A couple of weeks ago, two stories flashed through my Facebook feed. The first time they sped through and I moving through the paces of life missed them. The second, third, fourth, times they caught my attention. Stories on plus size models usually do that for me. The first about the FIRST SPORTS ILLUSTRATED SWIMSUIT MODEL automatically had my eyes rolling far back into my head. She's a size 12. Plus sized. When the second story, hit my feed, I almost didn't open the link to the story. From the thumbnail, this plus size model didn't look plus sized. But always on the look for some distraction, I hit the link and loo and behold here was a model who had my body. They are both beautiful woman. And I guess technically if you're a double digit you're a plus sized human.
But....
I already feel like a monster. My body takes up too much space. I sometimes find myself curling my arms around myself, pushing myself into corners to ease the worry I imagine on people's faces when they see me enter a small store or restaurant. I carry wounds from the past, sometimes not so distance, of being mooed at by adults in Walmart or from cars. Jr. High taunts of "lard ass," "pig," feel like they hang like labels on my body. A life time of looking in the mirror and never seeing a body worthy of love, praise or acceptance.
Is it any wonder, I think, looking at a model who in my mind is safely in the slim category, that even when I hit a size 12, I see a fat woman in the mirror? That I still walk the world feeling ungainly, lumbering, obstructive? Even at a weight I find acceptale, I have been told by doctors that I am too big to be healthy. A size 12 for the rest of the world is fat. Period.
And what does that make me now? At a size 18, I am clearly in the monster category. I am a giant among women. Shameful and disgusting. Or so I am told. I am regulated to special stores who only in the last ten years began to carry clothes that were sexy and lovely. They cost three times as much as Target but at least it's a whole store and not a tiny corner hidden from the "normal" clothes. Models my size are mocked on line with a cruelty that leaves me breathless. When I dress up, I sometimes still have to push aside that I don't deserve to look attractive because my body is a monster. Monsters are not supposed to be pretty or sexy.
I do not write this to garner sympathy or to hear about thin bodies being mocked. I am not unaware that all women's bodies are policed. I write this because the reality is that when slender women are held up as plus sized, we not only continue to push a very rigid notion of acceptability but we make other women's bodies monstrous. I am 42 years old, and I have dieted my whole life. I have starved my body, purged it, exercised it to exhaustion doing things I hated. I have hated this body, mocked it, sliced it open in disgust. I misused it. I tried to pretend it didn't exist. It was never a good enough body. It was never thin enough. Never pretty enough.
As I walked through life trying to make myself invisible, I could never imagine myself as anything but highly visible. Last year a woman published photos of herself with people reacting to her weight. Many many who commented said she imagined the reactions, that she was just seeing things that weren't there. There were other stories. But what many missed was that this was this woman's story, and as a fellow fat woman I knew the story well. I knew the looks and snickers of young college girls when I shopped. I knew the jokes about weight coming from men who were often bigger than I. I knew the pain of having women flirt with your husband in front of you, not that you weren't invisible but that you were so insignificant that you didn't matter. Eventually these moments add up and become the narrative even when the words are not being spoken.
And I woke up a few months ago, done. Done with the constant self hatred that I carried on my shoulders like a yoke. Done with the paranoia of worrying what others were thinking when I eat or shop. Done with worrying if people were mocking me. Mostly I was done with the years and years of self abuse. I started to buy lovely clothes. And I dressed the way I wanted to dress not the way that society deemed OK for a monster. I started to wonder if maybe I was sexy and beautiful in this monster's body. And eventually I started to think that perhaps I was not a monster.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Monday, February 09, 2015
Qutting Isn't Easy
The words from the message haunted me long after I shut my computer down. During the conversation, I had been able to show a disregard, a carefully calculated distance.
A new PhD program? Pfft. I was done with the academy. Over it. Moved on.
But later that night as I lay in that inbetweeness of sleep and awake, I started to make plans. I could retake my GREs. H wouldn't mind do some teaching jobs while I did my thing. Umberto would be old enough to do some babysitting if we had gaps. Surely I could juggle therapy and class schedules with a little magic. Only when I felt the tears starting to form did I snap myself out of this hazy dream world.
For a few days, I walked around with the heavy load of failure. I joke often that I am an academic failure but like most jokes this one has a stinger. If I had my PhD, I could rely on the evidence that on the impossibility of tenure especially for women. But I don't have that piece of paper that at one point represented to me the pinnacle of success. Instead, I was the person who couldn't even get her foot in the door for a more noble failure. When I told people that I was not accepted into a PhD program, I imagined that I could see in their eyes my own thoughts: She wasn't good enough. She wasn't smart enough. Of course time dulled some of these feelings, or at least help me push them into the background of my life.
As time puts distance between my academic past and me, I found myself still floundering. I no longer posted on my academic friends post and when I did I offered apologies for my ignorance. At some point, I stopped reading academic books because it felt like torture: launching myself into something I loved but from which I felt utterly disconnected. I no longer imagined myself as a free range academic because without a PhD and an institution no one was going to make my work seriously. I alienated myself and struggle through this gap of wanting and not wanting.
When I woke up the morning after that message exchange, I realized just what I had lost. There are few things I can list under what I believe. Belief is a horribly problematic word and concept. But I do believe that we humans are meaning make machines. All of us find ourselves constructed by stories, practices, and significations. Some of us have more power than others to shape those constructions of course but we all engage in this activity. Usually unawares. For the last few years, there is a part of my life that feels in stasis. Unconstructed. The part of myself that I saw as an academic was a part that had been built upon for many years. Boards laid in place through encouragement and amazingly enough rejection.
See, my original plan from the time I was ten or so was to be a writer. I tried my hand at publishing when I was in my 20s and like most early writers faced a landslide of rejection notices. When I was 23, I applied to the creative writing program at a local college. Not only was I rejected, I was rejected after receiving someone else's acceptance letter. After all these years, the feeling of joy when I read that I was accepted only to go on and realize the enclosed story wasn't mine still aches. I imagined this some other person sat at her kitchen table reading MY rejection letter. I remember when the head confirmed the news, and said as a consolation "We felt that you would be successful at many things not just writing." At the time that felt like cold comfort. I walked around in a fog of pain, insecurity, and meaninglessness. The yearning to be told if I was good enough had been meet with a resounding no and now I wasn't sure if the knowing helped.
But this time I got lucky and a professor commented that I was smart. A horrible writer but smart. I believe his words were "I don't know how someone as smart as you can have so many grammar errors." But it was a lifeline and I took it in my hands like a drowning victim. For the next 15 years these words followed by others shaped me into an academic. Of course I struggled with that nagging insecurity but it was something. I was something. Somebody. I had purpose.
The first rejection letter stung. But when the U of Toronto letter marked my final rejection, I felt the same way I did when I had to sit with that department. Another confirmation that I was indeed not good enough. You wanted to know I taunted myself because I house a deeply mean inner girl. Fortunately this time around I had other meanings built up. My family. Homeschooling. Things that were vital and important.
However I still floundered because there was this piece that felt missing. I tried religion, and for a time it worked. I imagined myself getting into theology or counseling. But the problem of not really believing (and yes I know the word is complicated) kept me at a distance. I tried to engage through practice but it felt fake and awkward. I tried spirituality recently with the same results. I am not a religious person anymore even though I still find religious things deeply fascinating. There was no building me into that religious person. I dipped my foot into the being the "disability mom" but that didn't fit either. I don't like making so much of my meaning rest on my children. Icky.
Lately I tried writing. I finished a novel. I think it's okay. And I realized when I got the news about a potential graduate program close to me that something important had shifted in the last six years. There was an identity in that space; one that scared me yes but it was there. I wrote my novel in a month. A month of frenzied, wonderful, exhilarating writing. Editing has not been meet with the same enthusiasm. It is February and I am only 30 pages into my novel. In December, I told myself it was the business of the season. Exhaustion from writing so much so fast. The drudgery of five six kids and a six mama. But by mid January I admitted it was fear. Wonder if my novel was so horrible I couldn't even read it? I couldn't bear the thought. Still I pushed myself one to day to read. And yes there were some major problems but it was a solid story. I pushed further and realized I still loved my characters, and loved my plot. Tentatively I began to sit more firmly in the idea I was a writer. An identity I had shied from since that long ago rejection.
Over the last few weeks, a few incidents have popped up that make that old insecurity crack open again. Fears that I am foolish and presumptuous to take on the title of writer. Fears that the local college had it right in denying me the title writer. Graduate school became something else in this moment of fear. It was the second choice. Something I knew and felt comfortable doing even as I felt I was not good enough. A chance to prove myself and make a claim about worth. Graduate school for all it's shit did a fairly good job of giving me constant feedback about my place in the world. Being a writer does not offer these same comforts. My blog doesn't get enough hits to give that kind of feedback. No one who has read my work has come out and said "Wow you're shat time to move on love" but they've also not said "Wow you have talent. Keep writing." And slowly I am starting to think that even if someone did say these things that this wouldn't be my defining moment as a writer. While I don't buy into the ridiculous notion that we give ourselves meaning, I am sure that my identity as a writer comes from having stories to tell not necessarily from having admirers. And for the first time, I feel that the academy does not get to be the end of my story.
A new PhD program? Pfft. I was done with the academy. Over it. Moved on.
But later that night as I lay in that inbetweeness of sleep and awake, I started to make plans. I could retake my GREs. H wouldn't mind do some teaching jobs while I did my thing. Umberto would be old enough to do some babysitting if we had gaps. Surely I could juggle therapy and class schedules with a little magic. Only when I felt the tears starting to form did I snap myself out of this hazy dream world.
For a few days, I walked around with the heavy load of failure. I joke often that I am an academic failure but like most jokes this one has a stinger. If I had my PhD, I could rely on the evidence that on the impossibility of tenure especially for women. But I don't have that piece of paper that at one point represented to me the pinnacle of success. Instead, I was the person who couldn't even get her foot in the door for a more noble failure. When I told people that I was not accepted into a PhD program, I imagined that I could see in their eyes my own thoughts: She wasn't good enough. She wasn't smart enough. Of course time dulled some of these feelings, or at least help me push them into the background of my life.
As time puts distance between my academic past and me, I found myself still floundering. I no longer posted on my academic friends post and when I did I offered apologies for my ignorance. At some point, I stopped reading academic books because it felt like torture: launching myself into something I loved but from which I felt utterly disconnected. I no longer imagined myself as a free range academic because without a PhD and an institution no one was going to make my work seriously. I alienated myself and struggle through this gap of wanting and not wanting.
When I woke up the morning after that message exchange, I realized just what I had lost. There are few things I can list under what I believe. Belief is a horribly problematic word and concept. But I do believe that we humans are meaning make machines. All of us find ourselves constructed by stories, practices, and significations. Some of us have more power than others to shape those constructions of course but we all engage in this activity. Usually unawares. For the last few years, there is a part of my life that feels in stasis. Unconstructed. The part of myself that I saw as an academic was a part that had been built upon for many years. Boards laid in place through encouragement and amazingly enough rejection.
See, my original plan from the time I was ten or so was to be a writer. I tried my hand at publishing when I was in my 20s and like most early writers faced a landslide of rejection notices. When I was 23, I applied to the creative writing program at a local college. Not only was I rejected, I was rejected after receiving someone else's acceptance letter. After all these years, the feeling of joy when I read that I was accepted only to go on and realize the enclosed story wasn't mine still aches. I imagined this some other person sat at her kitchen table reading MY rejection letter. I remember when the head confirmed the news, and said as a consolation "We felt that you would be successful at many things not just writing." At the time that felt like cold comfort. I walked around in a fog of pain, insecurity, and meaninglessness. The yearning to be told if I was good enough had been meet with a resounding no and now I wasn't sure if the knowing helped.
But this time I got lucky and a professor commented that I was smart. A horrible writer but smart. I believe his words were "I don't know how someone as smart as you can have so many grammar errors." But it was a lifeline and I took it in my hands like a drowning victim. For the next 15 years these words followed by others shaped me into an academic. Of course I struggled with that nagging insecurity but it was something. I was something. Somebody. I had purpose.
The first rejection letter stung. But when the U of Toronto letter marked my final rejection, I felt the same way I did when I had to sit with that department. Another confirmation that I was indeed not good enough. You wanted to know I taunted myself because I house a deeply mean inner girl. Fortunately this time around I had other meanings built up. My family. Homeschooling. Things that were vital and important.
However I still floundered because there was this piece that felt missing. I tried religion, and for a time it worked. I imagined myself getting into theology or counseling. But the problem of not really believing (and yes I know the word is complicated) kept me at a distance. I tried to engage through practice but it felt fake and awkward. I tried spirituality recently with the same results. I am not a religious person anymore even though I still find religious things deeply fascinating. There was no building me into that religious person. I dipped my foot into the being the "disability mom" but that didn't fit either. I don't like making so much of my meaning rest on my children. Icky.
Lately I tried writing. I finished a novel. I think it's okay. And I realized when I got the news about a potential graduate program close to me that something important had shifted in the last six years. There was an identity in that space; one that scared me yes but it was there. I wrote my novel in a month. A month of frenzied, wonderful, exhilarating writing. Editing has not been meet with the same enthusiasm. It is February and I am only 30 pages into my novel. In December, I told myself it was the business of the season. Exhaustion from writing so much so fast. The drudgery of five six kids and a six mama. But by mid January I admitted it was fear. Wonder if my novel was so horrible I couldn't even read it? I couldn't bear the thought. Still I pushed myself one to day to read. And yes there were some major problems but it was a solid story. I pushed further and realized I still loved my characters, and loved my plot. Tentatively I began to sit more firmly in the idea I was a writer. An identity I had shied from since that long ago rejection.
Over the last few weeks, a few incidents have popped up that make that old insecurity crack open again. Fears that I am foolish and presumptuous to take on the title of writer. Fears that the local college had it right in denying me the title writer. Graduate school became something else in this moment of fear. It was the second choice. Something I knew and felt comfortable doing even as I felt I was not good enough. A chance to prove myself and make a claim about worth. Graduate school for all it's shit did a fairly good job of giving me constant feedback about my place in the world. Being a writer does not offer these same comforts. My blog doesn't get enough hits to give that kind of feedback. No one who has read my work has come out and said "Wow you're shat time to move on love" but they've also not said "Wow you have talent. Keep writing." And slowly I am starting to think that even if someone did say these things that this wouldn't be my defining moment as a writer. While I don't buy into the ridiculous notion that we give ourselves meaning, I am sure that my identity as a writer comes from having stories to tell not necessarily from having admirers. And for the first time, I feel that the academy does not get to be the end of my story.
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