Maisie Peters exclusive essay: 'I cant stop thinking that is a better body, body better than mine

Singer-songwriter Maisie Peters, 22, has written a beautiful, poignant essay exclusively for GLAMOUR about the break-up and punishing comparison to her ex's new partner that inspired her latest song, “Body Better”.

“I can’t stop thinking that is a better body, body better than mine”

Something I wrote on my iPhone notes, late at night when the most spidery of thoughts come to me. I had gone through a breakup of sorts a few months before, when I’d felt a great deal for someone who I thought felt the same for me. In a tale as old as time, he sadly did not.

There’s nothing like heartbreak to make you magnify yourself with the most poisonous of lenses - insecurities you’ve always had swell up tenfold in the darkness, and you find yourself desperately unpicking every thread of your being. What your body looks like in the dark, in the light; how it underperforms in all the ways you're taught really matter. I’m an obsessive person by nature perhaps, and I wrote a lyric once in a song I never used that I often think back to - ‘I’m the type that once you get her, you get her forever’. I’m slow in and to love; however once and if I decide on you, you are permanently lodged in my heart, and as a result I have a few thorns that I like to pull and poke and prod over and over again. Eventually, over time, the pain gets lesser and my attachment to them gets smaller, until it's only the smallest ache that I can choose whether or not to pull and bring back. So with that in mind, when I went through this heartbreak (conveniently also when I was trying to write a second album), there was one thorn I kept pulling, over and over and over again.

“Body Better” is a song that came out of that thorn. Watching someone you love love someone else is not a recommended experience, and on this specific occasion I found myself unable to get past it. It drove me crazy, this knowledge that I’d had something (I thought) so good, and that not only had I lost it so suddenly, so without warning - someone else had got it now, someone else was living the life I’d lived only a few months before. Being able to see that play out, over a screen on social media when you’re a thousand miles away, does strange things to a heart and mind that is already stretched to its limit, constantly - as I was - in lonely hotel rooms in cities, with nothing better to do than think, think, think, think, think. 

I really want to make it clear that I never felt any sort of anger or hatred towards her (the new woman in his life); she was sort of just like a bat that I could use to beat myself with - everything I felt insecure about, all the reasons I could imagine that he had decided he didn’t want me, I now had a perfect example of someone who I could tell myself was the opposite. She was right, and I was wrong, and it had been proved. It is irrational and embarrassing and honestly a little uncomfortable to share, but it is also honest, and there is always merit in honesty. 

I think existing in a public space since the age of fifteen has no doubt warped the way I see myself, and as much as I so firmly believe that your body is the least interesting thing about you, as a young woman in an industry so concerned with youth, image, and desirability, it’s been hard not to constantly fix that lens on myself. I really want to implore anyone reading this that you are more than the body you exist in, but whilst I absolutely know that, I also believe that music is an art form for expressing all thoughts, even the ugliest, most flawed ones.

So I wrote this song, about vulnerability and how it stings when it's used against you - about my relationship with my body. And I wrote it without thinking anyone would ever hear it, because that’s how all the most candid songs are written. Now it is being heard, and it feels very strange - kind of like sending that bitter and twisted text you drafted at 3am one night, to someone who is now more of a stranger than anything else. It was healing to write it, and I hope it’s healing to hear it - honesty is difficult, but worthwhile, and I hope this song shows that.

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