the 3 words most people think a woman wants to hear - preferably whispered into our ear, please...on a street corner...in the rain...in paris. merci.
lovely words, yes, but...
you've lost weight!
the 3 words most women actually want to hear.
even if i know that i haven't lost weight - as a matter of fact, my jeans are tighter and as far as my breasts go, my cups runneth over - i still get a little giddy at the sound of those words. it trips some sort of ecstatic circuit in me and for a few moments i am flying...i can see the utopian village of Gwynethin from up here, and it's to be mine, all MINE mwahahahaha!!!
but at the same turn, it pisses me off...catch me on a different day, or five minutes later and:
WHAT!? are you saying i was fat before? not good enough then? but NOW you think i'm pretty? thin enough? huh? HUH? HUHHHHHH?????
god, it's exhausting.
i started thinking about this charming little idiosyncracy ha. b/c i was walking home with my friend t last night and he said those 3 incendiary words...
you've lost weight?
which set off the whole series of aforementioned emotional fireworks. poor, poor t. luckily he's well aware of my combustible nature and likes me anyway. i know he didn't mean it in a bad way...t is an unconditional pal, he hangs out with me when i'm sopping with sweat after bikram yoga class for chrissakes, and has accompanied me red and puffy, reduced to tears on a subway.
but...
i am just so tired of being judged by my weight, clarity of skin, haircolor, thinness of thighs, firmness of abs, blah blah blah blah...i have spent a lifetime trying to be the version of Me that so-and-so wants Me to be instead of the Me that i am. so, it bothers me anytime i might feel my value as a human being is being determined by what i look like regardless of the onlooker's opinion - positive or negative, even when it might just be a harmless little, god forbid, compliment.
my body is not a Mad Libs game:
just because i am pretty (or not), does not mean i am _______.
just because i am fat (or not), does not mean i am _______.
capiche?
i am tired of caring.
and yet, i do care, dammit.
argh!
calvin klein wasn't jokin' when he created a perfume for women called contradiction - a scent with strong notes of ylang-ylang, lavender, and occasionally overwhelming beeatch.
it's like i've got two women battling it out in my head - the Barbie clone who desperately cares what other people think and the Angry White Female in doc martens listening to ani difranco full-blast on her ipod who desperately does not want to care, but does, in spite of herself. you'd think the AWF would be the obvious winner, she wears steel-toed boots and a spiked collar after all, but do not be fooled by the deceptive pink prettiness of the Barb whose pointy plastic pieds can puncture and deflate a hi-falutin' self-esteem in a matter of moments.
pfffft.
so, how do i learn to reconcile these two very different women living inside my head?
god, i wish i knew. i think i should throw them both out and redecorate.
2 comments:
As a boy (of 43) who also happens to be a recovering anorexic, I can identify. When I finally gained enough weight that people no longer thought I was dying of a horrible disease (I had been, but they never suspected that one), people thought it was nothing to say things like "Wow, you've gotten chunky" (I hadn't) or "Look at that gut!" (I didn't have one, but compared to before....) It drove me nuts. Now I've been the same weight for 17 years, and I still hate the way I look on bad days; on good days, I accept that I look awful (I don't, really, but that's my brain). It's a weird, weird world. I love your blog!
thanks so much for your comment, doug. it's always so helpful to hear this from a guy...er, i mean, boy. ( : i think most of us women folks think this disease/dysfunction/whatever is exclusive to us girls. heaven knows, it's not.
and amen. it IS a weird , weird world.
congrats on your recovery, and keep on keepin' on. I'LL bet you're beautiful, not awful at all...
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