Me before I began this healing journey. |
This journey has had so many ups and
downs, it is hard to even quantify them all. But some of the mile
markers recently have been the most emotionally vertigo inducing.
We have a Honda Minivan, because an ex
was obsessed with not buying an American car. It wasn't a great
answer, at the time. It was expensive, and cars made by tiny Asian
people tend to completely fail to accommodate differently
proportioned Americans, let alone very overweight ones.
For a lot of reasons that mostly
involved being exhausted with battling and not really having my needs
respected, I eventually just gave in and said it would do. It was
one of those dumb things that those of us with autoimmune disease are
prone to do. Eventually we're just trying to make everyone else
happy, because we can't find a way to meet everyone's needs, and
those around us are busy pushing back on all of ours, and we're
exhausted.
In retrospect I can see all the stupid
parts of that decision. But one of the more frustrating consequences
of it was that, the seat belts never worked for me. I eventually
gave in and went on a quest for a seat belt extender. It's
humiliating enough to be stuck with a foreign car with short seat
belts made for 120 pound people, and to need a seat belt extender.
But had I known at purchase time that Honda doesn't even make such a
thing to meet the needs of their customers and refuses to care about
fat people's safety on the subject, I wouldn't have okayed the
purchase of the car, even with my tendencies to try to make peace.
That left after market and third party
options. There was an extreme lack of them, which just further
emphasized the humiliation and helplessness of the problem. Everyone
likes to tell themselves they would never get that heavy, that it's a
set of choices I was making, that maybe I just needed to get off my
butt and pass on the potato chips. They tell themselves it can't
happen to them. But I assure you that I could follow all that
advice, and it made not a bit of difference. If anything, following
that sort of advice became an unhealthy form of self torture based on
the constant fear of it continuing to spiral out of control. And the
more I yo-yo'd the more extreme the rebound every time. And so I did
what all those trusted authorities and our whole culture seems to
believe in. Only it wasn't working.
And so that left me with hours of web
searching, just to be a little bit safe driving the car, and not
having to listen to that infernal behavioral modification system of
beeps telling me “You're too fat!” or be in pain from a belt too
tight. I did finally find one. But no sooner had I gotten the
stupid thing, than it was recalled for safety reasons for not always
latching well enough.
The problem was that there were no
other choices other than having someone pull apart the car and start
from scratch on a belt. So I just kept using it, trying to remember
to double check that it was really latched firmly. But it wasn't
really safe. It wasn't really okay. It's not okay that this isn't a
standard device in this country. It's not okay that the trade
agreements and chemical agricultural phenomenon have so screwed up
foods that anyone here needs it to be a standard thing in this
country. And it's not okay that we're left in that ignorance to just
face the shame of trying to find non-existent, after market parts for
our cars to cope with the consequences of choices we were not
genuinely consciously making, and wouldn't have made, had someone
been able to explain what on earth was going on.
It becomes a form of cultural gas
lighting. It is so clear that we are not allowed to be fat that we
learn not to talk about it and blame ourselves. Every moment is
defined by the problem, and constrained by it, and we try desperately
in every moment to please all the rest of you by following your
rules. But those rules are lies. They are things that work in
healthy people who aren't as sensitive to being poisoned by the
disaster we call a food system. And so we absorb the shame and turn
it on ourselves, believing we must just be too weak. But we're not.
I have news for you. We, in our fat bodies that many of you find
repulsive, are probably some of the strongest people you will ever
meet. Every day that we don't end it in despair is a day that we
prove we fought harder than most will ever understand. And we do it
every day, one more time, while things spiral further out of control,
and while we are genuinely helpless to stop it in that moment in
time.
I can say this because I finally have
found the understanding. I have finally spent enough years of my
life reading medical journals and firing doctors to finally get to a
place where I forgot to grab the extender, in a hurry the other day,
and discovered that I don't need the horrible recalled reminder of
all that victim blaming.
So it is with relief and exhaustion and
much heart pain that I finally say goodbye to this little death trap
I no longer need. But that process made me realize it had been some
weeks since I weighed in.
So I stepped on the scale, and blinked,
with tears coming to my eyes. 275. Maybe that still seems like a
lot to a lot of you. But what it was for me, was a weight I hadn't
seen since I started college. The weight is still coming off. There
are interludes of wild fluctuation when I am fighting a virus or
otherwise inflamed for some reason. But overall, it's just falling
away.
I finally had to give in and go
shopping for some winter clothes. I haven't wanted truly winter
clothes, other than a jacket, since I was a child. Most of the time
I was too warm, if anything. But suddenly I am cold when the weather
changes. Suddenly I have some glimpse of what it's like to not be
miserably inflamed all the time, for those of you lucky enough to
spend at least some of your life that way, or with less extremes of
inflammation, so that you can still tell the difference.
It was weird to go shopping for the
first time in years, really, for anything other than a bra here and
there. Mostly I had to order my clothes online, because the
inflammation and weight spiral was so out of control. I actually got
to use dressing rooms again, and have a girls day out, and … wait
for it … feel pretty in something I picked. I could even shop
expensive brands in outlet stores and find things hanging on the rack
that fit me.
I am not done yet. There is more to
this journey, but 275 was a bit of magic I hadn't even dared hope for
when I started this. It was an impossible desert mirage, a lie our
culture believed in, but that I couldn't risk more heartache to
believe it. It was a cruel number. A hopeless number. A pipe
dream, and a curse, and, now...finally...a relief.
So I stood there in tears, wearing a
size I haven't worn since high school, weighing what I haven't since
college. And it also made me realize that while I still have denser
fat to loose, I have lost so much inflammation that I am now a size
smaller than I was the last time a scale read anything of the kind.
Me today in a little too much sun. |
Me today in a little too much sun. |
There are people out there who believe
this is a problem of all kinds of things, but the truth is that being
overweight, for a lot of us is no more and no less than the
inflammation and ignorance trap we can't find our way around. But
have hope, my friends. If you can find enough of the pieces of your
personal puzzle, like I have, you too may find yourself in tears of
relief and rage and hope as you stare at your own personal 275, and
turn away to toss your own personal reminders of that trap you feared
you'd never escape. And you are absolutely right in your heart of
heart that knows and fears that all that advice to eat healthy
grains, and work out more, and all the rest, are really dead wrong
for you. But you have to decide to stop the cultural abuse and find
your path. Good luck. And know that my heart is with you, and that
your pain is real, and totally undeserved.