MOVING FORWARD â—½ ENCOURAGEMENT
I Wasn't Fat
by Pam Charro
All of my life, I have believed I was a fat kid. I've been hearing about my fondness for food ever since I can remember: "You have always liked your food." "Fat and Skinny went to bed, Fat rolled over and Skinny was dead!" "Give Pam your leftovers, she is our family garbage disposal." And that was just in my own household! Once the kids at school found out how I felt about my body, a new onslaught of teasing began.
To be fair, it would have totally made sense if I had been overweight. Mom tells me that, even as I baby, I never seemed to know when I had been fed enough, and would keep crying for more, no matter how much she gave me. And in elementary school, I remember being completely obsessed with food. Almost every word reminded me of one of my favorite dishes. I would often stuff myself until I was sick, needing to lie down for a while until I felt better. Had I not been several inches taller than the other kids, I'm sure that these habits would have shown as extra weight on my body. I never doubted for a minute that I was fat.
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But the pictures don't lie. It simply wasn't true.
It got me wondering ..
why, for all of these years,
have I been so convinced of
something about myself that was a lie?
I'm sure that part of the reason was the common stigma in the 70s that many of us felt as girls, that if you weren't thin, you were fat. I'm so glad that my own daughter isn't shackled with that hurtful idea.
But I'm also coming to grips with another reason I held so tightly to the belief that my body was ugly: The idea that I was fat was the perfect scapegoat for all of the hurt and rejection I had experienced. Of course no one loved or liked me - who can love a fat kid, especially one with so much potential to be beautiful? Every obsession and weakness was my own fault, something to be ashamed of. And all of the responsibility to "fix" myself was on me. It made perfect sense in my subconscious mind: If I can look like a beautiful person, the world will treat me like one. But no matter how I struggled, I could never look "good enough" for long. And the most likely reason was because then I would no longer have my convenient excuse for all of the hurt.
So now I am at a huge turning point in how I view myself, despite all of the years of therapy I have already had in trying to accept that all of the pain and rejection wasn't my fault. Even if I had been overweight…or selfish…or ugly…or a hothead…or too hyper...or annoying…I still should have been loved.
But I have physical proof in photos right in front of me, showing that something I believed about myself all of those years wasn't true.
There is something powerful about finally knowing that, and it is leading me into a greater truth. I wasn't a lot of things that I was led to believe I was. And maybe now that I can see the lies for myself, I can get them out of the way so that there will be room for what actually happened. Room for who I really was, and all of the grace and truth needed so that I can finally heal.