It dawned on me, all of a sudden, that my life as an overweight person - whatever my degree of overweight - has been, and still is, marked by constant comparisons. Comparisons from others, comparisons from me, comparisons that probably never existed, that I was only imagining. In a way, I find this behavior ugly. In another way, realizing it may actually help me to reach a new step in my journey.
I don’t make a mystery of it, I’ve pretty much always be overweight, or more precisely, for the past 20 years, which is a lot to the scale of my life (I’m 26 this summer). Being too proud and too strong-willed to let anyone see me down for such reasons, I’ve never shown to others how their remarks about “you piggy” and other nice words were hurting me. It’s not that they never tried, of course; I just think that the fairly low quantity of insults had much to do with my attitude of “don’t mess with me or you’ll regret it”, with my way of clearly showing, at the first attempts at mockery, that I wouldn’t let the harsh words bother me, and that I had the means and the will to retaliate in a hurtful way as well (I mean with wits, that is - not with physical blows!).
It however doesn’t mean that I wasn’t very self-conscious when it came to “what do the others think of me”, and I find that my attitude on this point has always be rather ambiguous. On the one hand, I’d still try to wear the clothes that I liked, not the ones that were advised to me (also known as: “the sacks”); on the other hand, I’d regularly wonder about how I looked like to other people’s eyes, hoping that I didn’t look too ridiculous, that this shirt wasn’t too short, that these pants weren’t making my butt look even bigger than it was. That’s when I was being haunted by this feeling of “constant comparison”.
Even now that I’ve shed more than half of the weight I plan on losing, I still retain reflexes from the times of being “really fat”. If I hear someone laughing in the street, my first thought is: “they’re laughing at me”. If someone watches me, I immediately wonder if perhaps I don’t look too fat, too ridiculous. I understand better now the many articles and blog entries about “never feeling slim, even when we did slim down” - and it’s hard to get used to being “just slightly overweight” instead of being “the fatty, the piggy”. I still think of all of this in terms of comparisons: what do I look like, what does the average passer-by in the street think of me when they look at me, do they smirk and think “what a fat ass” (when they probably don’t even pay attention all, come to think of it!)… It is stupid and likely unfounded, yet these thoughts remain in me, as strong as they were before. Really, what’s worse is this self-talk about comparisons that don’t exist; sure, perhaps another patron at the local fast-food would think “look, the fat one eating a cheeseburger, no wonder she’s fat!”, but seriously, in random circumstances, who the heck cares enough about people in general to constantly look at other ones in case they’d find an opportunity to pick on them?
Here’s when it becomes ugly, for in spite of my own weight, I remember that when I was younger, I would also proceed to comparisons - mainly to comfort myself, though, not in a mocking way. For instance, in school, I’d “compare” myself to girls who were more overweight than me, and I’d feel happy and comforted at things as trivial as noticing that their butts were taking more room on a chair than mine. I wasn’t devoid of such lame thoughts, really; it’s somewhat shameful of admitting it, as all of us “fatties” were after all in the same basket to the eyes of the “normal” teenagers, with their clothes becoming sexier and sexier with each passing year, their getting a boyfriend when we’d never have dared speaking to our own crushes in fear of being rejected, their easiness in sports and the fact that they could wear whatever they wanted without looking ridiculous. Thus I’d compare myself to others, too: “at least I’m not too bad this way, I could have 20 more pounds like the girl over there, and then it’d be worse for me!” Such ugly, degrading thoughts, when I look back on it. I wasn’t better than “the thin ones” who would judge us.
This all comes back to one point, though - “comparisons” probably are part of our lives from the moment we started gaining weight, and the longer we’ve had this weight on, the longer we may need to stop getting these thoughts. I’m not a kid anymore, I don’t comfort myself anymore in thinking that “some people have it worse than me”, yet it’ll very likely take me more than just a few months to realize that nobody is constantly watching me, making remarks in my back, mocking me either openly or in their hearts of hearts.
Next time I hear a laughter in the street, I’ll do my best to assume that it’s not about me, and that the person is simply chatting and joking with friends about something completely unrelated.
- Kery
