I am Gen X…
Barbie, Decapitation, and the Head Games. We Survived them all
I didn’t learn body shame from Barbie. I learned consequences. That plastic queen taught me that once the head comes off, the party is over. No amount of apologizing, not even the solemn ritual of shoving the neck post back into the tiny torso, will fix it. You can’t sweet-talk a decapitation. It’s final in a way that nine-year-olds and grown adults both understand in their bones. There’s a wisdom in that: some things you can’t unsay, unsee, or un-do to a body—yours or anyone else’s.
I grew up Gen X on the sunburned side of the world, where “thongs” were shoes and self-worth was a sport. Then at twenty-one I landed in the United States with an accent, a suitcase, and the blinding hope that new geography could solve old feelings. America was loud in the ways I loved—music, ambition, truck-stop snacks—and louder in the ways I didn’t—magazines counting your calories like crime scenes, strangers discussing women’s bodies like weather. Back home we had our own mess, but here the mess had a marketing budget. The 90s sold us “heroin chic” and a hundred ab gadgets that looked like medieval equipment disguised as fitness. If you were a young woman, your body was a project you were supposed to constantly be renovating, even if you already lived inside it full time.
Through all of that, Barbie never made me hate myself. The adults did that just fine. The billboards did their bit. So did the offhand comments—“You’d be perfect if you just…” If a compliment requires a condition, it’s not a compliment. It’s an invoice. And paying it never buys you the feeling you wanted. It buys you the next invoice.
What Barbie did do was become my first crash-test dummy for reality. You pull too hard, the head pops off, and now you have a head in one hand and a silence in the other. No lecture, just physics: you can’t reattach what you violently removed. Which brings me to the head games—the small manipulations, the slow drains, the way culture asks us to abandon our minds so our bodies will fit a frame. That’s the real decapitation. The split between the head that knows and the body that keeps trying to be liked.
I remember arriving here and realizing how much of womanhood was a performance with lighting cues. The low-rise jeans era: a brilliant time to be twenty-one and an absolute horror for anyone with organs. We wore them anyway because the room applauded. We learned to smile through hunger, to call it “discipline.” We learned to accept the compliment that was really an audit. We got very good at shrinking. If you have to fold yourself into origami to be loved, that isn’t love. That’s craft hour.
But here’s the thing I learned somewhere between Australia and America, magazines and mirrors, twenties and fifties: your body isn’t an apology letter, and your mind isn’t a detachable accessory. When you separate them—when you agree to the head games—you lose something you don’t easily get back. You can heal, yes. You can stitch and tend and grow better than before. But you can’t return to the innocent connection you had before the cut. That’s not bleak; that’s holy. The scar is proof you stopped the blade.
Gen X raised itself on latchkeys, mixtapes, and sarcasm. We were the “be cool” generation, allergic to sincerity until sincerity was the only thing that actually worked. Somewhere along the way, I stopped negotiating with mirrors. I started asking different questions: Did I move my body because I love it, or did I punish it because I was told to? Did I eat to live and to enjoy, or did I feed my shame? Did I sleep because my mind needed repair, or did I scroll because my anxiety needed a babysitter? The answers changed me in ways 1,200 sit-ups never did.
Humor helped. I learned to laugh at the performance: the way a store will sell you empowerment for $89.99; the way a fitness trend will promise you a new life if you just ignore the life you already have; the way someone will call you “brave” for eating cake in public like it’s a high-risk sport. I also learned to draw boundaries that don’t need explanation. I don’t explain my hunger. I don’t explain my soft. I don’t explain my joy. I don’t explain my no. Boundaries are how you keep the head on before anyone yanks.
And yes, people play games with your head. Some do it with charm, some with silence, some with rules they keep rewriting. I’ve stayed too long in rooms that made me feel smaller because I thought leaving made me rude. It doesn’t. Leaving when you’re being carved up is the healthiest thing a person can do. You can forgive a wound without inviting the knife to dinner again. You can keep your compassion and your distance. There is no trophy for standing still while someone unscrews you.
Body image today feels less like a mirror and more like a reunion. I don’t want a truce with my body; I want a partnership. I moved across an ocean at twenty-one and across a lifetime since, and the most radical thing I’ve done is practice staying inside myself when the world tries to evict me. I feed the body I live in. I move it because motion is joy. I rest because I’m not a machine. I dress for weather and for mischief. I refuse to outsource my self-worth to public opinion, algorithms, or an ex who still thinks “you’d be perfect if you just…”
The older I get, the more I trust the signals that don’t lie: the sleep that makes my moods kinder, the food that doesn’t pick fights with my gut, the movement that whispers yes instead of shouting more. The mind is clear when the body is respected. The body is brave when the mind is kind. That’s the reunion ceremony—no confetti, just quiet truth. When I catch a glimpse of myself and feel nothing dramatic, that’s peace. Not ecstasy, not dread. Just, “Oh hi, we’re still here.” That’s wealth.
Maybe Barbie’s greatest gift wasn’t her waistline or her dream house. Maybe it was her unintentional parable: don’t separate what belongs together. Don’t be so rough with yourself that you lose your head. Don’t be so gentle with someone else’s chaos that they take yours off. You get one body, one mind, one life. When they’re attached, you can do just about anything—raise kids, cross a country on blistered feet, rebuild after losses you thought would swallow you, fall in love without disappearing.
So here’s my Gen X toast, raised with a bottle of electrolytes and a square of chocolate: to the bodies that carried us when we were unkind to them, to the minds that kept the light on when the world went dark, to the scars that refuse to be secrets, and to the quiet decision—made again and again—to keep our heads firmly where they belong. Not for pretty. For power. For presence. For a life that feels like ours.