TL;DR: As someone who has had deep body issues for 20 years, I have come out on the other side of severe depression and sexual trauma to begin a healthy pursuit towards weight loss...while having PCOS. There’s a lot goin’ on here!
Hello everyone! Long time lurker, but never written (or even joined) prior to this. For a long time, on many different occasions, I’ve felt compelled to chime in or contribute my own post, but I did not, for whatever reason. I am now embarking on what feels like a complete over-haul in physical and mental health, and a complete lifestyle change to move towards genuine health and happiness. As such, I find myself at the bottom of what seems like a really fuckin’ tall mountain. I hope I can start utilizing the amazing community and support system places like this thread can provide. So, I want to just share my story. I hope that it finds you, and you find it helpful or moving or interesting-or something. If not, that’s okay too. :)
So, I’m gonna be as detailed as I can while attempting to keep this condensed. This is gonna be a long boi no matter what, but I’ll do my best to keep it reasonable.
I am a young woman, 24 years old, turning 25 next spring. For as long as I can remember-and I truly mean this-I’ve been aware of the space that my body took up. The first time I was around children who weren’t my neighbors or family members, the first day of kindergarten, I had an interaction with a kid named... Matthew. (fuck you, Matthew.) It should be noted that I was a mixed little girl (curly light brown hair, tan skin. My mother is mostly Italian, and some smaller degree Lebanese and Polish while my father is African American with a strong French/creole lineage from his mom’s side.) and I didn’t look much like my classmates. I already stuck out in many ways from the girls I shared play-time with. The black children didn’t believe I was black, and I wasn’t white enough for the white kids either. This is an entirely separate story in itself, but I think it’s important to mention because it instilled in me a strong sense of “outsiderness”. I never quite felt like I belonged anywhere. Still don’t, tbh. So, on top of that, I was a little chubby. It honestly pains me to have to even say that, because what was quite literally harmless baby fat was blown out of proportion for me in childhood, and kind of created a complex that grew and morphed with me as I aged. Anyway, back to Matthew. I was playing with a little girl on the first day who had offered to share the mini kitchenette privileges with me. We were pretending to eat those plastic McDonald’s hotcakes and chicken nuggets, for anyone who remembers them. I remember this really clearly. It was just she and I hanging out, minding our own fucking business, when Matthew comes over and asks what we’re doing, to which I or my friend replies something along the lines of “making lunch/dinner/whatever”. Mind you, Matthew is a marvel to 5 year old me. He’s blonde and blue eyed, and also a boy. I was an only child who was exposed to my artist parents and their adult friends. By 5 I knew my cousins and the boy next door. That was it. So he made my tiny heart pitter patter. Matthew, who was worldly and full of sage wisdom, told us something like: “You can’t play house without a husband”. Or a daddy. Or whatever other creepy sexist shit we were fed as little kids about domestic play. And my friend says, “Well which one of us is going to be your wife?” And Matthew points his finger at my friend and says, “You.” To me he says, “You’re kind of fat” I didn’t know exactly what that word indicated for me but I knew it was something that was “bad” to be. I went home and cried, then asked my mom what it meant. I don’t remember the conversation that would have followed. I do remember, however, my mom making me pick him out from her car while on the way to school and telling me to yell at him from her car window. I refused, and she ended up bringing enough popsicles for all but one person in my class like a day later to send the message that he was a punk. I learned to internalize two beliefs when I was 5. The first being that I was fat, and the second being that being fat was undesirable. It was the building block of my later damaging and distorted beliefs about myself and my value to the world (and, unfortunately, specifically my value to men). All it took was that comment. No amount of discussion or rage from my mother could fade the impression Matthew had made on me.
Soon after, when I was 7, my mother’s brutal and dangerous alcoholism started to gain momentum. She was hurling towards oblivion at great speeds and was almost completely out of my life by the time I was 10. I’d watched her have an affair with the neighbor, try to kidnap me and take me to live in California with him, found vodka bottles empty hidden in places in my room so my father couldn’t find them, watched her attempt suicide (she believed I was asleep, and she swallowed a bottle of prescription pills. My dad had to reach into her throat to physically scoop them out.) and finally, the end seemed to come when, during an asthma attack, I took a giant drink from her plastic water bottle and found it to be vodka, not water. My mother was a soft touch, but a deeply troubled woman. She was loving, affectionate, and positively affirming for me. She was exactly who I thought I was supposed to be when I grew up. She was devastatingly gorgeous and kind, and always taught me to root for the underdog. But she was really sick. And it was no longer safe for me to be around her. When she was gone, my dear dad was suddenly tasked with bringing me up all on his own. He was a hibernating punk rocker, a guy who fell in love and stopped living on people’s couches long enough to get a good engineering job and raise a family. When the support of doing this with his partner was taken from him, he was totally bewildered. I am now closer to my dad than anyone I know is with their own parents, and I think he did a fucking amazing job with me. That being said, I was on my own alot. He was extremely protective of me, so I wasn’t unsupervised-I was just alone. I played elaborate games of barbies, I wrote stories-I was deeply active in a fantasy life. I had a lot of friends, but I preferred my own company a lot of the time. So I wasn’t really exposed to the same things my friends were. By choice, but still. I guess this is getting ridiculously long, so I’ll speed up. I grew up with intense body issues. Deep, deep insecurities. And no female influence to guide me or diffuse the situation. I deferred to the outside world for this guidance, and therein lies my problem. I let the world form ideas about what kind of girl I was, how desirable I was, how normal I was. I was always the best friend, the late bloomer, the funny/smart/artist (insert whatever adjective you want there, they all served the same purpose.) girl. The one who was probably more fun to hang out with that the girl you wanted to fuck, but...let’s face it, was not as hot as her friend. At least I think that’s the mindset. I don’t really know. I was diagnosed with body dysmorphia at 16. I lost my virginity to my best friend’s older brother, drunk at a party. He treated me coldly after and I enlisted my older friend to buy me Plan B and spent the entire next day in bed weeping like my ribs had been cracked open. That was the pattern I created, and am still actively trying to break. I have never had sex sober. I have never had sex with someone who cared about me. And I have always, ALWAYS, associated my body with being undesirable and not good enough-which has seriously fucked up my approach to love and sexuality. You may wonder how this is relevant to weight loss. But the way that I viewed my body was that it was ugly and not deserving of real care. Not internally, not externally. I am 5’4 and curvy. I have big hips, a big butt, and a good sized chest. My waist is quite small, which has afforded me a very love/hate relationship with my body. Fast forward through to years and years of inadvertent sexual sexual trauma, a lot of old shit from the past I have to constantly work through, and a weird relationship with alcohol- thank you MOM-I have gained a lot of weight since highschool. About 60 pounds. Most people can’t tell how much I’ve gained because of the way my body distributes fat, but obviously I notice every single detail. It has, in the past, plunged me into deep, deep depression. I was truly suicidal on two separate occasions in the last 4 years, and found myself treating my body like it was a weapon to combat the brutality that was inflicted upon me. Men mistreated me, but I also perpetuated this mistreatment, and was in all reality, equally as brutal to myself as any man or woman had ever been. I have tried everything in the book since I was about 11 years old to try and be “beautiful.” I had eating disorders. I worked out. I went on fad diets. Blah blah blah. But I made no strides for mental recovery; fuck, I didn’t even realize I was in need of it. Since the second and hopefully last call I made to the Suicide Hotline- I have been on a deep journey for inner peace and the pursuit of being gentle with myself. I now feel, 2 years later, ready to finish up the last leg, the homestretch-physical weight loss. Though I am constantly focusing on myself mentally, I feel ready to lose weight in a way that is healthy and forever. I recently got a diagnosis of PCOS(poly cystic ovary syndrome. This fucks with your hormones and insulin response and other levels in your bod, so weight gain is easy peasy and weight loss is tough as shit. Lucky us!) -one which I was expecting and basically knew I had anyway-which is helpful, because I can finally understand why things that work for other people don’t work for me. I quit my office job that made me FUCKING miserable, and got a new dream job that begins in December. Thanks to savings, I have 2 months of rent taken care of and am free to stay unemployed (relatively; I am an artist and freelance writer who makes enough on the side for living modestly if rent is not an issue.) so I am using this time to FULLY dedicate myself to this journey. I don’t have a goal date necessarily, though I would like to ring in the new year with a lot of progress under my belt. I am currently using the bullet journal method which is great for me, because I fuckin’ love physically seeing things, filling up notebooks, making lists. The apps just don’t work for me and the way I respond to things. I’m also on low carb diet, starting today, and hormonal meds addressing the PCOS. So, things are looking up. This is my way of introducing myself, and I’m hoping that this can be yet another way to hold myself accountable and help me on my journey. I’m considering posting a before picture, but I’m quite nervous as it is. Thank you all for listening if you’ve gotten this far. I’m going to post this in a PCOS related weight loss thread as well, because I know I obsessively google things when I am struggling with something, and it’s majorly helpful just to read other people’s stories and identify or find inspiration from them. I’m hoping this could do that. I know it’s basically an essay, but I at least hope it does some good.
Feel free to introduce yourselves and share any insight or stories you may have. <3
