Posts Tagged ‘Voices’
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?
When you see a fat girl, what do you think?
“Ugh. I hope she doesn’t sit next to me.”
“What is she thinking, eating that (insert any food here)? She should be starving herself.”
“I’m so glad that’s not me.”
“She should be ashamed to be alive/be wearing that dress/be out in public…”
When you see a fat girl, what do you think she’s thinking?
I wish I could answer this with an equally glib list of mental thoughts, but the truth is, it’s a trick question. You can never know what a fat girl is thinking unless you’ve been a fat girl. And by fat, I don’t mean all you skinny bitches in the crowd bemoaning the fact that you’ve got to lose “those last ten pounds” or those of you who believe that the Special K Diet is a real godsend around January 1st every year. I mean girls with an X after the number on their clothes tag, girls whose butts fit snugly in an average chair, girls who find themselves in the high twenties (and higher) on the BMI charts.
Girls who hate themselves because society around them has stripped them of the title of “woman” and slapped them instead with the all-loving moniker of “fat girl.”
We know what you think of us–us obese, pork-rind munching, Coca-Cola swilling gluttons that we are who don’t really deserve a second glance–but do you ever wonder what we think of ourselves?
Not to worry, friends. There’s a chip (brain-programmed, not potato) in every one of us fat girls that serves as a two-way radio for your criticisms and judgments to come through loud and clear. We hear you tell us we shouldn’t be eating “that” (which amounts to just about anything aside from celery sticks and water), that we aren’t really beautiful if we can’t cram ourselves into a single-digit size, that the bigger we get, the more disgusting the print should be on the fabric of the clothes we buy, that we have no right to expect men to be nice to us because there are so many other skinny girls out there to impress. That we’re second-class citizens and should be glad you give us disgusted side glances. (Please, ma’am, may I have another?)
What you may not know is that the chip translates your smarmy, self-serving, rude thoughts into our own voice inside our heads–and, despite technological advances that allow us to program our DVRs from our phone during a bank robbery, there is no known way to turn these hateful voices off. You can be assured that rarely is there a moment of our waking hours each day that aren’t filled with hearing your comments in our own voice.
From the moment we wake up, we’re assaulted by a barrage of self-doubting, self-loathing voices. From within our own heads.
“You’re going to wear that? You’ll look like the Sta-Puft marshmallow girl.”
“Pearls make your neck look fat.”
“Walk by mirror fast. Don’t look.”
“You really deserve to eat a bowl of cereal?”
“You’re not taking that for lunch, are you?”
“If you even think about a donut, you’re a loser.”
“Imagine what the kids see when you’re writing on your white board.”
“At least your ass isn’t as big as hers.”
“You’re only giving up your lunch period to walk and not your planning period, too?”
“Eating your apple AND soup for lunch is going to make you fatter.”
“Your ass is NOT getting smaller. The mirror is getting dirtier.”
“What do you mean, you want fifteen minutes to yourself before you work out?”
“Did you do enough today to earn dinner? Or should you just have water instead?”
“Only 500 calories burned? You should be ashamed.”
“Maybe tomorrow you’ll do a better job of starving yourself and losing weight.”
“Those pajamas make you look fat AND sloppy.”
“Why am I not surprised you’re still a size 16, loser?”
(Please note I’ve edited for brevity, content and offensive language. While this isn’t a family blog, lots of F-bombs might get me blacklisted.)
While the list is linear, the comments are circular and constant. Sort of like a mind-tornado, attempting to suck us and our precious self-worth and self-confidence into the vortex of the crapper. Being a fat girl has added a dimension to me over the years that skinny girls don’t have: the voices.
Fat girls can’t do anything–and by that I mean anything–without some type of voice reminding us of our shortcomings. I’d like to follow this with a pithy comment about how I first remember the voices coming into my life, back in and around the 4th grade, but I’ve forgotten. I’m sure they had the sound of Patti’s voice, possibly Grandma Alice’s, maybe another well-meaning but critical adult at first, a startling intrusion into my assumably placid ten-year old thoughts (Oh, he’s cute! Oh, he’s cute! Oh, I can make a fortune teller! Oh, how do I make a cursive S again? Oh, he’s cute!), but then, with repeated exposure, the voices evolved into a part of me I just expected and, in a strange way, comfort me. I can’t make a food, weight or life decision without second-guessing myself these days.
Even though I’ve gone down approximately ten pounds since January (depending on the weighing apparatus du jour), those voices hound me around every single curve and taunt me from every dark corner. There’s even a new dimension to them: sucker! Not only are they laughing and criticizing me, they’re making light of the work I’ve put in to starting one final weight loss journey. They’re sure I’ll fail. They’re convinced of it. After all, if I wasn’t born skinny and haven’t lived much of a skinny life (except that one miraculous size 10 year when I subsisted on carrots, water and five-mile jogs that seems more a fog than a piece of my own reality), what right do I have to expect I’ll ever lose this weight?
I started the journey (again) to lose this weight as a gift to myself on my 40th birthday (so much nicer than a double scoop of self-loathing with that scant piece of birthday cake) and wanted to free myself from the dregs of shopping the plus-sized clearance racks, but in the last few weeks I’ve discovered another goal: to make the voices stop. I can’t even imagine what a quiet, peaceful day in my mind sounds like. I’m sure it’ll be jarring at first, like my friends (or so they say) have abandoned me, but at that point I’ll get the best gift of all from them: silence to hear my own true thoughts.
I don’t know if it will really work like that, if they will *REALLY* take a hike for the long-term, but in my opinion, it’s worth a try. I hope my only question at that point is how to reprogram that chip to hear myself and not others…(instead of…”where’s the guacamole?”)