I was in the Aerobics Classroom of the Y, twenty minutes into my second-ever yoga class, in the middle of Virabhadrasana, Fierce Warrior Pose, trying to concentrate on looking up between my eyebrows, when I began to feel my legs begin to tremble and my airway constrict, began thinking Not here not here not here please not here.

I wanted, desperately wanted, to keep some kind of control over myself. Two whole weeks of doing yoga have taught me, above all, that I don’t have nearly the control over my body that I thought I did.

For me to even sign up for a yoga class is something of a triumph, because there is nothing that makes me feel inadequate quite like an exercise class. I rely on my mind, my sense of humor, my love affair with words, the way I style my appearance, to present myself to others. In an exercise class, I have none of these things — I have only my fat body, my clumsiness and lack of strength or stamina, my spandex exercise clothes. In an exercise class, none of what’s showing is the Me I try to lead with.

After my first week of yoga class, I felt like a badass, just for signing up and following through. I did something utterly outside of my comfort zone, something that leaves me open to other people’s assumptions about me that I don’t have a forum to correct, something that displays, vividly, the things I am not good at.

I am not good at yoga. I hope I will get better.

But somehow, where last week’s class felt empowering and affirming, a challenge I am eons from being able to meet but one which I am excited to begin tiptoeing towards — somehow this week’s class felt suffocating, oppressive, something to close my eyes and hang on and wait for it to pass.

It’s not as if there was anything different about the class itself. This week the difference is only me, the fear that my body is betraying me, is not functioning the way I depend on it to function, that sent me into panic.

This week is the week that I began realizing that somehow my body isn’t working the way it normally works. This week is when I realized, all the exhaustion I’ve been feeling — the exhaustion that I first thought was because of an especially intense fall semester, then attributed to the collision between my grandmother’s death and finals week, then expected would pass once Christmas was finally over and life returned to normal — hasn’t passed. Has been slowly intensifying, even, to the point where I am sleeping ten hours a night and still longing for a nap, where I have to budget my energy in tiny increments: do I take a shower and reheat leftovers for dinner, or skip the shower and so I have the strength to cook something? Can I manage trips to both the library and the grocery store in one morning, or do I need to break it up?

The fact that this is a new sort of budgeting makes me realize how intensely privileged I am to live in a body that normally does what I expect it to do, even if it’s crap at yoga.

This sudden — or months-long, at most — betrayal by the body I’ve depended on for so long, and tried to take such good care of, is terrifying, and it’s yanked the rug out from under my psyche. I don’t know what’s wrong, and I’m afraid. I’m seeing my doctor tomorrow morning to try to figure out what’s causing it: Anemia? Low vitamin D? A wonky thyroid? Or is it simply time to fiddle with my antidepressant dosage?

I hope I’ll find answers tomorrow morning. Right now I am exhausted, and I am afraid. I don’t have the energy to push back against the anxiety that I can usually manage hold off pretty well, and every thought I have is wrapped in a film of panic, the sort of panic that I know is irrational but I can’t break out of even by rationalizing.

I had a panic attack in yoga. I was, and am, afraid my body would fail me, that it could not hold me, that I would fall. My body shook and my chest squeezed shut and I turned my back to the class and hoped no one would realize I was sobbing, and I tried with all the willpower I had left to do my freaking out as silently as possible. When I finally rejoined the class I tried to meditate on metta bhavana, lovingkindness toward my body, but I could not crowd out the whispers, What is wrong with you, what is wrong with you, what is wrong?

Update 1/13/12: Thanks, everyone, for your support. I made it through the snow to my doctor’s office this morning and had blood drawn for labs. He’s inclined to think this is a flare-up of my depression rather than something physical (we’ll get to his perception of depression being an emotional, not physical, problem another time) and will be solved by upping my dosage of Effexor, but he’s waiting for lab results back on iron levels, vitamin D, thyroid, etc., etc., to rule out other causes before we change anything, which I appreciate. After a long list of questions about my lifestyle, which I was able to give honest answers that I felt good about, I got only the mildest of suggestions that all of my problems could be solved by “taking care of [my] obesity,” but he followed it quickly with a disclaimer that he didn’t have any good solutions for how to accomplish that, and I’m too tired to resent him for it.

When I write it all out like that, well, it’s no wonder I’m exhausted.

My grandmother died two weeks ago, and it hurts more than I thought it would. At thirty years old, I’ve experienced profound losses before, but I think this is the first time I’ve had to process losing a loved one in a way  that is deeply sad, but not tragic. How does grief work when the one you lose is old, is tired, is ready to be done with a body that has slowed to a stop? Losing a grandparent is the natural order of things; I had assumed that grieving the loss of her in a series of slow small losses — as my grandparents left their home for assisted living, left assisted living for full-time care, left that for hospice; as my grandmother spent six months fully bedridden in hospice care, shrinking away to 65 pounds or so, until there was nothing left of her — I’d assumed that all the little deaths along the way would make finally losing her easier to deal with, more relief than grief.

But it turns out there’s grief there after all, grief that feels like homesickness: for the stability my grandparents’ house represented in a childhood spent feeling cast adrift, for the warmth and safety of being surrounded by an extended family that loved each other and loved me. And because grief triggers grief, it’s tangled up in my own parents’ in-progress move from the only house my kids have known them to live in, a move that doubles the miles between us to what feels like an insurmountable distance, a fear that my parents won’t be able to be to my boys what my grandparents were to me. It’s tangled up in my mom’s death so many years ago, and tangled up in my deeply damaged childhood, and tangled up in all the ways I try to do better for my own children but sometimes fail. Grief triggers grief triggers grief.

Because my own fond memories of childhood Christmases are so wrapped up in being at my grandmother’s house, losing her right before the holidays means unexpected stomach-knotting tears at things that should be joyful: blue Christmas lights and “O Christmas Tree” and red velvet bows, fireplaces and tinsel. I’m already worn so ragged by an autumn that has left me utterly wrung out, so finding the energy just to cope with all my Feelings is almost more than I can manage, much less trying to do Christmas. Even though putting on a big Christmas huzzah would probably be good for me, would make me feel better, I just don’t have the energy to put it all together. This year will be about making do with storebought cookie dough and minimal decorations and every single gift coming from Amazon, and about begging God for the strength I need to make it to January, to get me through to the place where it doesn’t hurt as much.

Merry Christmas, from the brink of collapse.

My grandparents with baby me, thirty Christmases ago

P.S. Here is a very nice word you might like, brought to you by state-of-the-art German linguistic engineering. (Grief bacon!)

Sometime last night after I’d finally finished tying all the tulle strips onto my skirt (which isn’t a skirt at all, really, but “tutu” sounds somehow frivolous, as if that makes any difference at all) I realized just how very much tulle is required to cover an ass this ample. And somehow I had envisioned the tulle strips drifting softly down, like on the little girl in the picture; I hadn’t thought about how much more dimension my own well-curved shape would add to the tutu (yes, okay, tutu).

For a moment, I worried that it would make my butt look big.

Then I spun around like a ballerina, and HECK YES. My butt didn’t look any bigger; it was big to begin with. What happened instead was, my butt made the tutu look big. I was wrapped in a poof-cloud of tulle that swooshed and floofed around me with my every movement. I felt like a giant floaty gravity-defying ball of fluff. I was a human tulle-nado. Tutus, I decided, are pretty much perfect for fat ladies. And fat ladies are perfect for tutus.

And then, I wore it out in public. In daylight. To my kids’ elementary school Halloween parade. Fortunately, they’re not yet old enough to feel embarrassment that their mother exists, much less goes around swathed in tulle-fluff, and to them it was awesome, not mortifying, that I was the only parent in costume.

Actually, the students marching by in the parade gave me quite a few sincere high-fives and compliments, which was pretty fabulous. And I have a little bit of hope that I helped normalize, and maybe awesome-ize, body diversity for them. (Because appearing in public as a fat lady in a tutu just isn’t ever not activism. My body size, and my enjoyment of same, was definitely noticeable.)

So here you go, a fat lady in a tutu:

And here are my boys in their homemade costumes:

Yep. Happy Halloween.

____

By the way, you’ve probably noticed that it’s been approximately six million years since I’ve written much here. This has turned out to be a really difficult, time-consuming semester for me. My brain is stuffed full of all kinds of blog content that I just haven’t been able to publish. I’m really hoping that in a few months I’ll be able to get back to a more regular writing schedule. Thanks for sticking around in the meantime.

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.

Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.

                                              – “Eleven,” by Sandra Cisneros

Today is the 20th anniversary of my mom’s death from cancer when I was 10 years old. I was planning to write about something else — I have a whole list of things waiting to be written, words I didn’t have time for during the chaos of summertime with three rambunctious boys at home, posts that have been waiting for me to get back in the routine of setting aside blog-writing time; but this is what’s coming out today, instead: 20 years without my mom.

There have been a lot of round numbers this summer, some very straightforward math: my 30th birthday; my 10th wedding anniversary; the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks; and now this one, 20 years without my mom. This anniversary means that she’s been missing from my life twice as long as she was in it. Such stark, startling numbers.

Underneath the 30-year-old is the 27-year-old with three little boys; the 24-year-old leaving the workforce to move to a different city and stay home with her kids; the 19-year-old straightening her wedding veil; the 15-year-old awash in dramatic feelings about boys; the 12-year-old navigating puberty and an ill-advised haircut; and the 10-year-old whose heartache is raw and unabating, feeling utterly cast adrift: all stacked inside like matryoshka dolls. Grieving for my mom means grieving for the pain of the thousand girls underneath; acknowledging every stage of mourning and of the mourner: grief stacked on top of grief, layer upon layer.

And self-care, a requirement anytime but vital today, means nurturing the 30-year-old and the 10-year-old both. This may be the first of these anniversaries that I’ve truly felt worth getting the care I need, the first I’ve felt it permissible to nurture myself, to love myself openly in my grief, unashamed: letting my needs stand on their own, undepreciated by flaws of body or of self, but worth acknowledging, worth meeting. To uncritically embrace the 10-year-old and the 20-year-old and the 30-year-old, to welcome both the grieving and the nurturing.

And I grieve with hope, as the 30-year-old and the 10-year-old: with belief in an eternity, of a someday reunion, so essential to my Christian self — with faith that this is part of a larger story arc, not just random tragic happenstance. Faith doesn’t minimize the grief, but it reshapes it, changes its meaning. Faith means whispering to the 10-year-old little girl, “This is awful, truly, and worth mourning for; but it is not forever, dear heart.”

And tomorrow I will have been missing my mother for 20 years plus one day, and all of the other days will still be inside me, will still be me, just as all of the days of my 10 years with my mother will be part of me, too. And the next day and the next and the next, I will be daughter and wife and mother, girl and woman, mourning and hoping.

(Not that I’d have anything like that to say! Hi, parents!)

I also post the link to this blog on my personal facebook page, which means that all kinds of people, from my church friends to my sixth-grade crush to my former coworkers to my extended family, have access to what I write here.

(Hi, friends and acquaintances!)

Still, even though I know they know about this website, it’s thoroughly surreal to me when I’m talking to a family member and they refer to something specific I’ve written here — there’s still a disconnect for me between my blog life and my family life, even though I know that Venn diagram overlaps quite a bit.

Why, they’re out there, reading this, right now. (Hi, family!)

But what do I write about when what I have to contribute to the fatosphere is about my family? What do I say about the baggage I’m carrying after ten days visiting my extended family, baggage I wasn’t carrying before I left home? How do I write about the disorder and disconnect I feel when my body, my fat body, marks me as different from them in a way we’ve been trained from childhood to recognize as bad - that for all I know, they still think of as bad? Knowing that they’re listening, how can I authentically deconstruct the sick feeling of wondering if they think something’s wrong with me, that they’re reading these words right now and nodding their heads yes?

When I’m with my family, there are biscuits and sausage gravy and a half-dozen kinds of homemade jam; there are eggs and grits and coffee and so much laughter. When they’re thinking Uncle Jaime’s big breakfast, hurrah! I am thinking about getting to the table before all the armless chairs are gone so I don’t have to spend the meal wedged into a too-narrow seat. When they are laughing and making conversation I am trying to do the same thing while watching to see how many biscuits my thin cousins are eating and not taking more than them, and going easier than I’d like to on the gravy, because I don’t want them to see me eating and think, glutton. When I’m with my family I am conscious, so conscious of being the only fat person there, and I am trying desperately not to stand out.

Not to be the elephant in the room.

Later, we go camping, and I am careful to sit in one of the Premium Camp Chairs that’s designed to hold up to 325 pounds, not the regular ones that hold up to 200; if one’s not available, I make an excuse to stand. I am famished from hiking and pitching tents and chasing kids on the playground, but I eat only as many hot dogs as I think I should be seen eating, not as many as I’m hungry for. When we rent paddle boats for an hour, the boat tilts dramatically when I sit down in it, and I try to cover my mortification with false cheerfulness when I say I’d rather stay on shore and read my book with my toes in the lake.

I spend the week trying not to draw attention to the difference between my body and theirs, and trying not to reinforce the stereotypes I’m still afraid they believe: glutton, lazy, no self-control. When my size does become a limitation, I am filled with shame, certain I am fulfilling their expectations.

All the ways I feel healthy and confident at home disappear when I’m with my family. When I’m with them, all my hard-won sanity evaporates.

My therapist defined a new word for me today: countertransference, when a psychoanalyst takes on the client’s issues and experiences an emotional reaction to them, rather than remaining in an objective, diagnostic role. It’s revealed by the therapist’s personal, emotional response — when a therapist feels self-conscious about her own lack of makeup in the presence of a client who is obsessed with physical beauty, for a very simple example. In a nonclinical setting, countertransference is essentially: letting someone else’s disordered worldview infect your own healthy one. Personally taking on the other person’s emotional baggage instead of setting a boundary that says, no, I won’t carry that.

And in this case, I’ve taken one family member’s obsession with absolute control of one’s physical body - an idolization of the state of being in Perfect Physical Health and a desperation to control one’s biology – and put it onto myself, like a smelly, rotten coat over my clean clothes. I’ve held myself up to one person’s disordered, impossible standard, and then in my insecurity assumed that everyone else was measuring me by the same ridiculous norm. I made another person’s sickness my own instead of rejecting it for what it is: sickness, idolatry.

In my mind, I let another person’s disorder make me into the elephant in the room, instead of being what I am: cousin, niece, sister, daughter, granddaughter, mother. Healthy. Sane. Cheerfully imperfect.

Beloved.

(Hi, family!)

I found myself unexpectedly frustrated and sad this weekend when I was reading the comments on a blog post about cats**, of all things — I guess that’s what they mean by “triggering”: when you encounter something that sends you spiraling into reactions you can’t completely control, angry and hurt by something that isn’t about you at all, feeling misunderstood and guilty and isolated, sending you back to that place where food and your body were your enemies.

Jen wrote about taking her cat to the vet, and as an aside, mentioned that one of her cats is borderline too-skinny while the other is too fat, and did anyone have any feeding suggestions for this situation? The commenters — all of them trying to be helpful, concerned about the health and well-being of these two cats — replied with a range of creative solutions (“Put the food up high where the skinny cat can get to it but the fat cat can’t jump up” and “Put the food in a box with a hole big enough for the skinny cat to get in but too small for the fat cat” were typical) designed to encourage the skinny cat to eat more food, but keep the fat cat from eating more than a prescribed amount.

What was jarring to me was how reflective the comments were of the accepted beliefs about food and eating and size — the context of animals provides the distance necessary for people (actual well-meaning human people, not troll-people) to candidly say what they really think about bodies: that those with fat bodies need to have their food intake limited, and can’t be relied on to regulate their own food intake. As one commenter said: You really need to moderate -how much- the cat is eating, don’t just toss some in a bowl for them and leave it there all day (That would be like tossing us in a buffet with no time limit haha). Because it’s about health: The last thing you want is to end up with a cat who has diabetes and needs insulin shots every day, that’s hard enough on a human who understands the concept behind them, but to a cat you’re just poking them with a needle and they don’t know why.

As far as the situation with cats goes, here’s my experience:  I have two cats — Orla, a chubby (not quite fat, but definitely big) cat, and Shrodinger, a skinny one. Both are happy kitties, both are active, and both see the vet regularly because they’re positive (but not yet symptomatic) for FeLV. They’re allowed free access to their food dish, and their food intake is not regulated or monitored in any way; but from observation, I can tell you that Shrodo spends much more time at the food dish, eats about twice as much as Orla, and is prone to stalk me around the house, nipping at my ankles, if the level of food in the dish drops below a certain point. Both cats are healthy, neither cat over- or under-eats, they just have very different body types, is what I’m saying.

But mostly, my reaction to the post was one of sadness and frustration, because my perspective on food and size issues has shifted irrevocably away from “normal.” Lately I make it a point to immerse myself in fat-acceptance blogs and minimize my exposure to pro-dieting, anti-fat sources, so when I’m unexpectedly confronted with so much “normal” about food, when I’m reminded of just how deeply enculturated these disordered eating habits really are, it makes me realize just how far from “normal” I’ve turned. I’ve taken several giant steps away from “normal.” I realize there’s no way I could comment on that post that (in the absence of other unhealthy factors) cats can be trusted to eat the right amount of food for their bodies, just like humans can, yes, even at an unlimited buffet — that’s so foreign, it would sound like nonsense. Saying that my two cats of wildly different sizes are both healthy would sound just as insane as saying that I don’t restrict my food intake in any way and yet most of the time I wind up eating mainly produce because that’s what my body is asking for, not because the food pyramid told me to (and sometimes I don’t, but that’s okay too).

And frankly, sometimes I miss being “normal.” When I started dipping my toes into fat acceptance and health at every size, I didn’t set out to create a schism between myself and “normal,” but it’s there now, and there’s a grief about realizing how far I am from everyone else. Yes, I used to hate my body, but at least I was on the same team as the rest of society, united in agreement that my big ol’ body was hateworthy and untrustable and wrong. Now that I’m on Team My Body Is Rad instead of Team “Normal”, I can see that my new normal is better, healthier, saner than the cultural “normal” — but it’s a little depressing, too, knowing that I’ll never again be on the same side as the majority, when it comes to bodies. Because the new normal is isolating, even while it’s healing.

I’m just glad my cats can’t read internet comments.

———-

*Yes, this is a 900+ word post about cats. I’m feeling very Debbie Loves Cats as a result. I just — sorry, I’m getting emotional — I really love cats, is all.

**I think Jen is fabulous, by the way, and I totally recommend her blog for girl-geekery and gentle humor. I was just caught off guard by the comments on this particular post, which were in no way mean-spirited, just totally reflective of how society treats food and weight.

She is too weak to move her arms; when the Visiting Pets lady comes with her Pomeranian, we place her hand on the dog’s soft back. We spoon small bites of her lunch into her mouth, like feeding a tidy, cooperative baby. She’s not really present in her body; she says she’s hungry when she’s just finished breakfast, she knows her back is uncomfortable but can’t tell if it’s soreness or itching. Inside her body, she’s still herself, but her speech is slow and quiet and her memory is untrustworthy.

I’m thinking about this state of being present in one’s body, of really inhabiting oneself, the space one takes up — of letting oneself be fully physical, unabashedly experiencing corporeal life. My grandmother has lost this option now, as her body slows toward death, but I’m not sure she ever took it when she could. She has spent her life fearfully, seeing potential for danger in everything — waiting to befall herself or her children. She parented this way, tethered to safety, afraid of camping trips, cars, always within arm’s reach; fearful for her grandchildren, too. – One summer during a family vacation my grandmother took my brothers and me to a swimming area at a lake, and forbade us from going any further out than “titty-deep” — as strong swimmers from summers of lessons, we were resentful, but she wasn’t willing to risk our going deeper. After I turned 16 and got my driver’s license, she warned me about how many accidents could be caused by oncoming traffic drifting into my lane; she closed every phone call and every letter with, “Be sure to stay away from that center line.”

So I’m thinking about this reluctance to completely invest oneself physically, this wading titty-deep into life and no farther; examining myself. Do I do this? Not from fear of injury, but from fear of fully committing a body I’m not entirely comfortable in? I know I do; I’m still afraid of this body, of how much space it inhabits, exhibits. At home in my bathroom mirror I’m confident, self-possessed; but put me on a sofa with my thin parents, aunt and uncle, cousins, and I feel like an obscene thing.  I avoid certain chairs so no one sees how tight the arms are against my sides; I’m suddenly aware of my body’s curves, of how certain positions make the waistband of my jeans push visibly into my flesh. I realize how much my purple hair, my vivid nail polish and eyeliner, how much they make me visible; and I struggle to reclaim the boldness I felt when I chose to showcase my personality on my body — now I want to shrink into myself, curl up as small as possible.

But I see my grandmother propped in her hospital bed, a baby bird. And I remember how much joy there is in this flesh, this body-ness. I push myself back into the far edges of this body I’m wearing, all the soft wobbles and curves of it. I will plunge headfirst into physical me-ness; I will not stop at titty-deep.

I purpled my hair this week, because purple hair makes me happy.

Last weekend during Lady Gaga’s appearance on SNL, someone posted on my twitter timeline, something to the effect of, “It’s too bad Gaga dresses like an alien — she’s pretty hot when she dresses normal.” And even though I don’t have much interest in Lady Gaga, and I’m unfamiliar with most of her music — and even though I’ve made similar criticisms about her and any number of other women in the past — this time something different clicked into place with me, and I thought:

Lady Gaga can wear whatever she wants. She doesn’t owe it to you to look hot.

Seriously, I realize this is basic Feminist Theory 101. But to me, it’s just now starting to make sense, and it feels revolutionary: No woman is required to look a certain way that society deems acceptable. No person, for that matter. Lady Gaga isn’t. I’m not.

A few days later, a friend sent me a link to this quote from an article on The Frisky:

“Despite the fact that I’ve got cellulite and a poochy belly and fairly big hips for my frame, I don’t diet. Despite the fact that I spent my entire adolescence and young adult life actively hating my body and attempting to hide inside my clothing, I don’t diet. Because for one thing, few diets work permanently, with lost weight often regained within a year. And for another, I don’t believe that there is one acceptably beautiful body shape or figure. And finally, I’ve found a far better way to help myself look and feel good than attempting to diet my body into submission: I dress to my figure.”

I was reading along and thinking, Yes yes yes! People are finally starting to get it: dieting is futile, and it’s okay to not be thin! Until I got to the last sentence, and it hit me again: I don’t have to “look good” if I don’t want to. I don’t have to “dress to my figure,” especially since “dressing to your figure” is usually fashion-magazine code for “deemphasizing your fat parts and focusing attention on your non-fat parts.” As the article went on to say, “I sought out garments and accessories that drew the eye to my lovely waist, my shapely shoulders, my delicate ankles. I slowly began accumulating flattering, interesting pieces while simultaneously ditching the dull, curve-disguising ones. … I learned that I felt beautiful when I looked beautiful, and that I could look beautiful by wearing clothing that focused the observing eye on my glorious natural assets.”

“Dressing to my figure” still means conforming myself to an external standard for what is “flattering” and what is “unflattering,” for making my clothing choices based on the opinion of the observer* instead of on what I want to wear. It means replacing one set of rules (Be thin!) with for another set (If you can’t be thin, at least draw attention away from your fat parts!).  And I don’t have to do that. I don’t have to conform to someone else’s notion of what makes my body look good. I can wear what I like, as an extension of my own personality.

(*We can say “the male gaze” here if you’d rather, but that’s a whole other topic I’m not capable of doing justice to.)

Choosing to style my body as an extension of myself is a celebration of my own uniqueness, my own created-ness. I’m celebrating the body and the personality God made me with. Wearing what I want to wear regardless of whether it’s in accordance with how fashion magazines think I should look or whether it makes me look “attractive,” and encouraging others to do the same, is a celebration of the beautiful diversity of human beings that God has created.

It may be that the choices I make end up being in line with what’s socially acceptable, but now I’m choosing to wear those items because they’re what I like, and society’s rules happen to line up with the things I like – not because I’m trying to conform.

My son dressed himself for preschool a few days ago in a yellow and tan striped shirt and red shorts. It wasn’t a color combination I would’ve chosen, and I gently offered to help him find an outfit that matched, but he said: “No thanks, I like wearing this.” And I realized: It really is that simple.

Mario mushroom manicure, inspired by http://www.youtube.com/cutepolish

If “dressing to your figure” and following “fashion rules” is important to you, great. It’s your choice how you decorate your body. But don’t think it’s the only option for how to decorate your body, and don’t fool yourself into believing that the rules are anything more than reflections of our culture’s arbitrary standard for beauty. There are no “fashion police,” and how I present my body isn’t up to anyone else.

You don’t have to like my outfit. You might think that wearing horizontal stripes draws attention to my fat curves, and you might have a problem with that. You can think I shouldn’t wear a sleeveless top because my upper arms are wobbly, but I’m going to wear it anyway. You might think that what I’m wearing is too young for me or too old for me, you might think it clashes, you might think I wear too much eyeliner or that my purple hair is absurd. But I’m ignoring your opinion of how I look, society, because how I look isn’t about you at all.

Shirt - Lane Bryant; skirt and necklace - Old Navy; shoes - Target.

  Black fake-velvet dress – Wal-Mart (a size 16 [I wear a 24] that I found on after-Christmas clearance for $5 a few years ago – it pays to try things on!); pink cable tights and silver bangle bracelet – Avenue; necklace – Lane Bryant; shoes – Target clearance (they were way on sale, so I bought pairs in black, white, turquoise, and mustard. I have problems). 

Peter, who will be 3 in a few weeks, decided to join me for my photo shoot. He was feeling a bit under the weather, so he’s wearing cozy pajamas and one sock.

By far the most exciting $4 I spent this week was on a bottle of Wet ‘n’ Wild turquoise liquid eyeliner. It’s a bit smeary (especially since it’s been hot and muggy here lately), but the color is vivid and holds up well. I plan to wear it everywhere, including dental appointments and PTA meetings.

I’m hoping to write more in the future about depression and malaise, but that requires mustering up the mental energy to write about anything, so. We’ll see.

This is about the discovery that at my core is a ten-year-old girl who thought that she was responsible for keeping her entire family intact. If I was perfect, if I excelled at everything, if I didn’t show weakness my family would stay together.

But then that family fell apart anyway. All that work, and it fell apart anyway.

Because, boy howdy, does that sound familiar to me. I’ve had regular sessions with a therapist for more than four years now and I still haven’t really dealt with the responsibility I feel for my family’s disintegration — not due to divorce, but due to my mom’s death from cancer when I was 10, and my dad’s corresponding emotional checking-out. I am still only barely chipping away at the emotional demons that say, You killed your mother by not being good enough. And you weren’t perfect enough for your father to love you.

Ironically, fat acceptance is addressing this in a way that nothing else has before. Because I’m learning to accept my body, I can look back at my childhood and say, Of course I was good enough; that was never the issue. There’s a ten-year-old magical-thinking mentality I still have to overcome about my mom dying, but when it comes to my relationship with my dad, it’s healing now in large part because I can finally see that my imperfections weren’t what was making him distant.* I can see how much effort I put into being thin in order to gain his approval — and how much more energy I put into being perfect in every other way possible, to compensate for not being thin enough — and I can grieve for the childhood that was lost, the warmth and security and acceptedness that I didn’t feel; but I’m beginning to stop blaming myself for not attaining physical perfection, then or now.

(*My dad’s had a lot of therapy, too, and being able to talk openly about things that went wrong when I was a kid has helped me make a ton of progress. So I don’t want to downplay how his growth is impacting my own.)

Accepting my fat self means that not only do I get to let go of the shame I felt about my body, but I also can let go of the other things I was doing to compensate for my shame. I can begin to take off the other behaviors I’d adopted to make myself acceptable in spite of my fat — the always having to appear to be the smartest person in the room, the funniest, the most self-reliant; the never admitting that I needed help, the never admitting when I was wrong, the snarky criticisms of others, the inability to accept a compliment instead of deflecting it.

And conversely, four years of therapy have gotten me to the point where I’m healthy enough for fat acceptance. If I hadn’t spent the past four years deconstructing the false self I wear to present an appearance of perfection, I wouldn’t be ready to make peace with a body that doesn’t meet society’s standards. I’ve spent four years slowly taking off the things I wanted people to see, grieving for them, and letting them go; taking off an expectation of future thinness is an appropriate next step, and one that helps all of the earlier pieces to fall into place.

I’m finding that making peace with my body means making peace with all of myself.