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5/11/2010

Society Is Funny Except Not

I want to feel at home in my natural body, I really do, but I don't know how to get there.  No matter how far away from purging or restricting I've ever gotten - in mindset or on a calendar - it has never gotten easy to be in my body at the weight and shape it wants me to be.  The only guarantee so far has been that the farther away I get from a certain weight and shape, the more uncomfortable I am.  I've gone a good, long time - five and a half years - above that weight and beyond that shape, and I'm sorry to report that it never felt natural.  As naturally as I let my body behave, it never felt natural.  Not that this weight and shape that claims to keep me sane feels "natural" either.  Or "comfortable," necessarily.  But it's a different state of discomfort and disconnect.

And so much else supports this latter discomfort and disconnect.  On the one hand I have a doctor and family (incidentally, I'm seeing my mom this weekend, so that should be interesting) and friends and, you know, science pulling for the higher weight, the natural shape.  On the other hand, I have society in general and conversations like this:

Person I haven't seen in a while:  CN, you're so skinny --
Me:  Yeah --
PIHSIAW:  You look beautiful!!

I think my face did one of these:


"wtf?"

And then I literally walked away without replying.  It was one of my more socially inept moments, but I had just no idea what to say.  It was probably better, because if I'd said anything, it would have been what very nearly made it out, which was, "I have an eating disorder and am medically classified as underweight."  All things considered, it was probably better that I wandered off like a four-year-old.

3 comments:

  1. See, now I totally go for it. After losing huge amounts of weight due to illness, to the point where I looked visibly ill and felt terrible, I was constantly confronted by people all too happy to either compliment me on my illness, "You look so thin!" or chastise me for it. "Jeez, eat something!"

    I started telling people, in uncomfortable detail, exactly why I lost so much weight, how it made me physically feel, and how I felt about it emotionally. That way, they got to feel as uncomfortable as I did. They started it.

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  2. I'm with PF. Sometimes I think you should just confront people with their inane views/comments.

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  3. The catch comes in when you consider privacy, as in, my own. Being underweight or at a significantly lower weight than many of one's peers, doesn't lend itself well to privacy as I know both of you understand. But this is a person in my extended family-in-law, one whom I see more often than I've seen lately, and one who is not entirely discreet. While part of me would have loved to make her realize exactly what she'd just told me, I valued my privacy more in that moment (and now) than the satisfaction of making her realize what a gauche thing she'd just inadvertently done.

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