my body story
Jun. 22nd, 2007 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thejunipertreeThis is my body story.
It was originally written for a community that I belong to on LJ,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fatshionista, but I decided that I needed to post this to my own journal as well. I'm leaving it unlocked because I feel that's something I need to do.
This entry was probably the hardest thing I've ever written in my entire life. I am embarrassed by a lot of what's contained in it and of the majority of the photos posted within. I've been writing this over the course of the past couple of weeks and have had to stop writing on several occasions because I started to cry. Writing this entry brought back a lot of memories that I've been trying to forget about for a long, long time.
That being said, I'm going to give one of my very rare subject matter warnings. If you are freaked out by reading about abuse (physical, emotional, and sexual), talk of negative body image, fat-phobia, self-harm, vulgar language, or drug use, then do not read this. I mean it. Also? There is a ton of photos and text under this cut.
Childhood
Tara-Love, born in 1974, on October 5th. The first child for my father and the third for my mother. There were already two boys in the family, from my mother's first marriage, and I was as different from them as night is day. The two of them are dark haired, dark-eyed, and olive-skinned. I had long, straight blonde hair, big blue eyes, and incredibly fair skin. The only girl in the group of siblings and the baby. I was destined to be doted upon. There are a billion photos of me from around that time. I won't subject you to all of them.
Christmas, 1976.
One of my earliest memories is from a softball game that my father was playing in. I don't remember how old I was, but I reckon it was still the 70s, so I couldn't have been older than five. I was running around with all the other kids there and I remember one woman saying as I ran past her, "That little girl is going to grow up to be a knock-out." I didn't know what it meant, but I knew it was about me because there weren't any other little girls near her.
For the majority of my young life, I think I was just a normal kid. At least, that's how the photos look to me. Not fat and not skinny, just there. I started to gain weight roughly around third grade. I didn't have a lot of friends, my mother was almost never home because she worked two jobs, and my brother was always off getting into trouble with his friends. No one really paid attention to what I did or ate, so I did and ate pretty much whatever I wanted. This is when the photos began to trickle away; I don't have many from that time. The photos drying up at that point is more likely due to the incredible dysfunction my family was going through at the time, rather than any dislike of my appearance. I can say that much.
Adolescence
The summer before sixth grade, my maternal-side grandfather died and my mother moved my brother and I into the house she grew up in to live with our alcoholic grandmother, who didn't want to live alone. That entire summer was just wretched. There weren't any other kids on the block who were even close to my age and the kids I did see around town, I was too shy to speak to. On top of that, my mother and grandmother did not get along in the least (because of my grandmother's drinking problem) and they got into very loud arguments a lot. I spent most of my time in my bedroom, lost in my own little world of My Little Ponys or reading my mother's books (I was a very advanced reader, books for kids my age were far too boring and infantile for me). When I wasn't in my room, I was roaming in the woods by myself or riding my bike to get ice cream from a local corner shop. Again, no one paid attention to what I was doing or eating. We moved out a couple of weeks before school was due to start because my mother couldn't take her mother's alcoholism any longer.
This is when my life really started going bad, I think.
We moved a town over, into a small apartment in a very large apartment complex. I thought it was the best thing in the world because it had a pool situated right across from our building and I loved the water. But by then, I was very chubby and more than a little weird from all the isolation I'd been experiencing. Furthermore, around this time I began to have mental issues that I hid from my mother. I heard things that weren't there, saw things that weren't there, had wildly fluctuating moods, and began to pull out my own hair, one strand at a time (I would be diagnosed in my early 20s as being schizophrenic with hypo-manic episodes [this diagnosis would later become schizoaffective disorder] and trichotillomania). I didn't want to cause any more worry to my mother than she was already having, so I just never told her about anything I was experiencing. It was also around this time that I began to very rapidly develop a woman's shape, something I attempted to hide with enormous t-shirts I stole from my father whenever I went to visit him. It was, in my eyes, one more thing I didn't want my mother to worry about and I was too embarrassed by this turn of affairs to bring up the conversation of needing to wear a bra.
When it was finally discovered that I needed to wear a bra, I already fit into my mother's hand-me-downs. I was a C cup before sixth grade.
I started sixth grade (age-wise, I should have been in fifth, but I originally started school when I was four) in this town and had to walk about a mile and a half to get to school. There were a lot of other kids who lived in the same apartment complex, but I generally didn't speak to any of them (still very shy, but mostly just wrapped up in my own head). The first day of school, I managed to make friends with another girl in my class, Marlena. Marlena was very dominant and I was so desperate to please her and therefore keep a friend, that I just let her walk all over me. She frequently set me up for massive falls, but I always just took it. These falls usually involved a boy who lived in my apartment complex and was in the same class as us, named Scott, who seemed to hate me from the very moment he laid his eyes on me, but tolerated me because I was Marlena's friend and he liked her.
Scott would walk with us to and from school, usually being very nasty to me the entire time. He was the first person to ever make me realize that I was fat. He was also the first person to ever make me believe I was ugly. Once, when Marlena had stayed home from school, we were walking home alone and he said to me, "You know, if you lost weight, people would like you. You don't have any friends at school because you're so fat." And I, stupidly agreed with him because I didn't really know how else to handle it and deep down, I wanted him to like me as a friend.
After that conversation, he kicked me in the solar plexus and left me lying on the side of the road, panicking and gasping for breath. I'd never had something like that happen to me before and because I couldn't breathe from the kick, I truly thought I was dying. Before he walked away from me like that, he stood over me, pointing and laughing himself silly. Once I was able to breathe again, I dragged myself home and hid in my room for the entire night, crying silently so no one would hear me.
I endured a huge amount of abuse from him for the two years we lived in that apartment. He stole a treasured stuffed parrot my father won for me at a carnival and set it on fire. He constantly told me that he was going to break into my apartment and kill my cats, describing how he would do it in great detail. He wiped dogshit on my skirt one morning as we were walking to school. He called me all manner of nasty names and got other kids to follow suit. He punched and kicked me, as hard as he could. He even tried to push me out in front of oncoming traffic on several occasions.
Once, we were sitting in class and the teacher was reading to us from a book. I don't remember the exact story or what she said, but she was talking about how large a pig was. And Scott said, sotto vox, "as big as Tara". I remember looking up and over at the teacher's assistant, who was sitting directly in front of Scott. She looked from him to me, with her mouth dropped open, but she didn't say anything to him or anything to the teacher about what he'd said.
Marlena wasn't any help with this. She ignored things or laughed them off. I was over at her house one day after school and a group of boys said, "Oh my god, it's a troll" when they saw me. She laughed it off when I got upset and told me that it was just because I was so short (at the time, I was about 4'10"). I tried to believe her. But after that, the name stuck and I got called "Troll" constantly by everyone.
The worst incident was one afternoon when we didn't have school for some reason or another. Marlena's parents were both at work and we were hanging out at her house. For reasons I can't remember anymore, it was decided that we should climb up onto the roof of her house. Marlena got a ladder and we climbed up there to sit and smoke cigarettes. A group of boys, Scott included, came over and Marlena climbed down the ladder. The boys took the ladder away and I couldn't climb down. They all kept laughing at me and telling me to jump, but I was terribly afraid of heights and scared I'd hurt myself if I jumped down. The garbage cans were right there and they began to throw trash at me, calling me terrible names. I started to cry, which made them worse. I cowered on the roof, trying to make myself as small of a target as possible, and began to scream for them to stop. I screamed so loudly and for so long that a woman who lived two blocks over heard me and came over to see what was wrong. She chased everyone away, got the ladder, and convinced me to come down. She gave them all a venomous tongue-lashing, but they all just stood there and smirked at her. After everyone had left, I asked Marlena why she let them do that to me and she convinced me that the boys had only been playing and I had just been overreacting.
More kids started to pick up on the blood in the water after that. One day, I had accidentally cut my hand to the point of needing stitches (and suffering nerve damage for the rest of my life). When I came back to school, my hand was wrapped up in gauze. One kid told everyone else that I had bit myself while I was eating. They all thought this was hilarious and tormented me about it for weeks. Another time, someone passed me a note in class that had a drawing of one of my cats getting his head cut off. It said, "If you let your cat outside, this is what's going to happen to it, you fat fucking bitch." Once, in art class, I had turned around to reach for something and the boy sitting across for me said, "Look at all that fat on your neck. It's fucking disgusting." My bike was stolen. Someone put gum in my long hair during class that I chopped out with scissors, too humiliated by the experience to wait until I got home for my mother to take care of it. Marlena and another girl we hung around with decided to stop speaking to me one day, as an "experiment in cliques" (we were reading about clique behavior at the time). I was given fake love letters, written by people who didn't actually exist.
And always, there was Scott. He beat me up, verbally and physically, all the way to school, all day long during class, and all the way home.
At the same time, my home life was a wretched mess. My mother was never home because she worked so much and when she wasn't working, she was going out with her friends. My brother, who was five years older than me, was heavily into drugs at that point and fought a lot with me and our mother. I spent a lot of time hiding in my bedroom closet, so no one would realize I was home.
There are a small handful of photos of me from that time period, but I don't know where most of them are.
This one is my school photo from 1986. It was physically painful for me to look at this and scan it into my computer, and I almost didn't.
Junior High
1987-1988, right before eighth grade, we moved again. This time into a house. New school, new life, right? Not so much. Although in this town, I had one really good friend: Jennifer. Jennifer was the fat girl in our grade. She was very tall (or at least, it seemed that way to me because I was still so incredibly short) and most likely wore around an 18-20. Jenn was never mean to me, but had her own issues due to her weight and homelife and so, we really only hung out with each other in school. I started wearing all black at this point. And Converse All-Stars. Jenn introduced me to the music of the Cure, the Misfits, and the Dead Milkmen.
Gym class was a nightmare. Our teacher wasvaguely sleazy and constantly favored the pretty, skinny girls and just as constantly put me down for being clumsy and slow. I began to develop horrible anxiety the night before I would have gym class (we had it twice a week, Mondays and Wednesdays). I ran the mile for Presidential Fitness Week, but it took me fifteen minutes and I threw up blood when I was finished. I remember kneeling in the grass, trying to get my breath back and the teacher saying to me, in a very disgusted manner, "If you lost weight, this wouldn't happen to you." I remember a weigh-in we had to do the same week, I weighed 120 pounds. I remember another girl who laughed at me because she weighed 98 and told everyone what my weight was. Square-dancing lessons, which I am sure school officials only put into curriculum because they are sadists, were purely an exercise in further humiliation, especially after the gym teacher wrote "right" and "left" on my corresponding hands, so I would know which was which.
After that, I started to hurt myself on the weekends to try to get out of gym class on Monday. Once, I tried to break my wrist with a hammer at my father's house. Another time, I tried to break my leg by hurling myself down the stairs at home. I wasn't successful either time. Sunday nights were always the worst, knowing that I would have to go to gym class the next day if I didn't succeed in whatever injury I was planning for myself. The time with the hammer? I remember growing more and more disgusted with myself that I couldn't summon the nerve to hit myself harder than I already was doing. I remember the frantic wave that washed over me when I realized I just couldn't do it. I felt like a rat in a trap trying to gnaw its own leg off to escape.
My mother and I. This file should actually be named 1987, but I didn't realize it at first.
Eighth grade, with my father. Again, this file should actually be 1988. I got my years a little confused when I was scanning photos and I'm just too lazy to fix it right now.
High School
High school started in 1988. Freshman year, I joined color guard in the marching band and made a couple of new friends (most notable being my best friend to this day, Kathy). I didn't have all that much trouble with other kids like I did before because when I wasn't withdrawing to the point of near-catatonia, I was purposely acting bizarre to keep people away from me. My mental disorders were running amok and my self-image was so poor that I hated the sight of myself. I avoided mirrors, breaking every single one in my bedroom. I wore clothes that hid every part of me and was so humiliated by the thought of having to go clothes shopping when those wore out, that I wore the ones I had to shreds. I rarely brushed my hair. I frequently didn't bathe for days. I just didn't care anymore. I felt ugly and inhuman. My brain was a whirlwind of self-loathing. The friends I did have never said anything to me about my behavior or my appearance.
There are next to no photos of me from that time.
Freshman year school photo
Sophomore year: I remember being terrified of going to band camp for a week before school started and knowing that I would have to wear shorts during drill because of how hot it was and being terrified of people seeing the faint stretchmarks on the backs of my knees. I tried to cover them up with my mother's make-up concealer, which was largely unsuccessful. I also tried to bind my stomach with an ACE bandage because I hated how big it was, but that didn't work.
Once, when I was in the cafeteria at school, a girl I was kind of friendly turned around and offered me one of her cupcakes because she couldn't finish the pack. One of the boys sitting at my table saw this and said, "What, are you like the dumpster for everyone or something?"
I thought about killing myself. A lot. I felt so low that I wanted to die, that I didn't deserve to live. That everything that everyone had been saying about me for the past few years was true. This eventually turned into an actual attempt at slitting my wrists, but it hurt more than I was expecting and I chickened out. I still have a scar on my right forearm from that.
Junior year, I managed to learn the art of being The Funny Fat Girl (TM). I gained more friends. My first boyfriend (who vaguely resembled Joey Ramone and eventually cheated on me with an aquaintance of mine) took me to my Junior Ring dance. I started going to Rocky Horror with Kathy and another friend, Jennie, every weekend. I started pulling out of the hell in my head and began to care about how I looked. Combat boots, black and white striped stockings, cut off denim shorts, band t-shirts and suit jackets were the order of the day and my constant uniform. I sometimes felt passably cute, but I always felt fat. Especially around my friends who were mostly all little and pretty waify girls with bobbed hair and swan-necks. Standing among them, I felt like one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other. Dogshit in the middle of a flower bed. A cockroach amongst the butterflies.
My second boyfriend was seven years my senior, a compulsive liar, and a sociopath. He took my virginity by force and told me it wasn't rape because he was my boyfriend. I convinced myself that no one would believe me if I said anything; he was my boyfriend and after all and not only that, but who would rape a fat girl? I deluded myself with these notions for a very long time. I had no choice but to, my brain wouldn't allow me to focus on the alternative, it would just shy away from reality like a spooked horse whenever I tried to think about it. I didn't stay with him long, but it took me years to completely shake him out of my life. He would always turn up, like a bad fucking penny, whenever I least expected it.
I had the attention of boys (I wanted the attention of some girls as well, but was too shy and confused to ever even talk about it), I had a circle of friends and a social life, but I was still a mess. I still didn't feel human, especially after what my last boyfriend had done to me. My brain chemistry was still throwing curveballs at me, I was frequently depressed and disassociated from reality and I started taking muscle-relaxers to make myself numb to it all. When the numbness got to be too bad, I would cut my arms up to bring some sense of reality back. At this time, I also convinced myself that the only way for someone to love me was if I lost weight. I started to starve myself, which wasn't all that hard because I'm one of those people that doesn't eat when they get depressed.
I attempted suicide for the second time, using an entire bottle of Tylenol. I just threw up uncontrollably for a couple of hours.
Junior year school photo
Senior year was probably the thinnest I'd ever been and I still wasn't skinny like I wanted to be. I have an hourglass figure naturally and at this point, it was just an exaggerated hourglass. All boobs and hips. I still thought I was fat and whenever I began to dare to feel mildly cute, the demons in my head from my past would pop back up and remind me of how disgusting I was. My third boyfriend, and my first real love, thought I was beautiful and told me so constantly. I believed him until four months later, when he cheated on me with a friend of mine one night when they went out to drop acid together.
I went to my prom, but was mortified that when I tried to order my dress from a shop in the mall, they only carried up to a size 12. I was a 14. I bought the damn dress anyway and had it altered by a friend's mother to have a corset-back so it would fit me. I refused to have the professional photos taken at the prom because of how hideous I thought I looked in my dress. It was royal blue, with a white trim around the neckline, and for some reason, I equated this in my head with a killer whale. The "Orca dress" I kept calling it.
Graduation day, 1992.
1992-1993ish, me and two of my best friends (Kathy and Jennie) at Rocky Horror. I'm the one in the middle.
After high school, I spent a lot of time drinking and doing drugs. I tried to kill myself again, this time with a large knife I was going to stab myself in the stomach with, but Kathy caught me and stopped me.
I moved to Philadelphia for college, but didn't succeed and thusly, dropped out. I still felt ugly, I still saw myself as horribly fat. The people I wanted to date didn't want much to do with me because they all wanted tiny little waif girls. I slept around a lot because, I thought this would make people love me. I went through a succession of doomed relationships that usually failed because I pushed them away from me.
Me, sitting at Denny's. Possibly 1994.
I'm the one in the Ramones t-shirt.
In my 20s, I had a roommate who was overwhelmingly dominant and constantly picked on me about my appearance. She ran a gamut of criticisms: said I was too Goth, I wasn't Goth enough, I wear too much make-up, I should cut my hair off, I should cut my hair like hers, that boys who liked me actually really liked her and were only using me to get closer to her, that I talked about liking girls too much, that I was slutty, that I didn't respect myself, that I copied everything she did, etc. No matter what I did, it seemed like I couldn't ever please her. Did knocking me down make her feel better about herself? I don't know. But, she did it a lot. One night, she went at me when I was tripping on LSD. She just berated me for the better part of an hour about how I wanted to go hang out with some guy that I liked, rather than stay home and hang out with her. Reality was already teetered around crazily from the drugs, but her tirade against me just made it worse. The more she hollered at me, the more dirty I began to feel. I locked myself in the bathroom and tried to take a bath, but just sat in the empty tub and clawed at my arms and legs until they bled.
One night, I'd watched a program (Jenny Jones talk show or something similar) about "freak" kids (i.e. punks and goths) whose parents were disappointed in them because of how they looked. I confessed to my roommate that I always wondered if my mother felt like that about me. And her response was to tell me, "of course your mother is disappointed in you, look at yourself." I cried for two hours. Again, with the feeling inhuman. Again, with the feeling unlovable. Again, with the feeling hideous.
1996, with my then-boyfriend who I went on to marry two years later.
My wedding, 1998.
My self-image was so destroyed at this point. I was unhealthily depressed, paranoid, and frequently delusional. I treated my husband like shit, lashing out at him, having affairs (two of them) and eventually leaving him in 2000. I am completely ashamed of my behavior at this point in my life; it was not a good time.
Scotland, 2000. One of the few photos of myself that I actually like.
2000, I'm rocking an awesome bruise on my leg. That day was probably the last time I've worn shorts in public.
2000, getting ready to board a plane back to Scotland. This was right after I'd left my husband.
2001, at Convergence 7 in NYC.
It's now the middle of 2007, and I still have a vastly poor self-image. I refuse to look at any photos of myself from when I was the Queen of the MotherFucking Bridesmaids (TM) at my best friend's wedding because I think I look beyond awful in them. As a holiday present one year, my best friend gave me a copy of a photo of the two of us from that day in a beautiful silver frame. I destroyed it because I couldn't bear to look at it.
Sometimes, I manage to feel pretty despite the weight issues I still struggle with. But, something usually happens to bring it back down. One day, about two years ago, I was coming out of my apartment to go to work and a landscaper working two houses down approached me as I was walking to my car. He told me how cute I was and asked me my name. I didn't respond to him and wouldn't even look at him, just kept my head down and continued getting myself to my car. He asked me for my phone number. He asked my name again. Told me how hot he thought I was. I ignored him the whole time, despite how close he was walking to me.
The thing is, I know he wasn't serious. You could hear the smarminess in his voice. I'm hitting on a fat chick because it's hilarious. Not only did his actions make me sick to my stomach, but they also made me feel threatened, something I had never experienced in my adult life: the full-on physical intimidation of a woman. I thought that feeling had been long behind me. It was a very sobering and disturbing moment.
Halloween, 2003. My boyfriend and I. I'm the Queen of Lemurs.
2004, my 30th birthday.
Last year, attempting to make my cat into a pretty, pretty princess.
Bad webcam photo.
I'm now 32 years old. I'm 5'3". I currently wear anywhere from a 16 to a 22 (depending on what it is and where it came from). I weigh roughly around 230 pounds (not sure of the exact number because I haven't weighed myself in a while, my cat peed on my bathroom scale and broke it). I've managed to clear all the unhealthy relationships out of my life, but I still continually compare myself to my peers and I'm so far away from any sort of body acceptance that I'm still afraid for my boyfriend of six years to see me naked with the lights on. I refuse to dance in public. I avoid having my photo taken. My friends complain that none of them have any good, recent photos of me because I'm always making faces in them. But, I can't help it. I'm so afraid of having my image as it stands preserved in a photo that I deliberately look silly in them with the idea that maybe no one will notice how fat I actually am because they'll be too busy looking at my patented "rockin' out" face. I am the perpetual child ruining all the family portraits.
And that's something I'm constantly working on: the unrelenting and nigh-on paralyzing self-consciousness that I struggle with. I've been readingfatshionista for a few weeks now on the recommendation of a good friend who has been a member for some time and I see all the body acceptance and self-love from so many people.
I don't understand how it's possible, to be quite honest.
I'm at a point in my life where I am basically happy with who I am. I'm self-reliant. I pay all my own bills. I have a big-girl job. I'm myself through college so I can get an even better big-girl job. I'm funny. I'm smart. I have a very patient boyfriend who has adored and endured me for longer than I ever expected. I have beaten addiction and abuse. But I still absolutely hate what I am. How I look. This image that I have of myself. I loathe it.
And what I am is fat.
How does one figure all of this out? I don't have the answer and I certainly don't expect anyone reading this to have the answer either. I don't believe that it's something as simple as just relaying a message, like some kind of bizarre fortune cookie. But, my writing all of this down is the first step I'm taking in trying to work all of this out. It's going to be hard, but I am incredibly tired of looking in the mirror every day and hating myself.
I need to at least try to be comfortable in my own skin.
It was originally written for a community that I belong to on LJ,
fatshionista, but I decided that I needed to post this to my own journal as well. I'm leaving it unlocked because I feel that's something I need to do.This entry was probably the hardest thing I've ever written in my entire life. I am embarrassed by a lot of what's contained in it and of the majority of the photos posted within. I've been writing this over the course of the past couple of weeks and have had to stop writing on several occasions because I started to cry. Writing this entry brought back a lot of memories that I've been trying to forget about for a long, long time.
That being said, I'm going to give one of my very rare subject matter warnings. If you are freaked out by reading about abuse (physical, emotional, and sexual), talk of negative body image, fat-phobia, self-harm, vulgar language, or drug use, then do not read this. I mean it. Also? There is a ton of photos and text under this cut.
Childhood
Tara-Love, born in 1974, on October 5th. The first child for my father and the third for my mother. There were already two boys in the family, from my mother's first marriage, and I was as different from them as night is day. The two of them are dark haired, dark-eyed, and olive-skinned. I had long, straight blonde hair, big blue eyes, and incredibly fair skin. The only girl in the group of siblings and the baby. I was destined to be doted upon. There are a billion photos of me from around that time. I won't subject you to all of them.
Christmas, 1976.
One of my earliest memories is from a softball game that my father was playing in. I don't remember how old I was, but I reckon it was still the 70s, so I couldn't have been older than five. I was running around with all the other kids there and I remember one woman saying as I ran past her, "That little girl is going to grow up to be a knock-out." I didn't know what it meant, but I knew it was about me because there weren't any other little girls near her.
For the majority of my young life, I think I was just a normal kid. At least, that's how the photos look to me. Not fat and not skinny, just there. I started to gain weight roughly around third grade. I didn't have a lot of friends, my mother was almost never home because she worked two jobs, and my brother was always off getting into trouble with his friends. No one really paid attention to what I did or ate, so I did and ate pretty much whatever I wanted. This is when the photos began to trickle away; I don't have many from that time. The photos drying up at that point is more likely due to the incredible dysfunction my family was going through at the time, rather than any dislike of my appearance. I can say that much.
Adolescence
The summer before sixth grade, my maternal-side grandfather died and my mother moved my brother and I into the house she grew up in to live with our alcoholic grandmother, who didn't want to live alone. That entire summer was just wretched. There weren't any other kids on the block who were even close to my age and the kids I did see around town, I was too shy to speak to. On top of that, my mother and grandmother did not get along in the least (because of my grandmother's drinking problem) and they got into very loud arguments a lot. I spent most of my time in my bedroom, lost in my own little world of My Little Ponys or reading my mother's books (I was a very advanced reader, books for kids my age were far too boring and infantile for me). When I wasn't in my room, I was roaming in the woods by myself or riding my bike to get ice cream from a local corner shop. Again, no one paid attention to what I was doing or eating. We moved out a couple of weeks before school was due to start because my mother couldn't take her mother's alcoholism any longer.
This is when my life really started going bad, I think.
We moved a town over, into a small apartment in a very large apartment complex. I thought it was the best thing in the world because it had a pool situated right across from our building and I loved the water. But by then, I was very chubby and more than a little weird from all the isolation I'd been experiencing. Furthermore, around this time I began to have mental issues that I hid from my mother. I heard things that weren't there, saw things that weren't there, had wildly fluctuating moods, and began to pull out my own hair, one strand at a time (I would be diagnosed in my early 20s as being schizophrenic with hypo-manic episodes [this diagnosis would later become schizoaffective disorder] and trichotillomania). I didn't want to cause any more worry to my mother than she was already having, so I just never told her about anything I was experiencing. It was also around this time that I began to very rapidly develop a woman's shape, something I attempted to hide with enormous t-shirts I stole from my father whenever I went to visit him. It was, in my eyes, one more thing I didn't want my mother to worry about and I was too embarrassed by this turn of affairs to bring up the conversation of needing to wear a bra.
When it was finally discovered that I needed to wear a bra, I already fit into my mother's hand-me-downs. I was a C cup before sixth grade.
I started sixth grade (age-wise, I should have been in fifth, but I originally started school when I was four) in this town and had to walk about a mile and a half to get to school. There were a lot of other kids who lived in the same apartment complex, but I generally didn't speak to any of them (still very shy, but mostly just wrapped up in my own head). The first day of school, I managed to make friends with another girl in my class, Marlena. Marlena was very dominant and I was so desperate to please her and therefore keep a friend, that I just let her walk all over me. She frequently set me up for massive falls, but I always just took it. These falls usually involved a boy who lived in my apartment complex and was in the same class as us, named Scott, who seemed to hate me from the very moment he laid his eyes on me, but tolerated me because I was Marlena's friend and he liked her.
Scott would walk with us to and from school, usually being very nasty to me the entire time. He was the first person to ever make me realize that I was fat. He was also the first person to ever make me believe I was ugly. Once, when Marlena had stayed home from school, we were walking home alone and he said to me, "You know, if you lost weight, people would like you. You don't have any friends at school because you're so fat." And I, stupidly agreed with him because I didn't really know how else to handle it and deep down, I wanted him to like me as a friend.
After that conversation, he kicked me in the solar plexus and left me lying on the side of the road, panicking and gasping for breath. I'd never had something like that happen to me before and because I couldn't breathe from the kick, I truly thought I was dying. Before he walked away from me like that, he stood over me, pointing and laughing himself silly. Once I was able to breathe again, I dragged myself home and hid in my room for the entire night, crying silently so no one would hear me.
I endured a huge amount of abuse from him for the two years we lived in that apartment. He stole a treasured stuffed parrot my father won for me at a carnival and set it on fire. He constantly told me that he was going to break into my apartment and kill my cats, describing how he would do it in great detail. He wiped dogshit on my skirt one morning as we were walking to school. He called me all manner of nasty names and got other kids to follow suit. He punched and kicked me, as hard as he could. He even tried to push me out in front of oncoming traffic on several occasions.
Once, we were sitting in class and the teacher was reading to us from a book. I don't remember the exact story or what she said, but she was talking about how large a pig was. And Scott said, sotto vox, "as big as Tara". I remember looking up and over at the teacher's assistant, who was sitting directly in front of Scott. She looked from him to me, with her mouth dropped open, but she didn't say anything to him or anything to the teacher about what he'd said.
Marlena wasn't any help with this. She ignored things or laughed them off. I was over at her house one day after school and a group of boys said, "Oh my god, it's a troll" when they saw me. She laughed it off when I got upset and told me that it was just because I was so short (at the time, I was about 4'10"). I tried to believe her. But after that, the name stuck and I got called "Troll" constantly by everyone.
The worst incident was one afternoon when we didn't have school for some reason or another. Marlena's parents were both at work and we were hanging out at her house. For reasons I can't remember anymore, it was decided that we should climb up onto the roof of her house. Marlena got a ladder and we climbed up there to sit and smoke cigarettes. A group of boys, Scott included, came over and Marlena climbed down the ladder. The boys took the ladder away and I couldn't climb down. They all kept laughing at me and telling me to jump, but I was terribly afraid of heights and scared I'd hurt myself if I jumped down. The garbage cans were right there and they began to throw trash at me, calling me terrible names. I started to cry, which made them worse. I cowered on the roof, trying to make myself as small of a target as possible, and began to scream for them to stop. I screamed so loudly and for so long that a woman who lived two blocks over heard me and came over to see what was wrong. She chased everyone away, got the ladder, and convinced me to come down. She gave them all a venomous tongue-lashing, but they all just stood there and smirked at her. After everyone had left, I asked Marlena why she let them do that to me and she convinced me that the boys had only been playing and I had just been overreacting.
More kids started to pick up on the blood in the water after that. One day, I had accidentally cut my hand to the point of needing stitches (and suffering nerve damage for the rest of my life). When I came back to school, my hand was wrapped up in gauze. One kid told everyone else that I had bit myself while I was eating. They all thought this was hilarious and tormented me about it for weeks. Another time, someone passed me a note in class that had a drawing of one of my cats getting his head cut off. It said, "If you let your cat outside, this is what's going to happen to it, you fat fucking bitch." Once, in art class, I had turned around to reach for something and the boy sitting across for me said, "Look at all that fat on your neck. It's fucking disgusting." My bike was stolen. Someone put gum in my long hair during class that I chopped out with scissors, too humiliated by the experience to wait until I got home for my mother to take care of it. Marlena and another girl we hung around with decided to stop speaking to me one day, as an "experiment in cliques" (we were reading about clique behavior at the time). I was given fake love letters, written by people who didn't actually exist.
And always, there was Scott. He beat me up, verbally and physically, all the way to school, all day long during class, and all the way home.
At the same time, my home life was a wretched mess. My mother was never home because she worked so much and when she wasn't working, she was going out with her friends. My brother, who was five years older than me, was heavily into drugs at that point and fought a lot with me and our mother. I spent a lot of time hiding in my bedroom closet, so no one would realize I was home.
There are a small handful of photos of me from that time period, but I don't know where most of them are.
This one is my school photo from 1986. It was physically painful for me to look at this and scan it into my computer, and I almost didn't.
Junior High
1987-1988, right before eighth grade, we moved again. This time into a house. New school, new life, right? Not so much. Although in this town, I had one really good friend: Jennifer. Jennifer was the fat girl in our grade. She was very tall (or at least, it seemed that way to me because I was still so incredibly short) and most likely wore around an 18-20. Jenn was never mean to me, but had her own issues due to her weight and homelife and so, we really only hung out with each other in school. I started wearing all black at this point. And Converse All-Stars. Jenn introduced me to the music of the Cure, the Misfits, and the Dead Milkmen.
Gym class was a nightmare. Our teacher was
After that, I started to hurt myself on the weekends to try to get out of gym class on Monday. Once, I tried to break my wrist with a hammer at my father's house. Another time, I tried to break my leg by hurling myself down the stairs at home. I wasn't successful either time. Sunday nights were always the worst, knowing that I would have to go to gym class the next day if I didn't succeed in whatever injury I was planning for myself. The time with the hammer? I remember growing more and more disgusted with myself that I couldn't summon the nerve to hit myself harder than I already was doing. I remember the frantic wave that washed over me when I realized I just couldn't do it. I felt like a rat in a trap trying to gnaw its own leg off to escape.
My mother and I. This file should actually be named 1987, but I didn't realize it at first.
Eighth grade, with my father. Again, this file should actually be 1988. I got my years a little confused when I was scanning photos and I'm just too lazy to fix it right now.
High School
High school started in 1988. Freshman year, I joined color guard in the marching band and made a couple of new friends (most notable being my best friend to this day, Kathy). I didn't have all that much trouble with other kids like I did before because when I wasn't withdrawing to the point of near-catatonia, I was purposely acting bizarre to keep people away from me. My mental disorders were running amok and my self-image was so poor that I hated the sight of myself. I avoided mirrors, breaking every single one in my bedroom. I wore clothes that hid every part of me and was so humiliated by the thought of having to go clothes shopping when those wore out, that I wore the ones I had to shreds. I rarely brushed my hair. I frequently didn't bathe for days. I just didn't care anymore. I felt ugly and inhuman. My brain was a whirlwind of self-loathing. The friends I did have never said anything to me about my behavior or my appearance.
There are next to no photos of me from that time.
Freshman year school photo
Sophomore year: I remember being terrified of going to band camp for a week before school started and knowing that I would have to wear shorts during drill because of how hot it was and being terrified of people seeing the faint stretchmarks on the backs of my knees. I tried to cover them up with my mother's make-up concealer, which was largely unsuccessful. I also tried to bind my stomach with an ACE bandage because I hated how big it was, but that didn't work.
Once, when I was in the cafeteria at school, a girl I was kind of friendly turned around and offered me one of her cupcakes because she couldn't finish the pack. One of the boys sitting at my table saw this and said, "What, are you like the dumpster for everyone or something?"
I thought about killing myself. A lot. I felt so low that I wanted to die, that I didn't deserve to live. That everything that everyone had been saying about me for the past few years was true. This eventually turned into an actual attempt at slitting my wrists, but it hurt more than I was expecting and I chickened out. I still have a scar on my right forearm from that.
Junior year, I managed to learn the art of being The Funny Fat Girl (TM). I gained more friends. My first boyfriend (who vaguely resembled Joey Ramone and eventually cheated on me with an aquaintance of mine) took me to my Junior Ring dance. I started going to Rocky Horror with Kathy and another friend, Jennie, every weekend. I started pulling out of the hell in my head and began to care about how I looked. Combat boots, black and white striped stockings, cut off denim shorts, band t-shirts and suit jackets were the order of the day and my constant uniform. I sometimes felt passably cute, but I always felt fat. Especially around my friends who were mostly all little and pretty waify girls with bobbed hair and swan-necks. Standing among them, I felt like one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other. Dogshit in the middle of a flower bed. A cockroach amongst the butterflies.
My second boyfriend was seven years my senior, a compulsive liar, and a sociopath. He took my virginity by force and told me it wasn't rape because he was my boyfriend. I convinced myself that no one would believe me if I said anything; he was my boyfriend and after all and not only that, but who would rape a fat girl? I deluded myself with these notions for a very long time. I had no choice but to, my brain wouldn't allow me to focus on the alternative, it would just shy away from reality like a spooked horse whenever I tried to think about it. I didn't stay with him long, but it took me years to completely shake him out of my life. He would always turn up, like a bad fucking penny, whenever I least expected it.
I had the attention of boys (I wanted the attention of some girls as well, but was too shy and confused to ever even talk about it), I had a circle of friends and a social life, but I was still a mess. I still didn't feel human, especially after what my last boyfriend had done to me. My brain chemistry was still throwing curveballs at me, I was frequently depressed and disassociated from reality and I started taking muscle-relaxers to make myself numb to it all. When the numbness got to be too bad, I would cut my arms up to bring some sense of reality back. At this time, I also convinced myself that the only way for someone to love me was if I lost weight. I started to starve myself, which wasn't all that hard because I'm one of those people that doesn't eat when they get depressed.
I attempted suicide for the second time, using an entire bottle of Tylenol. I just threw up uncontrollably for a couple of hours.
Junior year school photo
Senior year was probably the thinnest I'd ever been and I still wasn't skinny like I wanted to be. I have an hourglass figure naturally and at this point, it was just an exaggerated hourglass. All boobs and hips. I still thought I was fat and whenever I began to dare to feel mildly cute, the demons in my head from my past would pop back up and remind me of how disgusting I was. My third boyfriend, and my first real love, thought I was beautiful and told me so constantly. I believed him until four months later, when he cheated on me with a friend of mine one night when they went out to drop acid together.
I went to my prom, but was mortified that when I tried to order my dress from a shop in the mall, they only carried up to a size 12. I was a 14. I bought the damn dress anyway and had it altered by a friend's mother to have a corset-back so it would fit me. I refused to have the professional photos taken at the prom because of how hideous I thought I looked in my dress. It was royal blue, with a white trim around the neckline, and for some reason, I equated this in my head with a killer whale. The "Orca dress" I kept calling it.
Graduation day, 1992.
1992-1993ish, me and two of my best friends (Kathy and Jennie) at Rocky Horror. I'm the one in the middle.
After high school, I spent a lot of time drinking and doing drugs. I tried to kill myself again, this time with a large knife I was going to stab myself in the stomach with, but Kathy caught me and stopped me.
I moved to Philadelphia for college, but didn't succeed and thusly, dropped out. I still felt ugly, I still saw myself as horribly fat. The people I wanted to date didn't want much to do with me because they all wanted tiny little waif girls. I slept around a lot because, I thought this would make people love me. I went through a succession of doomed relationships that usually failed because I pushed them away from me.
Me, sitting at Denny's. Possibly 1994.
I'm the one in the Ramones t-shirt.
In my 20s, I had a roommate who was overwhelmingly dominant and constantly picked on me about my appearance. She ran a gamut of criticisms: said I was too Goth, I wasn't Goth enough, I wear too much make-up, I should cut my hair off, I should cut my hair like hers, that boys who liked me actually really liked her and were only using me to get closer to her, that I talked about liking girls too much, that I was slutty, that I didn't respect myself, that I copied everything she did, etc. No matter what I did, it seemed like I couldn't ever please her. Did knocking me down make her feel better about herself? I don't know. But, she did it a lot. One night, she went at me when I was tripping on LSD. She just berated me for the better part of an hour about how I wanted to go hang out with some guy that I liked, rather than stay home and hang out with her. Reality was already teetered around crazily from the drugs, but her tirade against me just made it worse. The more she hollered at me, the more dirty I began to feel. I locked myself in the bathroom and tried to take a bath, but just sat in the empty tub and clawed at my arms and legs until they bled.
One night, I'd watched a program (Jenny Jones talk show or something similar) about "freak" kids (i.e. punks and goths) whose parents were disappointed in them because of how they looked. I confessed to my roommate that I always wondered if my mother felt like that about me. And her response was to tell me, "of course your mother is disappointed in you, look at yourself." I cried for two hours. Again, with the feeling inhuman. Again, with the feeling unlovable. Again, with the feeling hideous.
1996, with my then-boyfriend who I went on to marry two years later.
My wedding, 1998.
My self-image was so destroyed at this point. I was unhealthily depressed, paranoid, and frequently delusional. I treated my husband like shit, lashing out at him, having affairs (two of them) and eventually leaving him in 2000. I am completely ashamed of my behavior at this point in my life; it was not a good time.
Scotland, 2000. One of the few photos of myself that I actually like.
2000, I'm rocking an awesome bruise on my leg. That day was probably the last time I've worn shorts in public.
2000, getting ready to board a plane back to Scotland. This was right after I'd left my husband.
2001, at Convergence 7 in NYC.
It's now the middle of 2007, and I still have a vastly poor self-image. I refuse to look at any photos of myself from when I was the Queen of the MotherFucking Bridesmaids (TM) at my best friend's wedding because I think I look beyond awful in them. As a holiday present one year, my best friend gave me a copy of a photo of the two of us from that day in a beautiful silver frame. I destroyed it because I couldn't bear to look at it.
Sometimes, I manage to feel pretty despite the weight issues I still struggle with. But, something usually happens to bring it back down. One day, about two years ago, I was coming out of my apartment to go to work and a landscaper working two houses down approached me as I was walking to my car. He told me how cute I was and asked me my name. I didn't respond to him and wouldn't even look at him, just kept my head down and continued getting myself to my car. He asked me for my phone number. He asked my name again. Told me how hot he thought I was. I ignored him the whole time, despite how close he was walking to me.
The thing is, I know he wasn't serious. You could hear the smarminess in his voice. I'm hitting on a fat chick because it's hilarious. Not only did his actions make me sick to my stomach, but they also made me feel threatened, something I had never experienced in my adult life: the full-on physical intimidation of a woman. I thought that feeling had been long behind me. It was a very sobering and disturbing moment.
Halloween, 2003. My boyfriend and I. I'm the Queen of Lemurs.
2004, my 30th birthday.
Last year, attempting to make my cat into a pretty, pretty princess.
Bad webcam photo.
I'm now 32 years old. I'm 5'3". I currently wear anywhere from a 16 to a 22 (depending on what it is and where it came from). I weigh roughly around 230 pounds (not sure of the exact number because I haven't weighed myself in a while, my cat peed on my bathroom scale and broke it). I've managed to clear all the unhealthy relationships out of my life, but I still continually compare myself to my peers and I'm so far away from any sort of body acceptance that I'm still afraid for my boyfriend of six years to see me naked with the lights on. I refuse to dance in public. I avoid having my photo taken. My friends complain that none of them have any good, recent photos of me because I'm always making faces in them. But, I can't help it. I'm so afraid of having my image as it stands preserved in a photo that I deliberately look silly in them with the idea that maybe no one will notice how fat I actually am because they'll be too busy looking at my patented "rockin' out" face. I am the perpetual child ruining all the family portraits.
And that's something I'm constantly working on: the unrelenting and nigh-on paralyzing self-consciousness that I struggle with. I've been reading
fatshionista for a few weeks now on the recommendation of a good friend who has been a member for some time and I see all the body acceptance and self-love from so many people. I don't understand how it's possible, to be quite honest.
I'm at a point in my life where I am basically happy with who I am. I'm self-reliant. I pay all my own bills. I have a big-girl job. I'm myself through college so I can get an even better big-girl job. I'm funny. I'm smart. I have a very patient boyfriend who has adored and endured me for longer than I ever expected. I have beaten addiction and abuse. But I still absolutely hate what I am. How I look. This image that I have of myself. I loathe it.
And what I am is fat.
How does one figure all of this out? I don't have the answer and I certainly don't expect anyone reading this to have the answer either. I don't believe that it's something as simple as just relaying a message, like some kind of bizarre fortune cookie. But, my writing all of this down is the first step I'm taking in trying to work all of this out. It's going to be hard, but I am incredibly tired of looking in the mirror every day and hating myself.
I need to at least try to be comfortable in my own skin.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-24 02:54 am (UTC)I have seen a range of pics of you. From cons to the wedding pictures and I have to say... when I see you with the WOD (Wife of Doom from memory) there is a joyous and wicked happiness in the both of you that is just so compelling.
You both seem to share a happiness that adds a fire to your looks.
Weird I know... but I think that has a lot to do with the self love thing. Also gives us reason to get healthy. We want to stick around and annoy the living bejesus out of our loved ones for as long as humanly possible. After all, they deserve the best.