I hated myself ever since I understood was a self was. Even when I was a child, I was acutely aware that my body was unacceptable in the world I was living in and no one was shy about letting me know it. My body became an extension of my self hatred. A justification in some ways. How could I possibly be lovable when my body refused to melt into that size 2 I was supposed to be?
In 2014 or 2015 I received a Facebook message from an account I had already blocked on my blog’s public page. I quickly realized it was my former future mother-in-law (I was engaged to her son). She dropped me a line to tell me how immature I was and mean I was. She casually mentioned that she had photos of me in my underwear eating food and she was such a kind and gracious person that she hasn’t released them to the world.
Yet.
I knew immediately what I what I needed to do. While I couldn’t locate the exact photos she was describing, I quickly found photos of myself in my underwear hours before I underwent gastric sleeve surgery. They were supposed to be my “before” photos. I wrote up a blog, uploaded all the photos, and bumped the scheduled post so this would post at noon.
Something inside of me had snapped. A woman thought she could blackmail me with the reality of my own body looked like and even though total radical self acceptance was several years off for me, I knew one thing: I had no reason to be ashamed of my body. No matter what size or shape it took.
And fuck anyone who thought otherwise.
My ex-fiance (the aforementioned woman’s son) once shouted at me until I cried, saying I was too fat, he was struggling to find my attractive, and he just cared about my health, really. Which I should have laughed at at the time. My physical health was pretty good at that point. What I really didn’t need for my mental health was someone screaming at me and claiming it was out of love.
Right now, my physical health is also pretty good. I’m still disabled, so I can’t really claim that clean bill everyone tells me I should aspire to. Currently, my only problem is the exhausting assumption that, as a fat woman, I must be counting calories, planning for cosmetic surgeries, doing whatever I can to lose weight and look more like an acceptable celebrity, because there is nothing more audacious than a fat person who isn’t powered by anxiety over their self image.
But here we are!
I realized one day, I was tired of having to say I hate my thighs whenever someone mentioned a body part they disliked. I got tired of talking about diets endlessly and theorizing what move to make next when they inevitably failed.
It was only in my late 30s that I was finally able to say that I really loved myself and understood myself and was willing to work with the self I have to become the best version of me I could evolve into. But now that I’m here, I’m really done talking about diets. Good and bad bodies. How everyone should look. How they shouldn’t. What products can produce the best slimming results.