“You are too fat! You need to lose some weight!”
Those words (or words to that effect) were not first uttered to me by the neighborhood kids, or by my parents, or even my siblings. No, the first person who spewed that filth in my direction was my doctor. I was at the clinic for the mandatory physical exam before starting kindergarten. That’s right – someone from the esteemed medical profession heaped that psychological stigma on me when I was 4 years old. Now, I don’t claim to remember such an horrific event, but parts of the aftermath are still very vivid memories after all these years. I can still see my mom subjecting me to weekly weigh-ins, her neutral demeanor changing to cruelty because, more often than not, I had gained weight. “You’re not trying hard enough.” “You don’t love me.” “Do you want to be fat?” The one that I pushed to my subconscious until I was 20 was, “You’re so fat, I’m embarrassed to admit that you’re my daughter.” My dad simply stayed out of it because he has always been a large man. I think somehow he wanted to believe that maybe my mother could coax me into a “normal” weight, and I would escape the fat barbs that he had experienced as a child. With my own parents behaving in such a manner toward me, is it any wonder that I felt that the abuse that I suffered later at the hands of my classmates and siblings was all that I deserved? Once, when I was about 12, someone told me that I was very fit for a fat person. (It was true; I was not sedentary as a kid.) Why didn’t I listen to that? Because at that time it didn’t matter what I could do. What mattered most to me was that all of the dieting that I subjected myself to from age 4 and on did nothing to make me into the lithe ideal. My body took up more space; therefore, I was everyone’s favorite object of derision. I could be bouncing on a trampoline for an hour, enjoying the fresh air and the feel of my leg muscles as I push off the taut fabric, and someone would make a crack about the earth shaking every time I come down or the jibe of “Two-Ton Tessie”, chipping away at that small bit of self-respect I had somehow retained. Fast forward through the high school and college years (they are just filled with more of the same treatment), and we arrive to where I am now – a supersized (5’10”, size 30ish) 28 year-old woman who is full of confidence and a zest for life. I have been married for almost a year and have been working on my graduate degree for a couple of years. I am excited just about being me! How did I get from there to here, you ask? Believe it or not, a significant revelation in my life relates to the movie, “Pretty Woman.” I was watching the movie with an ex-boyfriend (a fat admirer who did wonders for improving my body image), and this scene where Julia Roberts is laying in bed with Richard Gere comes up. Julia is feeling bad about herself and says (I’m paraphrasing here), “When so many people say negative things enough times, you just start to believe it.” That one sentence seemed to characterize my whole life. I had simply been a blind follower of every scathing comment. I had staked my beliefs in the wrong things. I was so overwhelmed that I began to cry – it wasn’t my problem. It had never been my problem. From that day on, I took control of my life. I was not going to let someone else dictate its worth. Sure, there were times that I doubted myself, and it still happens on occasion. I’ll be the first to admit that it was all a façade in the beginning. Even when my bluff was called, I didn’t give them the satisfaction of knowing that they were right. The change, not only in my self-perception but also in the way that people reacted to me, was very subtle. As more people started treating me as a person (not “that fat chick”), I would feel myself standing a little taller. The two just kept feeding off of one another in a very positive fashion until I no longer had to fake it. I had made it! If anyone were to ask me, “If you could be thin without effort, would you do it?” I would have to pause and try to imagine what it would be like to be thin (quite a challenge since I’ve always been fat.) Ultimately, my answer would be, “I would try to be the best person that I can be regardless of my size.” It is a non-issue. Thin or fat, I am the same me, so I don’t see the need to make a prediction about something that really doesn’t change the important aspects of me. (A quick note about my mother: I thank God that my mom is not that same angry woman that she was when I was a child. We’ve talked at length about what happened in the past, and we have both agreed that it is fruitless to belabor the fact that it occurred – no one can change it. She deeply regrets her actions, and I forgave her long ago. I talked about these events in this story simply to put my prior feelings about myself into perspective.) You may contact Melissa:
mmcool@lse.fullfeed.com
