That's Me!

I've been reading a book called Live Large: Ideas, Affirmations, and Actions for Sane Living in a Larger Body by Cheri K. Erdman. Stuart Smalley affirmations aren't typically my thing, but I found the book at the library, and I like to read size-acceptance stuff whenever I can. While many of the affirmations are predictable, the section about "creating your body image" caught my attention and has me thinking.

When I look in the mirror or see a picture of myself, I am less surprised now than I used to be. I have been working on looking at myself in the mirror, studying myself objectively, and trying to keep my thoughts neutral. The goal is, as one large lady on a message board I used to read once said, to see myself in the mirror and think, "That's me!" Just a neutral declaration, no cringing, no flinching, no sucking in the gut. Just, "That's me!" I have come a long way toward that goal.

And yet, when I go about my day -- when I walk my son into his preschool, when I grocery shop, when I dance, when I shovel snow, when I do yoga, when I am intimate with my husband -- I see myself as much smaller than I am. I imagine myself as "normal." It's not a forced imagining. It's just how I view myself when I'm not thinking about it and when there's no mirror to prove me wrong -- as an average-sized woman. This completely unrealistic body image has caused me some discomfort as I've tried to move toward the "That's me!" mentality. I even tried a while back to picture myself as I really am while I was kissing my husband. It ruined the moment, and so I quickly switched back to my unrealistic self-image.

In the book I'm reading, I found the following on the topic of an unrealistic body image:

When we larger women underestimate our size, we are not in denial, or crazy, or
anything like that. We are actually responding to a sick culture in a
psychologically healthy way: seeing ourselves as smaller allows us to act as if
we are a smaller size, which in turn allows us to move through life less
encumbered by fat stereotypes. We can act as if our size is not an issue. Having
a creative body image is really a tool for living a quality life in the bodies
we already have.

Wow. So no more guilt about it. It's a coping mechanism. A way to make myself feel "normal" when the world tries to tell me I'm not. Cool!

I'm reminded of how much better my current view of myself is than the one I had when I was a teenager and a size twelve. When I was a freshman in college, I briefly dated a guy who would later sleep with my roommate. But before any of that happened, I pushed him away with/because of my negative body image. One day he kissed me and put his hand on my waist. I panicked, thinking only that he was touching an enormous, grotesque roll of fat, thinking how if I couldn't stop him from touching me, he would figure out just how hugely fat and disgusting I really was, because somehow he had failed to see it. I pushed his hand away. He tried several more times to touch me (he was an eighteen-year-old male, after all), and each time I pushed him away, preferring only our lips touch. Obviously, that relationship was doomed to fail. He was not right for me in many ways, so the story isn't a tale of "the one that got away." It's just a strange memory from a place very far from here.

Sure, it would be great to have the body I hated back then. Yet I'm so much happier now, finally looking like my old body-image, while my new body image is that of the size twelve body I never appreciated.