Acceptance is a Hard Pill to Swallow

by sylvia

So today was a day. I can’t say it was good, but I also can’t say it was great.

See, I have this nasty habit of checking my email – all of my email – first thing in the morning. That means the Zaftig account, my work account, and my personal account. And all before I even get out of bed. It’s a bad habit, mostly because it can set the tone for the rest of the day.

So today, in my personal account, I found that someone had tagged me in three different photos in Facebook, in an album titled “Time Warp.” This person is someone I haven’t seen since I was 7 (she would have been 3).

As I may have mentioned before, I didn’t become a fat kid until I was 9 years old. I talked about it here. So I had a good idea that these pictures this old friend had tagged me in would be the pre-fat cute years.

I guess I wasn’t prepared for what would happen to me when I saw those pictures. Yes, I was cute. Yes, it was from the pre-fat years. I was “normal” looking.

It pained me to see those. Like that was the last time I was ever “normal” looking, and not the grotesque person I see myself as now, or saw for so many years.

My first reaction was a rhetorical “what the hell happened to me?” and I started to cry.

Was I crying for vanity reasons? Was I crying because I thought I was past this? Was I crying because sometimes I really really HATE what I see in the mirror? Was I crying because of all the years that people treated me badly because of the way I looked, and not just because I was fat, but because I was “off-looking”? Was I crying because I was hormonal?

The short answer is yes – all of the above.

This acceptance thing is hard. Right now I am so grossed out by myself. Not just because of the fat, but because of the hair, the face, the nose, the ugly feet, the grotesque hands.

The problem is, there have been many times in my life where I have felt this way, and I know that it does go away. All of us have our ups and downs and I take medicine to keep the downs in my life from taking over me and making me lose control of my emotions.

But when it does happen, it is such a deep, deep spiral down that it makes it hard to function, to even want to function.

And I know that everything I am describing sounds like depression, which I have no doubt it is, to some degree. I’ve had these feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing since I was a young kid.

It almost seems like it coincides with when I “became” a fat kid.

So, did I become depressed because I got fat and had social problems resulting? Or did my depression (read:brain chemistry) make me fat?

It’s such a chicken-egg question, but the fact that I’ve never been super skinny, I can’t say for certain that if I was at my “ideal weight” I would not be depressed, especially since of what I would have to do to get there.

But I don’t think I’m depressed. I just think my brain chemistry is fucked up.

So how do I control these feelings of worthlessness about how I look when I get this down on myself?

Do I exercise? Do I eat? Do I go shopping?

Nope. I guess I blog about it.

~ by Sylvia on November 12, 2009.