Tails of a 17th Street Geisha

I just had my one year review at work today. Instead of talking about my past work and accomplishments, my boss and I spoke about what my department needs to do in the next year. It’s kind of funny how… what the fuck? why am I talking about work. next topic… body iamge.

Being with Bryan has been unbelievable. He’s really into my body and tells me frequently that he loves it. I’m starting to believe him and it’s weird that I could have spent so much time in my life hating it.

I remember being 30 pounds thinner and hating my body at the time. Now I wish I was back at that body size! It’s almost a cyclical process: there’s some problem in the beginning that triggers emotional eating or drinking alcohol as a crutch, then you gain weight, hate the growing size of your body and the loss of control you have from using food/booze as a crutch, and then because you’re so upset about weight gain, you eat/drink some more and gain more weight. You’re out of control, hating your body and digging yourself deeper into a pit of self-loathing. You end up eating/drinking yourself until you forget about the original problem because now you have a whole series of new ones!

Instead of dealing with the emotional trigger, most parents, friends, doctors, nurses, etc., try to deal with the physical manifestations of it, not knowing (or caring) that it stems from unhappiness. People would always say, "what a beautiful face… what a shame!" or "if only she exercised" or "she would be a model if only…" How nice, eh? EVERYONE would say shit like this and it would reinforce to me that those closest didn’t care about HOW I FELT but WHAT I LOOKED LIKE. If I’m already unhappy, what makes people think that I’m going to radically change what and how I eat so that i can make THEM happy?

My body was a reflection of pain and sadness and I couldn’t give a hairy rats ass about appeasing others. Some thought that I would be happy if I lost the weight, not realizing that the weight would come off once I dealt with the issues that made me unhappy. Eventually, the added weight continued to compound the pain and problems and became a problem in and of itself. Perhaps I wanted people to see the weight and not the weight of a burdened soul?

Enter the binge drinking, bad relationships in college, an abusive workplace environment (that I put up with for 5 years)… and the spiral of weight gain and drinking spun faster. At this point I wonder–did I want to have problems that took up all my time so I couldn’t dwell on the one problem (or series of problems) that started this whole chain of events in the first place?

Leaving the bad workplace, I started to find more time for myself and to care more about myself and needs. I moved back to DC and bought a condo. I was still drinking however and I was still hiding in the gay community. Hiding from what?

I think I won’t know what my original problem was that came about around the time of my parents divorce (seperation anxiety?) but it’s now a game of chicken or egg to know if my body image issues were the new problem or if they were a reflection of the problem.

Giving up drinking and facing my fears without booze was a HUGE step in the right direction. meeting someone who is not judgemental and who is extremely considerate, who makes me love myself is ANOTHER huge step. I think I’m traversing a positive path out of that horrible cycle, but damn, it took a while and it was hard!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.