Hello there! This post is part of a series of essays where I am attempting to retrace the pivotal moments that have defined the relationship I have with food and with my body as I continue on my journey of healing, self-love and acceptance. Learn more about the project here.
Before I get started mining the depths of my childhood experience, I feel the need to say a couple of things first. This entire essay project is deeply, intensely personal for me and requires me to recount the truth of my experience as I remember it. That is the key: these are simply my memories from childhood, which are imperfect and defined by my perspective. The way I remember the events is important because these memories have cemented in my brain as truth and defined my perception of myself and of my body. From an adult perspective, they might not even be true or the same as others in my family would recount them, but that’s okay because of the nature of the writing I am trying to do. Please understand that I am not attempting to cast any blame on people I love dearly for the way I view my body. If individuals affected me with their actions, I now understand that they were simply acting in response to a fat phobic culture out of love for me.
I titled this essay with the word ‘being’ instead of ‘feeling’ because that is the crux of the memory for me. This is when I remember coding into my knowledge of myself a consistent, defining truth that I was fat and that being fat was a serious shortcoming. It had nothing to do with body chemistry or anything, it was a character flaw that I assigned to myself and one that I have held onto for my entire life, whether my actual real-life body was ‘thin’ or ‘fat’ or ‘normal’.
I went to my Aunt Sue-Sue’s house in Arkansas one summer when I was about eight or nine and it was pure magic. I was there for about six or eight weeks. The exact timeline and age is all a bit fuzzy to me, but I remember the feeling very clearly. I was so happy. My aunt is my mom’s identical twin and they both have the most mesmerizing personalities. They love so deeply, are full of charisma, are the center of our entire family’s universe, the glue that holds everything together. Identical in so many ways and yet polar opposites of each other. Gosh, I love them both. From what I understand, my mom was having trouble holding it all together as a single mom of three, recently divorced, and my aunt suggested that I come visit for the summer to give her a break. Off to Arkansas I went and I had the time of my life.
My aunt and I were thick as thieves. Inseparable all summer long. My kid memories are fuzzy but warm. We baked together, took naps every afternoon, I played office on an old word processor while she worked around the house. We crafted together, worked in the garden together, went to church together, ate phenomenal Southern food together, went shopping together. Basically, it was bliss. I loved my time with her and it is the happiest time I remember in my childhood.
When I returned home to Arizona at the end of the summer, things were different. My mom had met a new man, my stepdad to this day who is a lovely man, but everything had changed. It wasn’t just ‘us girls’ anymore and I didn’t even know it until I stepped off the plane. I was surprised to meet him, but still happy and chatty. My mom was surprised to see me, too. She said I had gained a lot of weight that summer and it shocked her to see me. I don’t remember that specifically, but I do remember coming home to a soon-to-be new stepdad and step siblings and the people around me being shocked at the size of my body. When I dig deep, I can’t remember the conversations, but I can remember the feeling. I remember feeling bad because my body was big and I remember feeling acutely aware of my body for maybe the first time ever. That first awareness was one of shame, one of doing or being something wrong. I remember feeling for the first time that my body was a problem, internalizing that I was ‘big’ or ‘fat’ and that it was some sort of a character flaw. I remember the dichotomy of being happy in the summer while getting bigger and then coming home and realizing that my being happy led to something bad. I still hold this fear that being happy can be wrong.
Within a year or so, I think I began my first diet. Since then, I don’t think I ever remember not being fat. Even when I can look back now and say that I definitely wasn’t physically fat, I have always identified as fat. Not in a fat positive way, in a very fatphobic way. In a way that believes that probably my worst quality is my inability to control my body.
So much of my work has been in accepting and coming to terms with the size of my body and I am still very much in a depths of doing that work. Of unlearning and unleashing a lot of the shame I feel about being fat or bigger bodied. Sometimes I can transcend and realize that the size of my body has nothing to do with my worthiness as a human, that there are many ways to describe me that have nothing to do with the way I look. I logically understand that fatness is not a character flaw and that the way we feel about our bodies has been culturally transmitted via an ideal of beauty that is completely unattainable for all women, even those one might describe as being physically perfect.
Sometimes I can transcend the shame and it feels so beautiful and wonderful, but when I can’t transcend it, when I am at my lowest low in terms of my body and the way I see it, I go back to feeling like that little girl who stepped off the plane and felt this icky, burning shame wash over her because her body was a problem. BEING fat. I can retrace it to that moment.
My work on my body image has basically been the process of me running to that little girl in that exact moment and holding her tightly in my arms, enveloping her in my bright love and telling her a whole new story:
There is nothing wrong with her at all. Not one thing.
She is deeply loved.
She whole and perfect exactly the way she is.
She doesn’t have to look or act a certain way to be loved and protected.
That she deserves the best life has to offer.
That her worth is inherent, completely independent of the way she looks.
That she is enough.
That she is enough.
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