Enough
By Lindsay Fauver
@lindsayfauver
I was eight or nine when I first learned my body could be wrong. It was a beautiful evening at summer camp, and I sat with a friend on a massive rock by the lake. The sun was setting, and gentle waves lapped at our feet as we dangled our toes in the warm water. Looking down, we noticed how our thighs spread out inside our short shorts. Wide-eyed, we lifted our legs and compared how they looked in the air versus lying against the rock. We had heard a counselor say, “Quads are your strongest muscles,” but we weren’t measuring muscles. "I think yours are mostly fat," my friend said with a giggle before she jumped in the lake. I laughed and followed. But later, I sat criss-cross applesauce on the sheets of my bunk and tried to figure out how to fold myself smaller.
***
As a newlywed living in our college town, I despised the sense of loneliness I felt. My husband was working 12 hours a day, six days a week as a BMW salesman—his dream job—but it was slowly depleting our marriage. To fill the growing emptiness, I took on three jobs: campus admissions by day, college ministry in the evenings, and drive-thru Chick-fil-A team member on the weekends. We didn’t have two nickels to rub together, but I got a free meal with every shift. I ate God’s chicken sitting on milk crates in the back, a whiff of fryer oil in my hair, and my body slowly softened with each week.
I still remember the thrifted pants—three sizes up from normal—that I had to shimmy, pull, and pray over. My body didn’t feel like mine anymore. It felt stretched and foreign. I was growing from absence—from fast food and a slow ache, from loneliness that took up so much space inside me. There was nowhere left for joy to expand.
***
I first learned about Whole30 on Instagram when I saw a picture of a thin woman smiling inside jeans so big they seemed to swallow her. She held out the waistband as if it were a trophy, having lost thirty pounds in thirty days. Inspired by the idea of change, I thought, I can do anything for thirty days.
After a cruise with my husband’s parents—where we ate our weight in ice cream at the slightest whim, where indulgence was the language of connection—I came home heavy. Not just with food, but with the repulsion of having no limits. So I committed. I would relearn food. I ate cashews, salmon, red peppers, and endless eggs. I said no to bread and sugar. I said yes to control.
When I zipped up those jeans five sizes down, I was literally disappearing. But for the first time in a long while, I was also showing up. People noticed. Complimented me. Admired the work. The smaller I became, the more visible I felt.
***
When I gave birth to my daughter, everything changed again. My body became something else entirely—swollen, stretched, leaking, raw. I had never been so full. Of life, yes, but also of pressure, of expectation, of fear. My skin could barely hold it all.
No one tells you how much disappearing happens after a birth—how your body is still full but no longer sacred.
My soft stomach was nothing compared to my hip pain. Something was off—not just sore, but wrong. Walking hurt. Lying down didn’t help. Yet, I was told it was normal. Everything’s normal postpartum, even when it’s not.
The small prolapse from my unmedicated labor was dismissed as "scar tissue." I remember blinking through tears at the OB’s kind-but-tired face, nodding as if her words made any sense, even as my body said otherwise.
I went home and cried in the shower, trying to swallow the sting and force myself to surrender. I gave up asking questions. I stopped expecting help. Instead, I shrank into the pain as it swelled, accepting it as a part of me I needed to carry alone.
There’s no medal for healing without help, but I wore my suppression like one. You don’t ask for attention when you’ve already learned how to disappear. You just keep moving. You grit your teeth and call it resilience.
***
Five weeks after my baby was born, I returned to photographing weddings. My husband brought the baby to the hotel, so I could nurse her on breaks. Holding her was precious—like stealing light in a long day.
When I returned to the dance floor, the mother of the bride pulled me aside. “You don’t even look like you had a baby!” she said, all kindness and admiration.
I remember sensing a strange mix of pride and sorrow—because, of course, I had a baby. I was leaking and bleeding and aching and alive with love. Why was invisibility the compliment?
***
Time moved forward, and then my breasts were the first to swell with our second pregnancy. I can still feel the tightness of my bra as I picked out a forgiving dress for a friend’s fall festival. We snapped a picture that day—me, holding our daughter on my aching hip, standing beside my husband, carrying the secret of our little one. I was radiantly happy, despite the pain.
I loved everything about that picture—except my round face. So I ran it through a shrinking filter before posting it on Instagram. I smoothed the jawline, and slimmed the cheeks just a little.
It’s the only picture I have with the four of us in it—before we lost the baby.
I despise that filter now.
Why did I choose to erase one of my most expansive moments?
Maybe because I’d been practicing for years—shrinking my body in bunk beds and dressing rooms, folding myself into silence, apologizing for taking up space—in photos, in rooms, in life.
And yet, all the while, I was swelling with grief, with joy, with anger, with life. With everything no one else would name. I used to think I was failing when I grew. Now I know better:
I was becoming.
This body has belonged to a girl, a bride, a mother. It has disappeared and returned. It has held hunger and held babies—and still, it holds.
I don’t want to disappear anymore.
Let the picture stay unedited. Let the face stay full. Let the moment stay whole.
Let me stay, too.
***
A friend recently confided in me how hard it’s been to watch her body change after moving to a new city, marrying into a family with four almost-grown boys, and sharing custody with her husband’s ex.
“It’s hard to see the stress I’ve carried show up on my face,” she said.
Of course it is, I thought. Maybe some of her softness has come from what she’s held—the weight of transition, of loving a family that came with history.
But I see radiance, too—a woman deeply loved, fiercely rooted, living a story she’s still writing.
I photographed her last month. The portraits were honest and luminous—unguarded, strong, unmistakably her.
No filters. Just the fullness of a life completely lived.
***
I’ve been going to the gym lately, lifting heavy weights and training to achieve my first pull-up. I want to be strong enough to fully embrace a life I love: water skiing with my daughter, hiking with my son, and playing pickleball with my husband.
The other day, I pulled a floral button-up dress over my head. I hadn’t worn it in a while, and my biceps wouldn’t fit into the sleeves.
I laughed.
I was swollen with strength.
***
I used to think my body was a problem to solve—a shape to manage, a signal of how well I was holding everything together.
But now I see things differently.
This body has held so much: children, grief, hunger, hope. It has carried me through loneliness and love, through leaving and loss. It has swelled with life and softened with sorrow.
I no longer measure its worth by how little space it takes up. I no longer fold myself into silence.
I will be here—full, present, whole.
And that’s enough.
Guest essay written by Lindsay Fauver. Lindsay is a photographer and writer from Richmond, Virginia. A city girl with a coastal heart, she believes creating beauty is an act of defiance, a reminder that hope is real and darkness doesn’t get the final word. She loves salads with fries, sneakers with dresses, and sourdough slathered with butter.