The de-boxing project being in full progress, I attacked another box yesterday. In one of the drawers I found a small packet of photographs of myself, all of them more than twenty years old and therefore pre-dating my weight gain. I had stashed them away in there and almost forgotten about their existence.
Of course, before finding a new home for them, I looked through them.
Now, when I try to remember what I felt about my body back then, what comes to mind is the feeling of shame about it. I was totally convinced that I was looking grotesque and fat, courtesy, mostly, of that relative of mine who kept trying to force me to lose weight in order to conform to what he thought I should look like.
That insecurity is evident in those pictures in the way I stand.
What is also evident when I look at these pictures today is that back then there was no factual base whatsoever for anybody to call me fat. The pictures show a young woman with a narrow waist and curves in all the right places, a slender neck and face, and hips that were narrow enough to wear a size S pencil skirt over them.
The person in these pictures is slim. BMI 23 slim, so, normal-weighted. Right in the middle of normal.
I don´t know what my relative saw when he looked at me. When looking at those pictures I can´t even imagine what he would have wanted to see that would have satisfied his standards.
What I do know is that, in order to make me conform to said standards, he kept making disparaging remarks about my body, all centered around the theme of "you´re fat, ugly, clumsy, stupid and lazy".
He repeated these often enough to sink down into my own subconscious, making me, not conform to his impossible standards, but instead grow into a bad case of body hatred, insecurity, and general low self-esteem. All of which set me up for a lifelong battle against my body, an eating disorder, becoming a victim of a bullying boss at my first workplace, and several mentally abusive relationships. And for getting as fat in real life as he had made me believe I was back then.
I wish I could go back in time to tell that young woman that her tormentor is wrong, that she isn´t fat. I wish I could somehow spare her from the experiences that her abysmally bad self-image will get her into.
But that isn´t possible.
What is possible for me today is working through the hurt.
I can´t undo my life´s experiences, but I can bring that young woman back from the fat suit she has been imprisoned in for so many years, and then continue to live the life I might have had all the time had I but been able to realize what I, what my body, really was like. A life free of shame.
Julia
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