Archive for March, 2010
Yeah, you’ve heard that line before. It’s the title of a great John Mayer song. It’s also the title of my post. Deal.
So as I decided, or am at least slowly coming to realize, maybe what*I* see in myself in regards to all this fatness and these weight issues is not what the rest of the world is seeing. (read up on I See You See Me…Or Do I?)
I teach middle school kids from different countries. Mostly Somalia, though I do have a smattering of kids from other locales. I’ve been working with these kids for almost 17 years now, and very rarely have I ever thought of a kid in terms of their culture. I’ve never been angry with a kid because they speak a different language, wear different clothes or have different religious customs. I’ve been angry because the kid behaves like a jerk. I also work with regular American kids and I don’t find myself mentally judging them on the basis of their clothes, their grasp on language or their family life. Now, I might look at a 250 pound 6th grader who waddles down the hallway and worry about how she’s going to get picked on and bullied when she’s older, or what kind of health issues she’s going to have before she even gets to high school, but I don’t judge the quality of her character based on her outward appearances. In my job, I can’t do that. I mean it when I say I love people, regardless of where they came from and what they look like. I see religion, ethnicity and language tear down people, cause wars and continue to create hatred all over the world, and I don’t want to be associated with that. People are people when you strip it down.
The problem comes in applying this fundamental belief–that people are people regardless of their external appearances–to myself. Thinking back to this post’s title, I don’t trust myself with loving (other people’s opinion of me). It’s like this: because I’m fat, I can’t let myself believe that other people are capable of seeing through the fat to see the real me. Why? Because, often times, I can’t–therefore who else can?
I’ll be honest here: I hate compliments. I always have. Secretly, I love them, because I don’t hear them often, so I tend to relish them and replay them over and over, like my first radio-created cassette tape back in the early 80s (Tainted Love, anyone?). What I hate about them is the shock they create to my system, the jarring impact they have upon my brain. My brain tells me that I’m not supposed to be good at anything, or look nice, or have anything worth positively commenting on because I’m overweight. I’m not a good wife, I’m not a good mother, I’m not a good person because my jeans are size 16 and they should be an 8. I can’t possibly look nice in this shirt/sweater/dress because fat people don’t “look good”–they are lazy, no good gluttons without self-control. And who’s gonna really like someone like that?
Then I get a compliment and it sends me all out of whack. Until about the last two years, my immediate–and I mean IMMEDIATE–response to a compliment was to degrade it. Say something nice about my clothes and the standard reply is “Oh, it was the only clean thing in my closet.” Give me kudos for a job I did and it’s “Oh, geez. Even a monkey could do that.” Don’t even think about noticing my hair or lipstick or anything even closely personal, because my reaction becomes personal. “Really? You need glasses.”
I’ve always been this way–unable to accept even the simplest compliment. I remember years ago, someone commenting something about me, my smart-ass retort and mom being horrified at my reply. “Why can’t you just say thanks,” she’d hissed in my ear, my comment obviously embarrassing her by virtue of being her ungrateful daughter. I’ve had friends tell me the same after commenting positively on something. One friend got snippy with me: “Why don’t you just say thanks and shut the hell up?” Another replied that since I didn’t take his compliment, I was commenting on his lack of taste, which he did not find funny.
I have learned, since then, to at least superficially accept the compliment. Now, most times, I just quietly mumble, “thanks” and move on with my day. I may be able to accept kind words more graciously but that doesn’t mean I must (or can, or will) believe them. And this is what’s bothering me most: why can I not trust my own friends to make the same type of unbiased observations–based on the real me, not just the fat me–about me that I make with them? I’m friends with them because they offer me something I need in my life: a sense of humor, a listening ear, unconditional love and friendship…yet I don’t trust them to make a sound decision when complimenting me?
Maybe this fat thing has me more screwed up than I originally thought…
I know, I’m behind in my Ten in 10 Weeks post (and the final one, no doubt!) I will get it up here–I’m shooting for today. I’ve got a new ten week plan to start, and I’ve no doubt you’re all on the edge of your seat for that LOL….
Actually, I probably won’t be in trouble so much as she’ll just consider me crazy (again). And most of my family will, too. See, they’re a quiet bunch–for the most part, anyway. Get us together at a hog roast or, as dad and his friend Dann thought in my mid-teenage years, at a square dance, and we may tend to get a bit rowdy but nothing too wild. My family is a low-key group. We do lots of stuff together, and there are lots of reasons to call and ask others to help: building a chimney, putting up a new electric fence, laying a new bathroom floor. But there are some things you just don’t broadcast, some jobs you just don’t ask others to help you with.
Namely, self-improvement projects. No, if you want to fix yourself, you’ve got to do it yourself. Putting together a deck? It’s fine to ask one of the three uncles to help. Need to eat healthier? Screw you, cupcake. You’re on your own.
It is against the law of the family to ask for help with self-based projects because it’s absolutely blasphemous to ask for help unless the job is bigger than yourself. Asking for help is a sign of weakness, of personal failure. Both sides of my family–dad and his large brood of brothers and sister, mom with her smaller but strong-willed sister and nephews–are independent souls. We don’t sit around whining about doing something, we do it. We don’t wait for tomorrow, because today is when we make a difference. We don’t wax poetic about the good old days (except occasionally during holidays) and mourn days gone by.
And we don’t ask for help losing weight. There may be nothing that signifies personal weakness more than asking for help or advice when it comes to getting your eating and exercise under control. How do I know?
Back when Judy Blume was all the rage and I devoured her books like mom’s secret stashes of frozen Girl Scout cookies, at one point I recall my mom, my aunt and my grandma being in TOPS together. TOPS (Taking Off Pounds Sensibly) was a cheaper, less glamorous version of Weight Watchers. Mom et. al. weighed in one night a week (Mondays, I know this because we tagged along since it was in the local library and it granted my nerdy self with a heavenly hour of books each week), celebrated losses, booed gains, and sometimes went out to the Ponderosa buffet as a reward. (I always felt that part was simply hysterical). Mom found her groove at TOPS–she dropped a total of at least 40 pounds as I recall, maybe more. They did silly retreat weekends together and came back with a fresh perspective on eating and exercising that sustained them for weeks at a time. It was like a Free Mason’s club for fat people (there were men, but on a limited basis as I recall). You had to have a secret password and your secret decoder ring could project a scale on the wall if the sunlight hit it at the correct angle. It was no secret that she went but it was a secret what she did once she got there.
Grandma and Aunt N. were also members at the same time. Wouldn’t it be great to have your family, those people you find as your backbone and support at times, join you in a journey for a better body? Not in my family. With three women on the same quest together, it’d make sense that our family gatherings (always centered around food. Always) would have changed, or that they’d talk calorie counts and portion sizes and healthy substitutions.
There was never a veggie tray in sight. In fact, I believe during those years, the dessert section of Grandma’s Easter countertop grew to massive proportions. There were never, ever food discussions that would lead to weight loss for Monday’s check-in. It was almost as if admitting that paying dues to a weight-loss group was failure in and of itself, even though that group helped my mom become a much more confident and beautiful woman (even if she did gain a lot of the weight back over the last twenty years).
The message I picked up? Asking for help for yourself, even if just a listening ear or a thoughtful response, is not acceptable. In fact, if it’s coming from one of the women in our family, the headstrong and independent types upon which genetics I am built, it’s an absolute indication of personal weakness. Personal issues–weight loss, addictions, marital issues, career dissatisfaction–should never see the light of day or fall on the ears of another. It’s all meant to be internalized and dissected from within.
And that’s what brings us back to my post title. When mom finds out I’m broadcasting to the world my shortcomings–the fact that I ate an entire sleeve of Thin Mints on Sunday without so much as a blink of remorse–I’m sure I’ll be in some sort of trouble. Of course, I’ve got an extra box of Thin Mints to subdue her with. And if that doesn’t work, we can always hit the buffet…
Since I’ve started examining myself and my thoughts about fat/being fat/living fat/calling myself the fat girl, I’ve had a couple of realizations. One, I’m a much more complex person than I knew. Two, writing about myself and putting it out into the public does motivate me to do what I say I’ll do (most times). And three, I am not alone in my obsessive worry about how others see me as a fat girl.
To address the third, you can read up on “Losing Fat–And Losing the Voices” from earlier this year. This will give you an idea of how it is to be in a fat girl’s brain, what with our constant nagging and thinking and comparing and self-degradation. These voices eventually find their way out of the single-minded hatred of self in our heads and morph into a twisted type of mental conversation with the people we meet each day. Long story short, instead of constantly judging myself from inside my mind, I imagine the judgmental comments others have about seeing me.
I didn’t realize this for years. Decades even. I mean, maybe there are people out there so shallow in their worldly interaction that they do take great glee in seeing I’m sporting an extra roll or that the chub rub won’t stop, but the more metacognative (thinking about my thinking, in short) I get toward my fat girl issues, the more I’m starting to see that what I think others see in me might not be what they’re seeing.
And, even worse, as I’ve realized this, I’ve felt as though I’m the only person who thinks this way. I felt as though I’m the only person around who imagines others only see me for the fat–in a most obsessive-thought-type way, I might add. But today, in catching up on my blog reading, I discovered that I wasn’t alone.
If you’ve never read Jeannette Fulda’s Pasta Queen blog or her wonderfully fun, serious, thoughtfully emotional Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir
The only bad thing about my current weight is all the time I spend thinking about what other people think about my weight. It’s a problem caused only by itself, like a snake eating it’s own tail. It’s a cyclical worry cycle, and I’m getting dizzy spinning around and around in my head all the time. I’ve wasted so many hours worrying about food, the scale, what I ate, what I should eat, and nagging myself to exercise, all because I’m worried people might be disappointed about how big I am if they meet me. Aaaaaaah!! It hasn’t been about about me and my health, it’s been about other people.
(from PastaQueen blog)
My reaction was one of pure relief. There’s something about being trapped with all those voices, those mean, smarmy, fat girl voices rattling around in my skull, that tends narrow the focus of my thoughts so much so that I think I am the only person in the entire universe fighting this stupid, crazy, mostly-losing-to-this-point battle. It’s not a good, mentally-healthy place to be. Jennette’s words gave me a tiny bit of hope toward the thought that I really can shut those voices down, turn my ways of thinking around to be successful at this. She proved this to me with her next statement–one realized after gaining some of her weight back:
That’s why when I’ve gained a few pounds, I freak out a bit and feel like I should do something drastic, because WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK?! When really, I should just chill out, and get over myself. People don’t think of me half as often as I think they do, and people who judge me on my weight aren’t people I want to like me anyway. I should just get my slow burn on and take care of myself for my own sake, not because I want people I don’t know to like me. It’s so easy to make up a reason that I should be ashamed of my weight. At my thinnest, I worried I was still fat. Now that I’m fatter, I worry that I’m not thin. It’s got to stop. There’s no way to win.
What is it about losing weight and the interior thoughts that accompany our actions that lead us to believe we’re alone in this? Or that the world is against us? Or that everyone else judges us based on outward appearances? The worst part of feeling as though everyone sees me as a fat girl, not a great person, is that I don’t see that in other people. Sure, I tend to notice size but I don’t slap a judgmental label on someone. I love people for what’s inside–heart and character. That’s genuine–I really don’t judge people by their weight and looks. So why do I do it to myself? Even worse, why do I do it on behalf of others to myself?
I sometimes think I have this weight problem thing backwards. From what I’ve seen in the movies, on TV and in books, it seems to me that women are most prone to eating tubs of Ben & Jerry’s followed by a dozen Jolly Pirates following a breakup of a relationship, a bad job review, a fight with a friend or a nagging phone call from mom. In essence, drowning their sorrows in a box of Twinkies.
Not me. I have the exact opposite problem. Bad news sends me into a welcomed tailspin of appetite suppression. Not even a fistful of Dexatrim has the same effect as finding out bad news or being publicly castigated or humiliated. When I fail at something, I succeed at losing weight. I just don’t care enough about food to eat.
On the flip side, when things are going well–like getting good news about a trip or selling an article to an editor or hearing from an old friend or having an earth-shattering conversation with someone important–I tend to run for the Ho-Ho Hills. I can’t find enough junk to stuff in the piehole (as my friend Lewis would say). These are the rare days I would make myself stop at the corner UDF or CVS or Walgreens and actually buy a candy bar, Coke and cupcakes (the holy trinity of sugar) to eat on the way home if I still did things like that. Now, I just scrounge around my writing reward shelf and scarf squares of raspberry dark chocolate.
Still, doesn’t this seem totally ass-backwards? If I’m depressed, shouldn’t I want to eat to bolster my confidence, my belief in mankind, my sinking heart? And if I’m happy, shouldn’t I just feel like dancing around in all that good energy? Of course I should but somewhere along the line my synaptic connections got all messed up. Maybe when I ate that box of cake mix as a teenager or when my sister and I made a secret donut run to the Valley General when the parents were gone.
It’s hard to tell why I’m backwards on this. What’s interesting is that the whole happy/depressed continuum is not a normal thing for me, food or not. If I’m happy about something, I’m reservedly happy. I have a very difficult time believing something is as good as I think, and I hold back in my celebration, knowing the other shoe will eventually drop. But if I’m depressed, nothing can stop me from sinking to the lowest of lows. When I’m sad, in other words, I hit a sort of low-high. Why is it easier to believe the bad stuff instead of the good?
Over the last few months I’ve hit, quite possibly, the lowest of the lows. The absolute low was on my son’s 18th birthday (not the birthday, the low just ironically happened on that day) and I truthfully think I lost about three pounds that week. I sustained myself on water and soup. Maybe a little bit of cereal and milk. I could barely even stomach those. Think about this: the kid wanted Golden Corral for his birthday dinner and I spent almost 50 bucks on the three of us and stomached half a plate of salad and a chicken wing. And I only ate a bite of the wing. If I could bottle that feeling of food hatred and revulsion, I’d be a bazillionaire.
I mention this because I notice my life (in regards to that issue) is improving and I notice myself unconsciously picking up bits and pieces of the junk that repulsed me for most of the last two months. While the pain those two incidents caused in the overall scheme of my life, by limiting my desire to eat, they also granted me some odd perspective I haven’t had before. I took the time to notice what was going in the piehole, and in many cases, ate only because I had to–which led me to make better choices. I don’t think there was a fast food day in there at all. Not even the interest of one, which doesn’t say much because I’m not a fast-food type of girl anymore. I wasn’t really an any-food kind of girl.
So now it’s back to pitting the mind against the urges. Sounds much more perverted than it is. All it comes down to is eliminating the junky garbagey-type stuff: a handful of jelly beans (which I don’t even like!) on my teaching assistant’s desk, a cookie in the teacher’s lounge, a bite of this or that while I’m making dinner. These are the little things that wrecked me in the past and got my ass into, at one time, size 18 jeans.
Never again. As God (and WordPress) is my witness, I’ll never inhale Ho-Hos again.
What is your emotional eating cycle? I’m really curious to know if anyone out there is a happy eater like me or if I’m just out in left field (not the first time nor the last). What sends you over the edge into a binge eating everything in sight? Happiness, sadness or a combination? A certain emotional trigger issue? A certain person or situation? I’m just curious here…
One more week, huh? Not bad. All in all, a good experience, but with tweaks could be much better. Ah, well. That’s the point. Improve little by little to get where you’re going…
This week had a little bit more depression in it again so I ended up losing via just not eating. But the sun’s been shining full-strength here in Ohio the last three days and I didn’t see snow in the forecast. Things are looking up! (But being depressed *is* a good appetite suppressant LOL).
No fries or pop
No fries–easy. No pop…well, I had two Jack & Cokes with my brother yesterday at Grandma’s 80th birthday party. So the pop was there but I consider it a necessary evil. I could have had diet, but grandma only turns 80 once…
Walking the Dogger
Much to her pleasure, dogger got two walks this week. I’m going to shoot for three walks this upcoming week. I don’t know what my schedule holds–haven’t looked it over–so we’ll play it safe with the anticipation of doing more if it’s feasible. It’s so nice to see sidewalks.
30 Minutes of Workouts 5/7 days
According to my newly refreshed sticker calendar, I worked out four days. Not bad. I’ll take that. This week I’m really shooting for five since I’ll be heading to Vegas on the 20th. Of course I won’t lose much between now and then, but I do want to go into it just plain feeling good. Not good enough to take a swimsuit but good enough.
Yoga/Meditation
I did do a yoga session this week and felt all the better for it. I also did a short meditation. Ya gotta start somewhere. And last night I perused the weekly yoga class schedule from my favorite studio thinking I might take a class a week. You never know. Spring is in the air.
Next week is the finale for this ten week session and I hope to leave it with a bang. Of course, that means I’ll start the next one with a bigger bang. Looking forward to new goals and more weight loss…
So I got to thinking about all the anger and bitterness I still hold, to this day, toward Deirdre. I know, I should get over it since it started back in the days of cassette tapes and Farrah Fawcett hair flips. Mind you, this is about more than the bus trip and bullying. This girl was a flat-out snotty rich, mean bitch from my first memories of her. Not just toward me but toward anyone who didn’t meet her standard. And there were lotsa sub-standards around.
If I saw a therapist today, I could only imagine what she’d think about my still-hot anger for a person I have only seen maybe four times (in passing) in the last twenty years. But I could very well tell you right now what that therapist will try to sell me in terms of my fat girl life: that if I let go of the resentment, I’ll let go of the weight.
There are so many–SOOOooooo many–bullshit lines us fat girls get fed on a regular basis that skinny girls don’t get. From diet programs and books to therapists who’ve never been fat a day in their life to well-meaning health care people to average people who want to “give advice”, everyone has a saying to offer to the fat girl. Curious? Here’s a smattering:
“Nothing tastes better than skinny feels.”
“You’re hiding behind the fat because it feels safe.”
“Do something with your hands, like knitting or sewing, and you’ll eat less.”
Can you imagine telling a skinny girl who wants to put on weight that she’s hiding behind her skinniness because it feels safe? How ridiculous is that? People think they’re helping with their free advice and commentary, but what they’re doing is proving just how stupid they really are. Weight loss comes down to two simple steps that anyone can comprehend: eat less, exercise more. Period.
Back to this thought that if I could “release” my anger, I’d “release” my extra weight. I know you fat girls have heard something similar over the years, and, like me, you’d rather just watch the offender/bully slathered in honey and tied to a red ant hill. Sure, I may still have some lingering self-image problems because of the bully but I’m not lugging around 60+ pounds of an extra ass because I won’t forgive the bitch.
If that were the truth–if losing weight was as easy as forgiving all the transgressions of others against us over the course of our years, don’t you think we’d have done it already? No, thanks. I’d rather have that bitterness somewhere inside so when I do my Wii Boxing, I have someone’s face to imagine on the targets.
So, I’ve had this “plan” the last three days…
When I got my iPod Touch at Christmas, I downloaded this nifty app called, “Lose It”. Yeah, a weight loss gizmo that works by you putting in your food and exercise for the day to keep track of where your mouth and ass have been. For the first month, I logged everything down to the last Lifesaver stolen from my student candy reward bin. It was fun seeing those numbers in the negative. (Remember, dealing with depression stops me from wanting to eat).
Like all good toys, it fell by the wayside after about six weeks. I’ve used it a handful more times but not on a regular basis. What’s really cool (or really sadistic, take your pick) is that you can have all your daily data from Lose It sent to an email address for you to look at later. I read over those first few reports but the novelty wore off. However–I got to thinking about how to enhance my weight loss efforts and realized that posting those daily here on the blog might be a way to either publicly laud or publicly humiliate myself into more action.
So on Monday I restarted Lose It tracking with a purpose. It worked well until the hubby brought home a large pizza from the local bar for which I have no calorie count in Lose It. (I will say Lose It has the largest food/calorie database for any program I’ve worked with. And I’ve worked with a lot over the years). It worked on Tuesday until the boy wanted to go to Popeye’s for dinner while we were out school supply shopping and I ate the entire two piece meal, side and biscuit and promptly fell asleep when I got home. It worked yesterday, even with my skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte and blueberry scone (BTW, those things are *NOT* tasty enough to EVER waste another 400+ calories on them. They’re not even good. They were just there. Lesson learned) until my 12 boxes of Girl Scout cookies were delivered. No, it wasn’t the cookies that were my undoing. I only had two when I got home. But an hour later, on a stomach filled only by a Ziplock container of Lucky Charms at lunch, after two glasses of wine, the cookies began to talk. They didn’t like the uneven rows my son had left them in, so I was obliged to even them out, which meant just eating the whole damned row. Combined with the wine, I don’t know how many I actually ate so I couldn’t put it in the Lose It.
Ok, so today I’m unloading this to make myself come clean. Today I’ll start back on the Lose It so I have something to post and to have the mental seatbelt of restraint when I “think” it will be OK to eat out of control (I’ve really not been binging like this at all these last two weeks. Really.). It’s not. And if I don’t want to look like a whale on the cruise, I’d better start working on losing more blubber now.
Since I take a sort of sadistic-humorous pleasure in nicknaming myself “the fat girl”, (with help from dad, because that’s kind of been his pet name for me for a long time. It wasn’t created from maliciousness, it was a defense mechanism. He’s about 3 inches shorter than me, so I call him “shorty”. It works for us both), I figured it was high time I figure out just where this entire concept of self-fatness came from.
This isn’t a self-loathing kind of thing. I don’t sit around thinking of myself as “the fat girl” and cry Kleenex boxes dry, all the while munching a can of Pringles and sipping away on soda. I won’t lie, though–comparing myself to others, noting my extra fleshy bits compared to their wafer-thin profiles does, at times, send me into fits of self-hatred and spits of bad words directed at my reflection–most often, when I’m unfortunate enough to have to try on something new in a fitting room. The grip of being a fat girl has lost its power to make me drop into a sobbing heap and compare my life to nothing for days at a time, but it’s still there, lurking.
And I want to know where it came from.
I’ve been pondering this and, as a result, have come up with a startling revelation: I am the originator of seeing myself as a fat girl but not by myself. (Dad’s nickname didn’t start until well into high school, maybe even college. By then, the damage was done.) Even though I was in a 6X at age six, I didn’t see the X as a negative. I wore a bigger size only because Patti and Alice commented that I wore a bigger size. I didn’t have any idea of what size girls wore in kindergarten and first grade. I was more worried about getting picked for the freeze tag team at recess and in making sure I had enough fat pencils to write on my fat-lined green flecked paper during handwriting time. (The theme of elementary writing does not escape my observation) I didn’t lament the issue that Dina, Cathy and Darla were probably wearing 4T jeans to my 6X: as a first grader, size didn’t mattter.
I don’t think that size ever mattered throughout elementary. Sure, there are bits and pieces of random comments I recall from Patti and Alice about jean sizes while shopping, or a reminder that I didn’t need to eat “all of that”, or that I should go out and play instead of watching Tom & Jerry some days after school. Those are the suggestions all moms and grandmas make to their kids. I wasn’t a lazy kid; I was active. I liked to veg out on occasion just as much as others, but I had a great group of neighborhood (if you could call the houses my friends lived in that bordered the edge of my parents’ field as a ‘neighborhood’) friends, and we were always doing something, into something, getting in trouble for something.
I know that there were times in 4th and 5th grade that brought my taller size (in looking back, I still don’t consider myself “fat” at those ages. I was one of the two tallest girls in 1981′s class photo, and there were other, more qualified entrants in the fat contest for that picture, name and initials withheld because graduating with a class of 54 kinda makes it easy to single folks out) made me self-conscious, made me wish my legs were only made of bones and skin like the other girls’, not bones, skin and a layer of blubber and that my chub rub would magically disappear, but overall I don’t remember feeling (or being made to feel like) a fat freak of nature incapable of being considered a normal human.
No, those thoughts didn’t arise until 6th grade and the period of time I’ve consider the 180 Days of Howard to Bladensburg Hell, aka The Daily 28 Mile (round trip) Bullying Session. As luck had it, my friend Michaela and I managed to snag the next-to-last-seat on the right side of the bus that first day, the day that determined our bus seating arrangement for the remaining 179 days. As unluck had it, the 8th graders behind us wanted their friends to sit in the seat, not a couple of snot-nosed 6th graders. Instead of being intrepid youths, we were bullheads and refused to move, thereby cementing the name-calling and bullying for ourselves, twice a day for the rest of the year.
The two bullies, let’s call them Deidre and Kathryn, took it upon themselves to never let us forget that we had stolen the seats their friends evidently earned as a birthright. The 2 bullies were a little more lenient toward Michaela, for one reason: her brother was in 8th grade and a friend of both girls. Me, on the other hand, had no such luck. In fact, Deidre had haunted and taunted me for years–as we had been in the same Girl Scout troop, the same 4-H Club and lived within half a mile of each other. She despised me from the start, for whatever reason I never knew, and appointed herself the Queen of Mean when it came to me. You think I’d have had the smarts to steer away from her but the seat was just too good and we hit numerous bouncy spots on the ride every day–jolts that couldn’t be felt in the front seats.
I think back and wonder if I’d have developed such a strong dislike for myself in those (and subsequent) years if I’d have had the smarts to move to a seat away from her, but…who knows at this point.
From almost the first day, I remember her comments. She started low and quiet, almost as if she might convince me that I was hearing things, or that if questioned, neither of her two seat mates (another friend of theirs, Dora, sat in the single last seat on the right side and was also an 8th grader–but she was nice to me) would be able to swear they heard her. Deidre’s first comments were about not my body but my trumpet. Yes, my trumpet. My parents didn’t have the money to fork over for a new piece of shiny brass like hers had, but I still wanted to be in band. Grandma R. remedied this by digging out the coronet my dad had played in the high school band. Deidre’s case was shiny, hard, gray plastic. Mine was circa 1964, fake leather covered veneer with a very becoming red velvet interior and the scent of valve oil from years gone by. The case was formed almost exactly in the shape of the coronet (hers was smooth, rounded and had flip-snaps) and the bell of the case was worn and shaggy. I didn’t mind–I thought it was kind of cool that I’d be playing the same trumpet dad did.But it was a carved invitation to Deidre to start picking apart what little self-confidence I had.
“Where’d you get that trumpet? A junkyard?” she’d whisper against the window from the seat behind me, mean spite dripping from her words. “It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.” I’d scootch away from the window, more toward the middle and get Holly into a conversation to avoid being near Deidre’s mouth.
My proximity from her mouth increased but she’d successfully bored into my brain. In the world of 6th grade, I didn’t know the rules–that to be popular, you had to wear the right thing, dress the right way, have the right hairstyle and makeup (which I wasn’t allowed to use until 8th grade), hang out with the right people, and have the right parents. As I discovered over the course of the school year, I had none of those. Each day it was a stomach-sinking adventure to discover which of those elements I lacked any certain day.
Her snarls ranged from my clothing (“Are those hand-me downs? Don’t you own a pair of Jordache jeans? Wrangler jeans are ugly. Nobody wears a sweater vest. Don’t you have any Nikes? Nikes are just the best. A sweater with a horse is totally ugly. Who wears purple penny loafers besides geeks?”) to my appearance (“Hey, buck teeth–here’s a carrot. If you walk so pigeon-toed all the time, you’re going to trip yourself. Your perm is so ugly/frizzy/curly/short. Your nose is so ugly it looks like a bird beak. You better not ask anyone for crackers or they’ll think you’re a parrot.” (This one she took all the way to high school. When I was a freshman in band class, she had the upperclassman nickname me “Polly”, as in “Polly want a cracker?” She was the reason I left the trumpet section to pursue a career in the percussion section on the marimba. And by upperclassmen, I actually mean everyone in the band from the lowest to the highest members.)) to my social status (“You have loser friends. Your boyfriend is a loser because he isn’t on the football team. Who has boyfriends not on the football team? No boys will dance with you at the dance if you wear that. If you were as popular as me, all the boys would like you.”)
She commented about my parents, my sister, my grades and my friends. If there was a subject she could degrade me about, she didn’t save it for later. She made it known. As the year progressed, she even got her seatmates to make comments about me.
The most unique facet to Deidre’s raging meanness toward me was that she never (as much as I can recall–remember, this is coming from age 11) called me fat. She was my first experience with a mean girl (and by far, the worst I’ve ever encountered in life) and I had so little awareness of what to do and so little actual self-confidence at 11, I had no choice but to believe her. She never called me a fat girl but did make it known what girls she considered fat. One of the nicest 8th graders, and one who became my friend in high school when she joined me in the percussion section from the trumpet section (interesting correlation there), T.A., was a taller, bigger girl too. Not in my wildest dreams would I have considered her fat. She was beautiful, with her Charlie’s Angel flipped hair and bright smile. But Deidre commented nearly daily when T.A. got on the bus at her stop about T.A.’s “thunder thighs” and “wide hips”–a comment I remember Deidre making out loud in high school band.
No, Deidre and The Evilettes never called me fat or really brought my weight into question. But with her/their constant, continual barrage of insults and bitch-rants (I was such a threat in my Wranglers, plaid-snap shirts, purple penny loafers and bad Toni-home permed hair), I soon became aware that one way to stem the tide of tears I’d cry about three times a week into my Care Bear pillow case was to be a step ahead of the hatred. I would lie in bed in the mornings before boarding the bus and dream up what new, fresh hell these meanies would greet me with. It was easier to take their hatred if I hated myself first–and hated myself worse than they did. I ran through every possible disgusting, mean, ugly, uncouth truth about me that I could muster, feeling slightly triumphant as I clomped down the bus steps each day in my uncool Converses if I had come up with a way to rag on myself that they hadn’t realized. It was a game, a challenge, a puzzle: hate yourself worse than others then they can’t hurt you. That became the lesson of the 6th grade, more so than learning how to read novels and pre-algebra equations.
It worked like a charm. I don’t remember when I first came up with the belief that I was a fat girl–no doubt a subliminal creation aided by their commentary on T.A. and other innocent bus-riders–but it was my go-to answer. I could start with that one and work my way down, hoping against hope that they didn’t call me fat because I’d have to really do some searching that night in addition to my science homework. Reflecting back, it really was a sick state of mind to think that I took pleasure in “knowing” I was fat but not having them call me fat. Like I was hiding a secret in my size 10 Wranglers while they sat perfectly unaware in their size 6 Jordaches. I had something on them and they weren’t going to get it.
Even if they didn’t call me fat, the thought started me thinking of myself that way. Boys didn’t dance with me at the Jr. High dance–not because I was a shy wallflower afraid to talk to them but because I was fat. I got a tiny role in the school play not because I didn’t try out for the lead, but because I was fat. No one tried to kiss me behind the baseball dugout because I was fat–not because the boys always went for the easy girls and I wasn’t one.
The name-calling began early and it began hard and continued unrelenting, not from someone outside myself, as I’d like to think. It came from me. Indirectly I can blame the bullies, for without their chiding, I wouldn’t have had the need to scrounge up the worst parts of myself and highlight them for future reference. But directly, the advent of viewing myself as a fat girl and living life as such has but one sole point of reference…myself.
To continue the thought of the Skydive? Or Walk Around Naked? post, I’ve been reviewing times in life when being a fat girl has affected my desire to participate in life.
There seems to have been a golden age of Beth that began circa 1986 and ended sometime around 1989, where, even with a higher weight than the circle of most of my friends (there are a few bigger girls in my circle, though we never really compared notes. Everyone in my high school class–for the most part–was friends, period. Of course there were exceptions. But we were, as a majority, an exception), super-puffy 80s hair helped by hideous home perms and eyebrows that I lovingly referred to as “the caterpillars” (thank God, never the “Unibrow”), I didn’t let my weight issues stop me from doing anything. Almost anything, I’m sure, because there were probably times I didn’t do something I wanted to because I felt too ugly or fat to do them, but the majority of my high school social career was rarely influenced by my weight.
The major way my weight impacted me then was that I just didn’t even dream of talking to guys as potential boyfriends. I didn’t flirt whatsoever because I had an unnatural fear of inducing laughter. I was the best- friend-girl every guy had. If guys wanted to ask a girl out, or wanted to know what a girl thought of them, I was the girl to do that. I’d work it into casual conversations (you must know that the only girls guys wanted in high school were the athletic types or the cheerleaders, and going to a school so small where you knew everyone did have its advantages. I talked to almost every girl on a somewhat regular basis). I was the matchmaker of the year–in fact, to this day, a few of my most successful projects still exist in marriage form.
But I wasn’t the girl who asked guys out, and I was the girl only asked out by default. So I don’t really have many tales to tell of being at all the high school drinking parties held by the jocks when their parents went out of town because I wasn’t a cheerleader dating one of them. I don’t have the memories of romantic love in high school (insomuch as that’s actually possible) because that happened only rarely. (Three times. One ended up being a mistake because the guy and I were better suited to being friends, the second because the guy had such guilt issues over a former girlfriend that he dumped me to run back to her, and the third was probably the worst mistake of my high school life because he dumped me (and lied about it) because his father didn’t think my parents made enough money, that I wasn’t smart enough and I was not pretty enough for him to date. But that’s another topic for another post.) I don’t have memories of sneaking out to meet boyfriends (but I do have memories of sneaking out, so let’s clear that up now) because I didn’t have that kind of boyfriend. I didn’t have the courage to. I didn’t fit into a cheerleading skirt and I didn’t parade myself around in tight jeans, so I don’t have the memories of ever being that kind of girl.
If I have few memories of being the desired girl in high school (rest assured, I have tons upon tons of high school memories–that was a good time in my life–just not of being all I wanted to be because of the fat), I have but a rare handful from college. It’s one of the laments of my life, that I don’t have the memories of college that others have. When we went to my sorority reunion last month, the girls (I sat at the table with the founders because I was in the first class–but that was my first and only year at that college because I got married that summer and we moved away) jabbered about a million memories they had of college. Of pulling crazy all-nighters, of bar-hopping in different cities, of socials and dances and silly things they did that made them the silly, wonderful people they are today.
Those are hard to listen to because I don’t have them. Partly a combination of being afraid of myself because of my fat (it became painfully obvious, even as a freshman in college, that I was never meant to be one of “those girls”) and because I spent my college years as a wife, then soon after, a mother going to school, I get a little melancholy when my friends start reminiscing about college memories. Aside from my first year and the sorority girls, and the last year, when a core of us student taught together, there aren’t any memories for me of fun in college. It’s like a blank, black canvas where I desperately wish to see something but nothing comes up.
Part of that is due to my marriage and the kid coming along. It’s hard to justify qualifying for beer bong nationals in a toga when your husband is coaching until ten p.m. and your kid will need a diaper change between now and then. I don’t lament the parties I missed, though–I wasn’t a partier or big drinker. What I lament are college friendships and goofy memories of road trips, study sessions and social stuff.
When I start thinking in this line, it gets to be a circular vortex of blame and dislike. Of myself, of course. If I’d have had more confidence (believe me, the baby weight didn’t help. In fact, it was the beginning of my weight hatred for the last two decades), maybe I would have branched out and made friends. It isn’t a case of the hubby keeping me home. We could have hired a babysitter and he wouldn’t have cared if I’d have gone out with friends.
I just hated myself, so deeply to the core of myself because of my weight, that I figured no one else would like me, either. I didn’t know any of my college colleagues with baby weight, didn’t know any who had kids, didn’t fit in. It was a lonely, hollow place to be. A busy husband without time, a kid to take care of, college to work on, a household to run and a self-loathing that made me cry most mornings. Not too many good recollections can be built upon those memories, eh?
Studying and learning became my world. Thank god a large portion of me is a nerd and loves being consumed by a textbook on Mesoamerican History or a research project on linguistic differences, because if I hadn’t had that, I might have ended up at the funny farm. At least when I studied or researched or wrote, the outside world dissolved and I could pull strength from knowing I was going to be smarter than half the people on Jeopardy someday soon. I read voraciously, wrote constantly and ignored the fact that I’d never really have the kind of friends I’d had in high school and that no one really wanted to do anything with me.
Maybe it was my attitude, maybe postpartum depression, maybe being in a still-new marriage and not knowing my role, maybe living in a new city where people didn’t like you if you didn’t have old money and would tell you that, maybe it was driving to a college where I didn’t have a single friend and never really fit in, or maybe it was because I was a commuter and not on campus to grow myself as a college girl that kept me from creating all the tales my college-finished friends tell now–but what I do know is that I blamed most (if not all) of my pain during those years on being a fat girl. In a strange way, realizing that I didn’t have any strong friendships from my college years was much, much easier to tolerate and stomach if I just blamed it on being fat. Nevermind the fact that I could have gotten out and done something (though god knows what because I had no idea even where I’d have begun) to make friends–blaming my fat for all my problems was easier than admitting how horrible every single facet of my life was at that time. The world around me was alive, vibrant and dynamic. I was closed in the shell of a person who used to be that way but had made some life choices and had such a poor image of myself as a valuable person that I didn’t know how–I didn’t believe–I was worthy to participate.
Not until my late 20s, after I left my first teaching job to take a new teaching job in a new district–the greatest single decision of my career–did I ever feel I had the right to participate in life. Those are some dark days when I reflect back, and I don’t think they’re completely behind me. I still feel myself occasionally slip back into the horrible confines of that glass-walled box when my self-confidence starts to wane and I feel myself put up a barrier based on my weight rather than an acknowledgment of the reality of the situation I’m facing, but I work hard not to. I’ve missed so many life memories already because it’s easier to blame the fat rather than attack whatever insecurity is causing it…I want to have more tales to tell.