My Abused Self-Image

Always my self-image has been terrible. Let me start this post by saying that the adults in my family were kids themselves having become parents of me, my brother, and my cousins as teenagers. They didn't and couldn't have know better. Their parents weren't loving compassionate people and as far as I know maybe their parents weren't either. Having said that even before I was truly aware of how image mattered I was being being told I was fat.

I remember one of my first episodes, I could only have been about six years old, and my mother made some comment to me and my brother about being ashamed of the way we looked to her friends and coworkers. Something about not being able to show off photos of us because we looked like rag-a-muffins.

And then again when I was in the fourth grade, my mother laid track for the railroad, she was gone all week and home on weekends. We stayed with my grandparents. I remember eating a lot of bread, I would sneak into the kitchen and ball a piece up, hide and eat it. I know it was a defense mechanism from her being gone. But when she came home she would tell me I was fat and I better not keep eating all of the bread. We didn't deal with the real issue.

My weight fluctuated throughout my younger years. I played a lot, but I self-medicated with food. I was also called the book worm within my family, because I loved to read, It was not complimentary either. The others made fun of the way I ran. Couldn't be happy that I was running. And they couldn't see that their words hurt, or didn't care. It was like I was suppose to hear those comments, change, and be happy that they had said something. Instead I was hurt, probably ate more, and hid more and more in my books. Was it abuse, no, but it sure wasn't helpful.

So along comes junior high, 7th and 8th grade, and I decide to eat healthier and exercise. Man was I good at it. I was slim, people talked about how pretty I was. Wait. I was aware that I was pretty well before then, Even though I was told I was fat through out my childhood I was also told I was pretty, that my mom had made pretty babies. Also I should say that I wasn't ever fat, I was plump or pudgy. Back to junior high, when we would stop at Dairy Queen I would get a diet sprite at this time. But one day my mom said that an ice cream cone wouldn't kill me. And that blew that. In my mind she wasn't on board with my new me. In reality she was right, I know Momma's always right, one ice cream cone shouldn't have broke my healthier me, it is the correct way to go about eating healthy, you know, everything in moderation.

High school rolls around and I become a bulimic. I do it for a while when I was about 16 years old. Of course I'm again told how pretty I am. I wise up and stop when I couldn't eat a few bites of a sandwich without it coming back up. It scared me. Then when I was 18 years old I do it again thinking this time I can manage it, knowing better than to go so long without food. I met my first husband and it stopped. I realize that it had been a control issue. I was felt so out of control of my life that if I could control my hunger and my weight then I had control over something. No one ever saw it, no one ever asked about what I was doing, or how I was doing, and I even look back at the photos from that time and think "wow, how did no one see this happening, I was bony and weird looking". Sad.

As an adult I haven't ever went back to the bulimia. If anything I have leaned more to the anorexic side at times. I became overweight by 30 some pounds with the stress of my first marriage. Divorce and lost weight. Remarried, became pregnant and diagnosed with diabetes, had a baby. Lost a lot of weight. Fight the diabetes and anxiety, put on 40 pounds too much. Now I look at fat women like myself and wonder how they do it everyday. How do they make themselves pretty or at least feel pretty? Because they look pretty to me. I don't look pretty to me though. Sad.