I expected to hate my body at ACL. I didn't.

Amid the cowboy boots and cutoffs, I found confidence, clarity, and women who weren’t hiding.

I went to the Austin City Limits Festival last weekend prepared to hate my body, but I didn’t.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but only slightly. I feel like many (most?) of us carry around this low-grade anxiety about how we will be perceived when stepping into new or unfamiliar situations. It’s often subtle, barely noticeable, but it’s there. And like it or not, how we look plays a big role in that.

Will we be judged for our size? Our age? Our clothes? How will we compare to others in the same setting? Will we measure up? Will we even register?

It’s natural to play the comparison game. It’s also natural to feel anxious in these moments. So natural, in fact, that many of us don’t even realize it’s happening, or maybe we’ve just accepted it’s all part of the deal.

When the noise gets louder

But then there are those moments when the buzz moves from background noise to center stage. This is often the case in spaces where skin is on full display.

I notice it more now, partly because I write about it, and partly because of where I’m at in my life. I stopped trying to shrink my body three years ago and gained enough weight to realize just how much thin privilege I’d been benefitting from all those years before when I thought my size 12 body was fat. That shift has made me far more aware of this anxiety than I ever was before. (And I should point out that my experience, as a white, cis, just-barely-plus-size woman, still comes with a lot of privilege.)

But I’ve also learned this anxiety often has little to do with our actual body and almost everything to do with how we perceive it. Is it thin enough, fit enough, young enough? The closer a body fits the cultural beauty norm, the less you’d think we worry, but that’s not the case.

Too fat for Paris

For example, my daughter and I were both worried about being “too big” for Paris ahead of a trip this past spring. After I wrote about it, I heard from many, many more people who felt the same way. The worry wasn’t just about being perceived as “ugly Americans,” but fat Americans.

But the thing that makes it especially messed up is that my daughter is straight-sized, and she was just as worried as I was. As a plus-size woman, my worry has a little more merit given the very real challenges of navigating packed cafes, sitting in tiny chairs (and hoping they hold me), and knowing if I needed to find clothing that fit, I’d be shit out of luck. The sad part is, my daughter didn’t have those same logistical fears but she was still worried.

What I’ve learned from experiences like these is that feeling worry, shame, or fear over how our bodies will be received is all but universal among Western women. It’s systemic, baked into the culture, no matter how much we want to paint it as an individual problem, and it has one goal: to keep us small.

We push back against it not by stuffing down the feelings, but by acknowledging them as a reality of living in a society that thrives on keeping us small, and, indeed, profits off our insecurities, and then by continuing to show up.

The story I keep telling

Of course, I wish I didn’t have the feelings. Sometimes I question what message it sends that I continue to write a variation of this same story, and that by writing about bodies I’m reinforcing the very standards I want to push back on.

But I also feel like the more I can name my own fears and worries, the more I speak or write about them, the more awareness I can bring to the universality of this. Not to wallow in it, but to loosen its grip. The more I can help others, and the more I can help myself.

In a way, the anticipation is a kind of protection. It helps steady me against the feelings I might encounter in the world. That was the case with ACL.

Showing up anyway

As a middle-aged woman in a sea of twenty-somethings, I went in expecting to feel a certain level of invisibility. As a larger woman, even more so.

And I’m not mad at it. I know some women struggle with the loss of visibility that comes with aging, but I’m not one of them. And I’m not invisible in all environments, or even most of them. Because of my show-stopping silvers, which were revealed a few years ago when I ditched the hair dye, I draw more attention now than I did in my younger years.

But there is a certain kind of liberation that comes with being able to walk through a crowd and draw no attention. I’m no longer beholden to the same pressures to conform that I felt at 20, 30, or even 40, for that matter. In many ways, it means I’m free to be... me.

And so, even though I still have moments when I feel insecure in my body, I also know it’s the larger cultural forces pulling the strings. Diet culture wants women to feel small and stay quiet. One of my forms of protest is to resist shrinking, not by hiding, but by drawing attention: with bright colors, big patterns, bold silvers.

The unexpected at ACL

Heading into ACL Fest, I expected to be comparing myself against all these other women and feeling like I was somehow deficient. But that didn’t happen.

Yes, there were lots of thin bodies, but there were fat bodies too—a spectrum of bodies, some of which looked like mine. I had braced myself to be the outlier, the “big exception” surrounded by the parade of crop tops and cutoff denim. But there was far more body diversity than I expected.

And it wasn’t just that the diversity existed, it was how it showed up. Women of all shapes and sizes were dressed with confidence. They weren’t hiding. They were fully leaning into the unofficial festival uniform: body-hugging western vests (both in denim and leather!) paired with mini skirts, cutoffs, or sometimes bloomers (still not sure how that became a thing), and full-length cowboy boots.

It was less country chic and more Western ho, and I was there for it. People-watching is always one of the best parts of attending ACL Fest, and this year, it was more exciting than the lineup.

Yes, I know a lot of it was performative. Practically every woman under 40 got the memo about the unofficial Western uniform and didn’t at all seem bothered about wearing full makeup, fully done hair, and full-length cowboy boots in the heat, which topped out daily at 95 degrees. (As that “invisible” woman, I felt no such pressure. My goal was to stay as cool as possible.)

Was there insecurity under all the makeup and leather? Almost certainly. But what struck me most was that these women, particularly the younger ones, seemed at peace with their bodies, at least in public. And that’s no small thing.

Midlife peer pressure

Because it’s easy to get lost in the body image noise and the creeping pressure to be thinner. In the last two weeks alone, I’ve had two separate conversations with women my age, neither of whom are overweight, wondering if they should be on a GLP-1. Not because they’re unhealthy, but because they feel like everyone around them is doing it.

To be clear, this isn’t a judgment of anyone who uses a GLP-1. My concern is about the way they’re being marketed and how quickly they’ve become the new normal for women who may not even need them.

This is the new peer pressure. It comes in the form of prescriptions and influencers pushing products to manage all the unwanted side effects. It’s seductive, especially for those of us in midlife. We’ve spent decades being told we could have it all … if we just kept ourselves small.

Now, suddenly, there’s a shortcut. A magic shot. And once again, we’re made to feel like we should be fixing something that was never broken.

A new kind of rebellion?

So it was refreshing to see the younger generations seemingly not giving a flip.

As a mother to two daughters of this generation, I know they’re not immune to pressures around body image, size, and appearance. In many ways, they face way more intense pressure than my generation ever did.

But seeing so many of them embracing their bodies in real life felt like liberation. Not because they’re unaffected, but because they’re pushing back. Or maybe they just can’t afford Ozempic yet.

I’m not naive enough to think that one music festival, where women of all sizes unabashedly bared their bodies, means we’re winning the war on diet culture.

But it still says something.

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Let me know what you think…

Do you carry low-level anxiety when showing up in new spaces? How do you combat it? Has aging made you feel more grounded and free, or something else entirely?