 Yesterday I was supposed to have a date with this guy, I’ll call him Frank, who is very confident and possibly a little skeazy, so I was already a bit intimidated and could feel myself automating into Good Little Girl mode. I was tired, and it was a gorgeous Sunday, and Emm and I had just gotten to our beautiful housesit. I wanted to go on the date, but I didn’t want to go on the date. Driving two hours, what a pain, and this my last chance to rest up for the new week. And then, barely an hour before I should have been getting ready to go, Emm came and dumped on me the depths of her pain and rage over my latest return to dating—not, as I’d thought, because it triggered her pain over Phil’s death three years ago, at least not exclusively, but moreso it seems due to her pain over my abandonment, the way I disappear. It made perfect sense, and it cut me to the quick. Sent me plunging straight down a shame spiral of the fact that I am not a good father OR a good mother, because I can’t provide and I can’t nurture either. (This is not true, of course, but I always go to worst-case, black-and-white thinking in a shame response.) Oh, man, I just plummeted. I could see it happening, so there was that, but I didn’t have much energetic fuel in the tank with which to interrupt it, and anyway, to a certain extent those feelings simply need to be felt. So in the midst of this, I texted this guy Frank and canceled our date only a couple hours beforehand. I was so scared. I fully expected him to be angry, to accuse me of playing him, to be a dick about it—and when he wasn’t, when he was very sweet and understanding instead, it had me in tears. Well, I was in tears by then anyway. Then he called. I ignored the call. He texted, and I waited a couple hours to text back. I just didn’t have any energy to manage his feelings when I was already trying to manage my daughter’s and my own. And that’s when I realized that another of my challenges in love is shutdown mode. I was legitimately activated into a pain place and a shame spiral. Saying so to someone I’ve never met was much too vulnerable, but not saying so is also vulnerable, and I was in such anxiety over the anger he might direct towards me. From my shame place, I had no bandwidth for talking with him and communicating clearly about why I was canceling the date or when I could reschedule it or what was really going on. I just had no access. I had shut down. It’s a challenge that, for the duration of however much time I spend in a shame response, I stop being able to engage. It isn’t entirely fair to the other person. Yesterday I was thinking, how will I find a man compassionate enough to understand my trauma healing journey and the ways I’m learning to regulate myself back from a freeze-state shutdown? Today, though, I have access again to my rational thinking. And if I’ve learned one thing by now, it’s that the path to finding a compassionate partner is through being compassionate first to myself. If I can’t create safe, loving space for my own discomfort, no man ever will. So yesterday served as a reminder for me to hold my own pain gently. My daughter shared with me some ways that my behavior has hurt her, and in addition to supporting and validating her, I also had to support myself. It’s hard work. No saying, I’m still a recovering codependent, so in addition to managing my own big emotions, I was looking for the balance of how much it was appropriate for me to help my daughter manage hers—and if I had talked to Frank then, there was just no way I was not getting sucked into thinking I had to manage his. I’m glad I can let myself plummet now and feel the bad feelings, knowing that in a little while, I’ll be able to climb back up and out. At least I don’t have to hide from the feelings or do something self-destructive to make them go away. And I’m glad that, even though I sometimes still go into freeze-mode shutdowns under extreme emotions, I can take care of myself and hold my boundaries there. The rest will heal, as L. R. Knost writes, “not with time...but with intention.” I’ve come far enough to trust myself that I can get the rest of the way.
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 Weight is a thing for me. My isolated upbringing in a religious commune notwithstanding, American culture did a doozy on me, and by the end of my teens, my negative body image was well entrenched. It wasn’t even my body so much, it was me (already unworthy, as far as God and I were concerned) going around in a body, period. I was inherently flawed. So must my body be. I was a skinny teenager, but I watched my weight—if that’s what you call eating junk food and then berating myself for it. Estimating grams of fat in my head and fretting that I’d had too many. Having a pack of peanut M&Ms and balancing the anticipated pleasure of eating that delicious candy against the anticipated horror of gaining weight. I’m 5’10”, with a naturally slender build, but I have an anomaly: my big hips. (Sometime in my teenage years, some forgotten adult, probably a well-meaning woman who pitied me, told me that in pioneer days all the men would have wanted to marry me. Why? Because they’d see my wide hips and know they could take me off to a wilderness homestead and count on me to birth their babies without up and dying on them.) I have wide hips, wide shoulders, just a wide torso in general. This lack of adherence to the societal ideal has tortured me. My lovely slender build, these long arms and legs—“willowy,” I’ve often been called, and it was always my favorite adjective—and then, KLONK, these wide hips, this big bum, throwing off the balance, un-willowing me. Once in a while I would see a photo of myself taken from behind and be mortified, filled with shame and revulsion—I worked so hard to look okay by societal standards, to be as good-enough as I could be, and then I’d see those Benedict Arnold hips of mine, that big squishy butt. Don’t you guys get it? Don’t you get that I am working really hard to be skinny enough to deserve love, and you’re just squishing around like you can be as big as you want and there’ll be no price for me to pay?! I was 25, I’d left the church and had my first boyfriend, then my second; I was enjoying male satisfaction with my physique for the first time in my life, and I had this epiphany: my ass comprises the best curves I’ve got—I may as well own it! But those Teen Vogues came back to me, the few contraband copies I’d managed to see during my sheltered teenage years; I had internalized that a societally attractive woman has big breasts, not big hips, and even in the face of my partner’s approval, I still felt like the consolation prize. Sorry for my small boobies, but I’ve got a big juicy butt, so maybe that’s better than bad? In my mind, I was the consolation prize. Hence the great amount of energy I expended—more with the passing years—to stay as skinny as I could. I was 31 and married when I had my first real bout of anorexia: I wonder how little food I can eat in a day and still function? I wonder how skinny I can get if I eat as little as possible for months on end? I got real skinny. I got divorced. I gained the weight back. I judged myself. Whether I weighed more or less, I continued to self-identify as a consolation prize. Even when people called my body gorgeous, I never looked gorgeous to myself. I hit my 40s, I weighed the most I ever had, I found the guy I wanted to grow old with. Then he died suddenly, and the weight fell off me—turns out the grief diet is highly effective! I lost 40 pounds and found myself, mid-forties, back in the body I’d had as a 20-year-old. (The body of my 30s was actually skinnier, but that was self-starvation skinny, and I understood the difference.) Here was a different kind of consolation prize: your heart will be shattered, but hey, you’ll be skinny again. I looked in the mirror and there she was, willowy me. Gorgeous. But then I faced the challenge of how to stay willowy. So began a renewed obsession with my eating—is this too much? Is that? I’m hungry, but I don’t want to gain weight, so I should go without. Only I know myself now, and I know there’s no love in self-starving, no integrity in trying to abuse my body into looking a certain way. I’m too old for that crap. I can’t lose myself in that trance of self-loathing and control anymore. I know better. Two years after Phil’s death, I started a new relationship. By then I’d begun padding back out, and during the months Brian and I were together, all that weight that had fallen off me, fell right back on. It felt like my body was relaxing back into itself. I stared in the mirror like I always had, aiming a harsh, appraising eye at my belly and thighs. The bigger breasts were fine; the bigger bum I could own; the bigger stomach, though—unforgivable. Except that there was Brian saying, oh my god, you look so much better. BETTER? I showed him pictures of 30s me, ultra-skinny, back during the years when I felt good enough (though was unable to enjoy it because I had to calorie-restrict so obsessively from fear of becoming not good enough)—and he looked at them and said, “you look like you need a good meal.” WHAT? I was too skinny? That’s a thing? But—but—all those Teen Vogues! I thought being willowy was the only way I’d ever be loved! Yet Brian, the sole person who actually saw me naked, whose opinion of the flesh on my bones actually impacted me, was not saying, “should you eat that?” Instead, he’d catch me in that squinty-appraising moment before his full-length mirror and speak up at once: “I’m so glad I met you when you’d already put some weight back on, or it would have taken so much longer for you to get back to this.” The pudge, the pooch, the squish, everything bad and unlovable about my uncooperative, noncompliant, would-never-be-featured-in-Teen-Vogue body. I was desired for this. These Jezebel curves, my no-longer-willowy frame—all those years I tried to pretend myself away, horrified when I saw a photo that reminded me I was fooling no one but myself. Those skeletal mid-30s moments in the mirror when I nodded, “this is the body I’ve always wanted,” then peered a little closer and concluded, “well, once I’ve lost a little more off my thighs.” Those bony thighs had no more to lose. And I have no more time to waste in the pursuit of being willowy. It’s so funny to me that I spent decades believing that men would only love me skinny, and then one guy loved me soft instead, and my body image completely shifted. Perhaps it was the intense work I did, after Phil died, to learn finally to love myself. Perhaps it’s sobriety. Perhaps I’ve reached the age where it just feels like, ahhh, screw this. For years, I starved myself compulsively. I would finish my carefully-portioned meal, still feeling hungry, and forbid myself to take seconds: you’ve eaten enough to stay alive; that’s enough. How will you ever get skinny if you keep on eating til you’re satisfied? God forbid, right? God forbid that I be satisfied. God forbid that I have, let alone be, enough. This is my gift of love to myself, decades overdue—that I eat when I’m hungry. That I enjoy peanut M&Ms every single day. That I shop for size 12 trousers and don’t promise myself I’ll be a 6 again next year. After some months single, I’m toying with dating again, and as I do, I realize that I’ve kept the stunning knowledge of myself as desirable for my softness, not in spite of it. Still the prize, but without the consolation—suddenly, late-40s, after a lifetime of self-loathing and self-starvation, I look in the mirror at my societally unapproved curves and think, gorgeous. |
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