Synergy

I have recognized the power of the two formative moments for a long time. One was "learning" that I was fat, and the other was learning that boys could only like me as a joke. What has been new to me is seeing how other factors contributed to my impressionability, and to reinforcement of the message. And, you know, actively trying to heal from it.

Anyway, once the message was picked up that I was fat and that was a problem, that was only going to be reinforced. The thin ideal female is held up as the standard of beauty for images used in entertainment and advertising, and there is a huge industry revolving around weight loss. That machine is there, and it would be very hard to miss it.

I want to explore the second lesson a bit more.

I don't think it is obvious now how much of a romantic and how relationship-focused I have always been. I was engaged to the boy next door at three. We agreed to get married when we were twenty and I kissed him on the cheek. Our families were friends, so even though they moved shortly after the engagement we still saw each other sometimes, and he was actually my first date the day before my sixteenth birthday.

(Sounds cute, but we really didn't have much in common at that point.)

I was always all about getting married and having kids. On one level, that was how I was going to fix everything that was wrong in our family, because my new family would make up for everything. I totally bought into fairy tales. I did not have a strong preference between starting as the princess or the peasant girl, because the important thing was happily ever after.

I always liked boys. Even though I was engaged to Shawn, I had other boys I thought were cute. When we moved and I started school, I was aware of boys there, and it didn't take long for me to fall for Casey. When that went wrong, it was easy for me to take comfort that Shawn was still out there.

Reasonably I was remembering that someone had liked me once, but also it did start a habit of always focusing on someone who was not around. It was safer, obviously, and it didn't feel like it was something I was doing deliberately. The feelings that I had for the person who was at another school or had graduated already felt real, but it also kept relationships very abstract and future.

I still liked boys a lot. In 7th and 8th grade I could have easily named 30-40 boys that I thought were cute, and that I had developed code names for with my friends. As much as I knew that I was fat and that I could not let boys know that I liked them, it still wasn't as terrible as it was going to get.

Before I get there, I keep thinking of two movies. I have never even seen one of them. It was a 2004 film called Sleepover. I read the review, which was not flattering, but the part I remember is that one of the girls in the film (it would have been geared to young teen girls) was heavy, and her friends told her that she just needed to find a boy that likes brownies, and she did! The review used this as an example of the amateurish writing, but I remember thinking it was wrong anyway, because if it was a boy flick, the fat boy would find a pretty (which means thin) girl who liked him anyway because he was funny or did something brave.

The other was from 2001, so both of these movies are from long after the events of this blog, but they illustrate something because they have fat girls. A lot of movies don't, and even plain girl just means that she is wearing glasses and has her hair tied back.

This was a television movie, Kiss My Act, a Cyrano de Bergerac story set in stand up comedy. I was still periodically doing stand up then, but the real attraction was that it starred Camryn Manheim and Scott Cohen, both of whom I had loved the year before in The 10th Kingdom.

I did find him attractive, and I liked her, but it hinges on them being able to be a couple, even though as a fat woman she cannot see it happening, and she does hide herself (she is giving jokes that she writes to an attractive woman).

Even though the whole premise of the movie is that she deserves love and she can have this attractive guy, it feels wrong at the end. The kiss is handled clumsily and it's not romantic. It feels like they are settling for each other. She even says "gross", if I recall, and it's a joke, but is it?

I bought it too. It did not feel right to me that a heavy woman could end up with an attractive man, though the reverse happens a lot. So actually, the bravest most subversive movie of my youth was probably Hairspray, though I did not see it then.

This is what I am getting at. When I was 14, and some boys started asking me out at lunch, and it was not to really go out with me but to make fun of me, it had the same sort of clarifying effect as that moment on the playground eight years earlier. Now I get it. Boys will not like me. And it made sense to put them together. Boys can't like me because I'm fat.

It was hammered home pretty hard, and it was painful because everything I wanted revolved around boys liking me. Okay, happily ever after only requires one boy, but if none of them can like you because of something so basic about you, it's hard to take.

When I disconnected from my body - which was more of a process than an event - it really seemed like the only possible course of action. Both of those crystallizing moments were based on lies, but I didn't know that. I did what I could to get by, and there were real problems with that. There were benefits too, though I like to think those would have been possible to get some other way.

I can only vouch for what did happen. And try and learn from it.