First, I will preface this with the fact that this is going to be very long and possibly somewhat disjointed. Delving into myself requires that I talk about these events but it needs a little bit of backstory to get us started.
If you have only known me as an adult, you know my general body type, which happens to be very overweight, but what may surprise you is that I have actually been this basic body type since I was a child. When I was very little I was kind of small and dainty but when I turned five I got stocky and the stockiness followed me through middle school until by the end of middle school it was no longer stockiness but just plain fat. This is, however, not a post about my health or my struggles with my weight but it is about how my degraded sense of self led me down some very undesirable roads.
I won’t say that I can distinctly recall when I started being picked on over my weight but I can remember the first time I was painfully embarrassed and aware of it. When I was in middle school we used to have these health fairs in the music room once a year. People from the health department would come and measure how tall you were, weigh you, and then sit down with you and explain to you your BMI. I was in either 5th or 6th grade, I don’t recall which at the moment, but keep in mind this means that I was either 10 or 11 years old. The people measured my height and my weight and sat me down at a table in the midst of a room of twenty-five other 10–11-year-olds and proceeded to explain to me that my height and weight were such that it placed my BMI in the obese category. I just wanted to die. I wanted to run out of the room crying but they just handed me this paper with my information highlighted like a beacon for all the wandering eyes to light upon and see my shame. I was fat.
I wish I had a picture of me in 5th/6th grade because though I was stocky, I wasn’t really what you would have called fat at that point, but I was one of those super awkward tall, stocky, broad-shouldered girls that always felt like the giant ogre compared to her female classmates that were small and dainty. So it’s not like I needed help feeling like I was out of place amongst my peers but that’s ok, that’s what we do here. We ruin a person’s mental health and self-esteem in hopes that creating self-loathing will cause that person to lose weight. I can personally attest to the fact…it doesn’t work. It just makes you feel lousier about yourself and if you’re an emotional eater you eat your feelings and then you feel even worse and it’s a vicious cycle. The point being is that from that point onward, I was painfully aware that not only was I the ogre that towered over her female counterparts but I was the FAT ogre. Unfortunately, that was the absolute worst time to make me so very aware of this fact (even though looking back now I realize I was barely chunky) because this is middle school. These are the years when if you’re different from the “norm” in any way you already feel like a pariah but to make it worse the other students are so insecure in their growing bodies that they take every opportunity to point out your imperfections to give themselves a momentary lapse in the craptastic feeling that is being a growing tween. I don’t think anyone ever directly taunted me about my weight but it would be sly jabs.
Sly jabs that came even from my best friend. I don’t know why it sticks with me so much but I remember one day Dr. Ralph Stanley visited our school and as we were leaving the room where he performed for us, my best friend turns around and asks me what my favorite food was. I said lasagna and she asked if I liked it really cheesy. Let’s be honest, unless you dislike cheese, who doesn’t like their lasagna cheesy, so I said yeah. She said something like, be careful, too much cheese makes you fat. Anyway, it’s just one of those things that stick with you. Throughout middle school and into high school there were always these jabs from people about my weight and my size and after each one your self-esteem falls lower and lower until you don’t wait for other people to degrade you, you are degrading yourself all day, every day.
The reason this is important is that around the time I was in high school was when dial-up internet became cheaper and accessible to more households and we got internet at my house. I feel like you may think you know where this is going and maybe eventually (depends on what you’re thinking), but to begin with it all started out innocent enough. I used to be allowed to talk to my friends on yahoo messenger for a little while and it was the coolest thing ever. One night one of my friends mentioned a website called espinthebottle.
If you grew up during this same timeframe, you probably know what this was. The best description I can give is that it was a rudimentary tinder for teenagers. You would “spin the bottle” and the website would randomly pick someone of the opposite sex that was also online at that point. Then you could choose to talk to that person or not. It just so happened that mine landed on a guy that used to go to the same high school as us but he and his mom moved to a place about an hour away. We both decided that chatting was ok and we started to talk. He told me that he had noticed me the previous year in a keyboarding class that we had together and he was too shy to talk to me and then he moved. Long story short, we started talking all the time and went on a couple of dates. I was nearly 16 and he was 17 1/2. The first “date” we had was us going to one of his church services together where one of his friends talked him into holding my hand. After that date, when we would talk over messenger he would tell me how much he wanted to be with me and how much he loved me and describe in odd detail scenarios involving deserted islands. Had I been more secure in myself I would have realized that this was not the type of person I wanted to be with but I fed off of his compliments and the fact that anyone would even imagine wanting to be with me. The rush of endorphins was addicting and I just kept going back for more. After a couple of months, he was able to come see me for what was truly my first date ever.
He brought me a gift for my birthday, one that included chapstick (because according to him watching girls put on chapstick was hot) and his class ring. This felt like nirvana to me. I didn’t have any middle school relationships like a lot of the popular girls did and I was 16 and this was my first actual boyfriend. We drove around and went to a few stores, ate lunch, he put his hand in my back pocket and I felt like maybe I could actually feel like a normal teenage girl for once. He takes me back home and before he leaves he kisses me. I won’t say that it was my first kiss (that happened when I was 8 and is a story for another time) but it was my first kiss with someone I thought I loved and it was…TERRIBLE! He literally duck-faced his mouth and tried to kiss me. I felt like he was eating my face but I was on cloud-nine, who was I to complain? He left right after that. We talked for a couple more weeks and he sent me a letter telling me that he wanted his ring back and that he no longer wanted to be with me. I was too much of a child and he wasn’t interested in me anymore. He even emailed one of his friends that still lived around me that I was a terrible kisser, unattractive and that I was lame for putting on chapstick in front of him like it would make him feel anything. This absolutely devastated me. My self-worth was already low but it placed it right at rock bottom but the worst thing is that he started messaging me after that and would tell me about his newest conquests and I would sit and take it because I had this hope that he would change his mind and want to be with me.
Fast forward a little bit to Spring of the next year. I met a guy online through this product testing website geared specifically at teenagers. He responded to a post of mine and he was super sweet and kind. We started messaging (good old Yahoo! again). He would send me texts to my email, we would talk over messenger when we could, we sent letters to one another, and I fell in love with him because he was nice to me. He never offered a picture of himself and never asked for one of me, which I was fine with because I was terrified that if he ever physically saw me he would instantly hate me. Even though I was scared of that, he asked if he could take me to my prom, and what girl is going to turn that down? He lived about an hour and a half from me and he was going to ride his motorcycle up and we were going to go to prom together. I wanted him to get to know my friends so we could all have fun at prom so we did some group chats on Yahoo! where my best friend invited a friend of hers to the chat that was not a mutual friend of mine.
I’ll spare you a long, drawn-out tragedy, but I found out that this nonmutual friend had shared my picture with him one day when she messaged him when I wasn’t online. After she shared my picture with him he disappeared. I couldn’t reach him by text, by phone, anything. I knew that the picture of me showed him that I wasn’t the type of girl he was after and so he, in current terms, ghosted me. I eventually got in contact with him a month or so later and he gave me this line about how a tree fell on the phone line next to his house and they just got it fixed but he did have a new girlfriend now. So, my self-worth that was already as low as I thought it was able to go…it sank lower.
After that relationship…which I hesitate to call it that because we never physically interacted face to face but I was so in love with that boy and he said he loved me, the emotional connection counts I think…but as I was saying, after that relationship, it was a while before I really talked to or pursued anything but one night, after starting college, a friend of mine got me to download AIM (AOL’s instant messenger for those that don’t know). It had a feature where you could connect with people that were also online, people that you had no clue who they were, they were just a username on a screen. I tried the feature and as you can imagine, even if you never used it, it was basically just full of a bunch of people looking for sexting. I wish I could say that I was above it but I wasn’t. It made me feel desirable and after the last two disastrous relationships and my self-esteem that couldn’t float a feather, it made me feel like I had hope that someday someone could love me despite what I looked like but on the flip side of that coin it also made me feel cheap and dirty. While these chat sessions were taking place, they would bolster my confidence but then afterward I felt like the dirtiest, lowest, piece of trash that is pulled from the very bottom corner of a 15-year-old trash bin. I felt even more worthless than I already had before, which is a feat to accomplish. There was another solely online relationship somewhere in the midst of all of this but it really isn’t notable at this point.
Finally, we reach the summer that I was turning 19, when I met my now-husband, as if you need to guess it, online. We met on plentyoffish (which by the way…when it first started was not a hookup site, it actually was attempting to be a legitimate dating site). We talked for a couple of weeks before we decided to meet at the Walmart. He took me to eat lunch and took me to a movie. He was still interested after he met me, so I counted that to be on my side. I won’t go into a bunch of details because it is too personal and all too painful, even to think of it now, but a few weeks after we had been dating, he told me that he wanted to just be friends and that we had moved too fast. I was convinced it was because of how I looked and I was in despair yet again. I had already started falling in love with him and he had broken my heart, just like all the others. I don’t know if it’s because I made him feel guilty because I absolutely bawled (I hope not because I really don’t want to think that’s why he’s with me today and I didn’t do it on purpose, I try not to cry in front of people, even him, it’s too much of a vulnerability for me) but he changed his mind and we continued to date. We had been together for about a year when we were having a really bad, off day and I decided to ask him why he wanted to break up with me that day. He didn’t want to answer and I pushed it. I will never know if this was his honest answer or if I led him to this answer but how I looked came up. It absolutely demolished any self-worth I had built at that point and I didn’t build it back up for years afterward. Honestly, I still have issues today. There are so many other events that are missing in this progression that all add up to the way I view myself but this is already a terribly long post. The point of all of this is for me to open up and admit to myself that I had a pointedly long journey to get to where I am and that I shouldn’t expect to be able to mend those issues in a short time. I love my husband with all of my heart and we eventually got through the dark cloud that that day put on our relationship but it took a VERY long time.
If you’ve read my other posts and are now reading this one..you have most likely noticed a difference in the tone of this one. I struggled to write this today because I don’t want to share my failings but I also don’t think I can get past them if I don’t. I don’t want to admit how low and in utter gut-churning despair I ended up in after each of the events I’ve described. I don’t want to admit that I had so very little self-worth that I disrespected myself by negating the morals that are at the fiber of my being just so I could feel something other than the pain of self-degradation for a few fleeting moments. You may think, well it was only words, you didn’t actually have sex with those men, and you’re right. I have only had sex with one man in my life and only after we were married but it doesn’t matter whether I performed the actual act or not. The scars it put on my soul are tough and immovable, whether you understand them or not. The shame I feel is almost palpable and so I shove all of these things into little compartments in my mind and keep them shut away so I don’t have to think about them. The problem with that is that I think for me to actually come to terms with myself and who I am and who I want to be, I have to bring these things into the light and deal with them instead of just rearranging them like the leftovers in the fridge, trying to make enough space for something else to fit. The leftovers need to be thrown out from time to time because they begin to rot and the stench is unbearable when you open the door. The same is true of those compartmentalized emotions that are stored away. They start to rot your emotional well being and it becomes unbearable.
I seriously doubt anyone is reading these but if you are and if you’ve made it through this post, the only thing I can hope is that sharing some of my pain will help you to let go of some of yours.
I’ll end this post with a poem that I wrote about broken hearts. I wrote it long ago. I don’t remember when. I really wish I would put a date on these things. Live and learn I suppose.
A Broken Heart
What is a broken heart?
Is it something that is visible?
Something repairable?
Something replaceable?
In answer it is none of these, but yet all of these.
It is not visible if you do not take the time to see.
It is irreparable if no one is willing to come along and fix it.
And it is irreplaceable if no one is willing to give you their heart in return.
If you take the time to look into a person’s eyes,
The seeming window to the soul, their broken heart will be made visible.
If you love them with all your heart and make it known to them it is repairable.
And if you give someone your heart and all your love then it is replaceable.
If the first step is taken and your love is strong enough to find that visible break,
Then really the heart is no longer a broken one.
It has been mended, and fixed, until it is good as new.
And when you exchange your hearts one for the others’ then love will belong to you both,
And no longer will there be broken hearts to find and mend,
But only loving memories to begin.
~Andrea S.
