just care for our own bodies. We care for our own stories.

I arrived at Boston College certain that I would study English and love it, but after a year of introductory English classes, I felt entirely uninspired. What was the matter? When it came to the stories, what mattered?

During sophomore year, something happened in my own story. I stumbled across a news article about a new interdisciplinary Medical Humanities minor. Medical humanities is a field devoted to the humanistic and cultural study of medicine, caregiving, illness, disability, and representations of the body; it values the interconnectedness and complexity of these issues, looking at them from different perspectives in order to better understand them. These topics have always been present in my life: my sister works in a lab, my twin is studying medical imaging, my mother is an EMG technician, my parents cared for aging and ill relatives and friends.

Could medical humanities synthesize my love for literature and my interest in caregiving and healthcare?

Sophomore fall, I attended a symposium at Boston College on Genetics, Narrative, and Identity. Contributors to The Story Within, a collection of essays on genetic diseases and the complex life-stories and decisions surrounding them, captivated me with their candor, strength, and insight. The day culminated in a writing workshop and keynote address given by Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D., who founded the field of narrative medicine. She made clear to me what it means to be present for another person, in sickness or in health.

I decided to enroll in an introductory medical humanities course. In the texts we studied and the conversations in which we engaged, the complexity and high stakes of the issues—genetic testing, public health, representing disability and disease—marveled me.

The most compelling text to me was Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. She writes: “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.” 1 Pain is that which cannot be put into words, cannot be represented; so specific, so individual, it falls outside of any system of communication. At the same time, pain is perhaps the most difficult thing for a listener to believe. If pain really did destroy language, dissolve the relationship between two people, what did this mean for me and my world of words?

But, more importantly, pain calls us to bridge the gap between individuals. Pain calls us to create something, to listen with empathy, to trust, to acknowledge the other, to bear witness. In sickness and in health, in pain and in pleasure, our words and our stories are what humanize us and connect us.

A friend of mine recently shared with me that she has been dealing with diabetes since she was two years old. She is one of the most driven, most involved students I know. I felt so fortunate and honored to hear her story and her insight. Her story and the conversations that followed strengthened our friendship.

In college, the stories of chronic illness or disability are so often untold and unheard. Built environments and institutional policies, sometimes established without consideration for those who have chronic illnesses or disabilities, can intensify these potentially isolating experiences. Laurie Edwards, a writing instructor at Northeastern University and a person with chronic illnesses herself, writes on the state of colleges for students with chronic illnesses or disabilities, shedding light onto the ways in which colleges fail these students.2 Students, faculty, and administrators should acknowledge these students and their individual needs. Making accommodations for these students and respecting their stories for these students will ensure that higher education remains accessible to all people—sick or well, disabled or able-bodied.

On a college campus, it is easy to assume that everyone is healthy, with crowds at the gyms and a vibrant and energetic student population. At the same time, illness is easily normalized. What college student hasn’t been exhausted? Who hasn’t caught a cold in a residence hall? We must heed narrative medicine’s call to honor the stories of health and illness in each individual, to acknowledge its specificity, and to listen with care and empathy. With this kind of attitude, we can perhaps see that the campus of the healthy and the campus of the ill are not different places: they’re the same.

Over the coming months, I will facilitate the sharing of stories about college students living with chronic illnesses or disability. Stay tuned for future features from me on these issues.

Christopher Kabacinski is a rising senior at Boston College, where he is studying English and Medical Humanities. He is a founder and the editor-in-chief of The Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College, a student-run journal featuring undergraduate work on issues such as medicine, health, illness, disability, bioethics, and representations of the body. Currently, Chris is working as intern at Health Story Collaborative. He is developing a project about college students with chronic illness or disability. If you or someone you know might be interested in sharing his or her story of health, illness, or disability, please contact Chris at healthstorycollaborative@gmail.com.

Resources:

1. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. Oxford University Press: New York, NY, 1985. Print. 4.

2. Edwards, Laurie. “When It Comes To Chronic Illness, College Campuses Have A Lot To Learn.” WBUR, Cognoscenti: Boston, MA. 5 March 2014. Web. Accessed 16 June 2015.