In my early childhood years, I was small for my age, shorter, and a lower weight than average. My mother said she had to order my school uniform as early as possible to get one of the few very small sizes and then remake it to fit me. Around the time I was ten years old, we had a different problem buying clothes for me. We had to shop for “chubby” or “plus” sizes.
I’d think back about those times and how I went from being too skinny to being too fat. I didn’t eat right. I didn’t exercise enough. The members of my father’s family were short and “inclined to be heavy.” I was weak, undisciplined, and genetically cursed.
Then I read Susie Orbach’s book “Fat is a Feminist Issue,” and the theme resonated with me. First published in 1978, the book was groundbreaking in connecting women’s issues with food to how we felt about our place in society. When I was heavier, I felt more powerful and safer. I felt that others took me more seriously in academic and professional settings. Was I trading off being attractive with being significant in other ways?
Fat Is A Feminist Issue talked about our lived experience: how preoccupied we could become with eating, not eating and avoiding fat. Emotionally schooled to see our value as both sexual beings for others and midwives to their desires, we found ourselves often depleted and empty, and caught up in a kind of compulsive giving. Eating became our source of soothing. We stuffed our mouths with food, and I proposed we could learn to exchange food – when we weren’t hungry – for words.
Forty years since Fat Is A Feminist Issue, Susie Orbach, The Guardian, June 24, 2018
Often, I was obsessed with getting thin and being attractive in “that way” rather than taken seriously because of my intelligence, but my attempts to lose weight were unsuccessful. As much as I desired to change, I was weak, undisciplined, and genetically cursed.
In my first article in this series, Breaking Free from a Lifetime of Weight Struggles, I detailed how I had few boyfriends. “After high school, I thought that men didn’t approach me because of my weight. I saw a look of disappointment or disdain when their eyes moved from my blonde hair and blue eyes to the rest of my body.”
Around the time I was 30 years old, I thought I had a breakthrough. I was loving my life in London. I was getting serious about cycling and rode my bike across the city, to and from work, and around the parks in the city on the weekends. I went to the gym regularly doing aerobics and started taekwondo. I learned about eating high-GI foods before a long ride or workout to keep my energy at the proper levels. I only ate foods that were 5% fat. I was losing weight and getting fit. It felt great until I started getting attention walking down the street.
My goal was to get attention from men, but this wasn’t the attention I was hoping for. I still wasn’t getting asked out, but I was getting leered at, lude comments, etc., as I walked down the street. It scared me. It scared me even more than I realized at the time. Looking back, it affected me so much that I started eating less carefully. I was as active, but my weight crept back up. I’d wear baggy clothes and layers, but that wasn’t enough. I needed the layers of fat to make me feel safe.
I didn’t connect all the dots until about ten years later. I was forty and lived in Ireland with my family. I met my husband when I lived in London, around the time described above. We had moved to Ireland, where his family was from, and over the next few years, I had three children. I watched a lot of daytime television while breastfeeding the babies, and this time, I watched Oprah. This episode was about a woman who had suffered sexual abuse, and they discussed how, after the abuse, she had gained a lot of weight that unconsciously she felt protected her. Hearing her story, I felt a shock in my body.
That story brought back a memory, and I realized why I needed that shield.
Through third grade, my mother sent me to a Catholic school in town, but then it closed, and I was so happy that I would go to the public school that all my neighborhood friends attended. In late August/early September 1972, I would have been about two months shy of nine years old. In those days, eight or nine-year-old girls could walk across town to school, visit friends, go shopping, etc.
There was a shopping center on the edge of town, the Arterial Plaza, with its flagship department store, Britts. The shopping center was about a twenty-minute walk from my house, not far from my new elementary school, and I frequently walked up there alone. Around that time, it had expanded, and there was a new movie theater and a chain drug store that sold stationery and school supplies. I was excited about starting school and went in to pick out some supplies.
As I was looking at a very cool binder with purple flowers, someone behind me said, “Can you read?” I turned and saw a man standing there, and I said, “Oh, yes, I’m a very good reader.” I was a good reader for my age and very proud of it. The man handed me a paper. “Can you read this?” It looked like a clipping out of a newspaper but covered in plastic. My mother used to clip articles from the paper that she thought would interest me or when anyone in the family was mentioned in an article, so I was excited to see what this said.
It was just text, no pictures, and it was about a little girl climbing into bed onto a man. When I read it, I couldn’t understand precisely what it was about, but I felt a shock in my body and knew I should not have read it. I returned it to the man, turned myself around, and didn’t run but walked as quickly as I could all the way home. I went in the front door and up the stairs to my room. The overwhelming thought that I was punished for being so proud of how well I could read.
I don’t remember what I did then or how I explained this to my mother. I do know that I didn’t tell anyone until one time when I was visiting home from college, and I told this story to my mother. She said I should have told her then because he may have done this to other girls. We didn’t talk about how it affected me. We never talked about it again, and it went back into the corner of my mind until about twenty years later when I watched this Oprah episode.
I sometimes feel guilty about feeling that incident affected me so strongly when many children, like Oprah’s guest, experienced worse and ongoing abuse. It did affect me profoundly, so I have great compassion for anyone who suffered more, especially when I see cases in the news and the victim is a girl around that age with long blond hair.
Many women who have had no experience like this can still have fear and feel the need to protect themselves from unwanted attention and possible harm. I have other memories of earlier times of my head patted, my cheeks pinched, being picked up by men I hardly knew, so imagine that this was common for girls before more recent times when we are much more aware of the dangers of predators.
It is incredible how powerful the unconscious mind can be. You can “forget” about something so terrible, yet it affects you so profoundly. When you remember again, it still has a hold on you.
But in remembering, I was then able to take steps to heal.
It’s been about twenty years since that realization, and I finally feel I am moving past the need for that shield.
I may feel less targeted by men because I am sixty years old.
Maybe I have learned that I can be smaller and still be strong – and safe.
There are still moments I catch myself being afraid. One morning, lying in bed, I felt that my waist was much slimmer, and I felt uncomfortable with the new feeling it gave me.
Then I realized I didn’t need to be afraid.
I am finally ready for this “new” body.
Take Action!
🌸 Consider if you feel safer or more comfortable when you are at a heavier weight. Do you hide in layers of clothes or do other things to shield yourself from certain feelings or fears?
🌸 Write a page on how these feelings may have started and affected you over the years.
🌸 Email admin@raisingyourvoice.com with your story. I’d love to hear about your journey!
If you enjoyed this article:
🌸 Share it with any friends you think could benefit from these articles.
🌸 Follow me on social media for more on personal and professional wellness.
🌸 Click here to subscribe to my mailing list to get each new article in your Inbox.