I was in second grade when I found out I was fat.
I was sitting on the edge of the pool at my dad’s house, moving my feet back and forth in the water, wiggling my toes around. It was right at the very beginning of summer, when, to an eight-year-old, the air is heavy with happiness, excitement, and freedom. I closed my eyes and tilted my face back so the sun hit me directly. I let the warmth cascade over my skin, seeping through me until my entire body felt toasted and comfortable. I probably could have fallen asleep if it weren’t for my sister’s yell.
She ran by me and jumped into the pool feet first. She had a friend over that day, a young small girl of eleven years, who glanced at me before cautiously lowering herself onto the ladder. Once she had worked up the courage to detach herself from the bottom rung, she swim-hopped over to my sister, giggling and darting her eyes over to me every so often. She leaned in, dramatically cupping her hand around her mouth to egregiously show she was about to say something secretive. Then I heard her: “Your sister is fat.”
It was followed by laughter, a few splashes, some more whispers, and finally the two girls swam over to the other side of the pool.
I looked down at myself, startled. Was I fat? I hadn’t really thought about my size up until that point, but now that it had been brought to my attention, I realized my sister’s friend was right. (Extremely impolite and a little bitch of a child, but still right.) I was fat. How had I not seen that before? Even at eight years old, I thought of myself as quite bright, perhaps even brilliant, and certainly smarter than my sister and her tactless friends. How had this very important detail slipped under my radar?
Suddenly, I was very aware of the way my stomach bulged out, especially while I was in my sitting position. I pushed at it, tried to tuck it in a little bit, but it still wouldn’t move. I looked down at my legs and, as if for the first time, really saw them. My thighs were big—massive actually. Once again, I felt flabbergasted by the fact that I had not been aware of this until now. How had I not seen that I had a tire swing for a stomach and tree trunks for legs? And there I was wearing a swimsuit, of all things! I felt naked and way too exposed.
I ran into the house, and up to my room, feeling the hot sting of tears brimming on my eyelids. Once in my bedroom, I grabbed the first big tee shirt I saw and threw it on over my bathing suit. As soon as it was on, I felt almost immediate relief. As if covering myself up helped me ignore how awful my body looked. Over and over again, I heard my sister’s friend’s words, bouncing back and forth in my mind, ricocheting off my hurt feelings and flying into my self-hate. I still couldn’t believe I had never seen this before.
Upon more thought, I supposed I had somewhat noticed that I was bigger than other kids, but I just figured I was built like that; I was built big and they were built small and that’s how it was. I didn’t even know that it was a bad thing that I was so chubby. In a way, I was grateful to my sister’s friend for opening my eyes to something I would see for many years after: skinny=good, fat=bad.
At that age, I just sort of dealt with it; I didn’t think I had much of a choice. I became accustomed to hearing comments now and then, either purposely-hurtful insults from my sisters, or innocent remarks from my peers. One time, when I was in third grade, I was at a friend’s house for a birthday sleepover and we decided to play dress-up with her mom’s old clothes. I slid into a dress and turned around for my friend to zip it up. She couldn’t. The zipper just wouldn’t go up past the middle of my back, no matter how hard my friend pulled. Finally, her face red from the effort, she leaned back with an exasperated gasp and said, “It doesn’t fit—you’re too big for it.” None of my buddies outright laughed at me, but I could tell from their faces that they were shocked I couldn’t fit into a dress that belonged to a grownup (!) I spent the rest of the night holding back tears, my stomach in knots of embarrassment and sadness, just waiting until we could go to sleep so the morning would come more quickly and I could just go home.
After that, dress-up was no longer a game I wanted to play.
Scenarios similar to the horrendous sleepover calamity occurred over and over again throughout elementary school. It got to a point where I would find myself staring at girls on the television, or in magazines, or even just in my classes or on the street; staring and wishing I could be them. I hoped if I focused my mind enough, really concentrated with all of my willpower, my body would somehow morph into that of someone I really admired. It never seemed to cross my mind that I should perhaps exercise and eat a salad now and then. I was a child, though, I didn’t think about things logically. Hell, I still hardly do. Besides, I really loved Doritos.
When I reached middle school, one more variable was added to this fucked up, self-loathing, shitshow of an equation. Boys. Oh, yes, boys. Now, not only was my body something I had to be ashamed of because it wasn’t like other girls, but it was also something to be ashamed of because boys didn’t like it either. The element of competition was increased tenfold, and suddenly I had twenty more reasons to be disgusted with myself.
I took matters into my own hands at this point. No, I didn’t finally figure out that I should take up jogging and add more mixed greens to my diet. That would have been too difficult (also keep in mind what I said about Doritos—that wasn’t a joke.) Instead, I opted for a slightly less conventional approach.
I had been reading a lot about girls my age who struggled with self-esteem; I also was taking a vast array of different types of self-help and faux sex-ed classes, all which touched upon the subject of body image. One thing I kept hearing over and over? Starvation. Girls starving themselves to lose weight. Now, you might ask me, “But, Kate, weren’t you learning about all the damage these girls were doing to their bodies by starving themselves? Weren’t you being educated as to why that was a bad approach?” And my answer to that would be simple: “Shut up.”
Of course I was learning about how unhealthy and destructive depriving oneself of food was. Do you honestly think I, as a narcissistic and self-involved 12-year-old, really cared if I was hurting my body if it meant I could be skinny? Of course not. I would have done whatever it took to get that cute little flat tummy most of my friends had. To be able to be picked up by a boy, literally lifted off the ground as if made of feathers, was a dream of mine. I would destroy my body ten times over if it meant I could have that.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good at starving myself. I would make it through the school day, then finally come home, fatigued and famished, and find myself unable to resist all of the treats with which my mom had stocked the kitchen. I would binge and binge until I felt sick and nauseated with myself. The next day I would wake up and promise myself I would not eat that day, and I would stick to that promise. That is, until I arrived home from school again. And so was the pattern. The pattern that destroyed my metabolism, kept me almost constantly miserable, and didn’t do hardly anything to change my figure or my weight.
High school was when my eating issue really started to spread its wings and fly…right into my face at full force. When I first entered the must-dreaded Freshman year, I was still very unhappy with my weight, but didn’t do much to change it. I would stare mournfully at the other girls in the gym locker room, with their unintentionally perfect stomachs and adorable chests in their extra small sports bras. Then I would look down at my extra puffy gut, my bulbous chest, the flab hanging from my arms, the dimples in my thighs. I could have just died. Or went home and cried uncontrollably for hours until I ate everything in sight as a way of dealing with my anguish. If you’re guessing I did the latter, you got it.
Shortly after I turned sixteen, my family went through the biggest traumas of our lives thus far with the suicide of my stepfather. Within a few weeks, I must have accidentally lost a couple pounds, because my peers and teachers started to mention it. I either lost weight or perhaps I didn’t really and people just wanted to see me as someone who was about to waste away due to such a huge, unfathomable blow. Either way, despite the horrific chaos that continued to swirl around me, I enjoyed these comments about my weight. Actually, to say I enjoyed them would be a misleading understatement; I thrived off of them. Up until that point, I had this huge ball of emotions pressing down on my mind, my heart, my body, my soul, and I had no idea how to get rid of them. Then, as if a sign from God (God, in this case, being a fucked up aspect of my traumatized, sad, lonely character) I started to receive attention about my weight loss. And wouldn’t you believe that I clung to that attention, those compliments, and those observations as if they were the one life preserver I had in this huge sea full of absolute shit.
My diminishing figure became the only thing I could count on, and my methods of losing more weight (all drastically unhealthy) became something of a friend, one of the only ones I could really feel close to at the time. I soon discovered how to stick two fingers down my throat after every time I ate, an attempt at releasing all of the ingested food. At first it was difficult, miserable in fact, and I hated it. After a few tries, though, it became almost soothing. Feeling my index and middle finger rub the inside of my cheeks and then back a little further until the first relieving surge of vomit would come up. After that—easy peasy.
It was a stress-reliever, a way of easing my mind, while convincing myself I was getting skinnier. In reality, it was probably more so the fact that I simply wasn’t consuming as many calories in general that helped melt the weight away, but soon getting skinnier almost didn’t matter anymore. It was more about that feeling of relief, the only feeling of relief I was getting at all in my life at the time. In every other way, I was sad, scared, anxious, horrified, and lost, but with that one small action, I had at least something that made me feel better.
I ended up losing almost sixty pounds that year. It wasn’t long before it was addressed, I was given help, and my real, underlying issues were treated. I went back to eating normally, but never exercising, and soon gained the majority of those sixty pounds back.
That became something of a pattern. I would gain weight, lose my mind over it, resort to unhealthy measures to shrink down slightly, then gain all the weight back. The cycle continued for a few years, before I finally started to learn how to exercise and take more control over my mind in terms of resisting the urge of disordered thinking.
I’ve gone up and down and up and down and back up again with my weight. It is an everyday, all-day effort to remain calm about my body, to accept it, and to even try to like it. I know I’ll never be skinny, I’ve finally come to terms with that, but I don’t know if I will ever come to a point of complete happiness with how I look, my body, or my weight. I don’t know if I can blame this on anything I’ve previously mentioned, or if it was simply innate within me to find disgust with my physical self. I don’t know if it all could have been avoided if it weren’t for that day, when I was eight, and I realized I was fat, or if it would have happened inevitably at some other point. Either way, the issue has served as both my worst enemy and my everlasting friend. Funny how that works.
Comentários