Scales of Libra

The Big Fat Chip On My Shoulder

15 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment

by scalesoflibra in Serious Side

Happy New Year!

Well, now that that’s out of the way, ahaha…

There’s been a draft post in my queue for over 2 years that I could never bring myself to finish nor to post. It’s just too personal. But, as I enter my mid-mid-life crisis in the last 9 months of my 20s (TT^TT), I figured I should go ahead and put it out into the aether, let come what may.

This post is a bit disjointed, because it is but the tip of an iceberg that’s been in my mind for 10 years. I think the point I ultimately want to make is that humans judge each other based on looks, and we should accept this fact and be honest about it.

And so, on to it!

The biggest lie I’ve been told is “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.” I grew up thinking that I’d be judged on my character and actions, not how I looked. I think the tenacity with which I held on to this belief, and lived honestly and diligently, was really a defense mechanism for what my subconscious knew and feared all along: we’re judged by our looks. I couldn’t verify it through personal experience though, since I always looked the same.

Enter 2005.

While I’ve been obese ever since my family immigrated to the United States in the late 80s, my weight peaked my senior year in high school. After a return to my usual weight, in my senior year in college I went up to my heaviest again: 235 pounds. At 5’6, that put my BMI nearly at 38. Upon graduating, I decided to make a change. Both fortunately and unfortunately, it took 9 months for me to find and get a job. In those 9 months, I embarked on a lifestyle change. Through proper sleep, calorie counting, and daily exercise (so much easier to do when you’re unemployed), I lost 40 pounds. I was pretty happy with my accomplishment, and was ready to keep going, shooting for a weight of 150 pounds. But then, I started noticing something.

People were so much nicer to me.

Not just strangers, but friends and family also, and eventually, my new coworkers. It was eerie. I wasn’t acting any differently. I didn’t really have more confidence in myself; as far as I was concerned, I wasn’t even at the half-way point yet. Yet there it was. People were acknowledging my existence, and taking me seriously before I even displayed any specialized knowledge, for the first time in my life.

I remembered having experienced something similar when a friend of mine plucked my eyebrows sophomore year in high school at a sleep over. Without any tweezing, I have a unibrow and my eyebrows completely obscure my brow bone. I didn’t see anything particularly wrong with this, that was just the way I was. When I got home from the sleepover and looked in the mirror, all I saw was a stranger. I felt completely phony with that new face, and couldn’t wait for my eyebrows to grow back. But when I went to school the next day, I got so many approving comments and glances. I thought to myself, “Who knew people cared this much about eyebrows?”

I let my eyebrows grow back, but when I started college, I thought, “maybe I should pluck ‘em after all.” At first I’d do it every now and then. Eventually, it became a weekly ritual.

If ever I’m complimented on a physical trait, it’s on how straight my eyebrows are. I haven’t seen my natural face in 10 years.

Just as I was experiencing a new level of social acceptance having reached 190 pounds, life got complicated. Late 2007 through summer 2008 was the worst year of my life. I dreaded going to work. I had the crappiest coworkers ever. There were arguments, which nearly came to blows, meetings, disciplinary actions, pregnancies, and lots of yelling and crying. It seemed the people I worked with were hellbent on turning life into an episode of Maury. I was angry every single day but felt the pressure to keep it together, to maintain a shred of sanity in that circus. But the stress got to me: I gained back 20 pounds. And once again, I became invisible.

I haven’t really recovered from that. I’ve been stuck between 200 and 215 for 3 years. One day I came across this interview with Jennifer Hudson where she echoed my feelings exactly: “You never know you’re being discriminated against until you see what you’re being deprived of.” I thought, “So it’s not just me trippin’.”

It’s become a huge chip on my shoulder. I’ve read many a weight loss success story where the person comments on how they get better treatment. But that’s all they say. My immediate question is, “Doesn’t that make you angry?”

I once overheard a coworker say to her boyfriend, “You wouldn’t have dated me when I was chubby.” I don’t remember the guy’s reply, and I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop so I just kept on walking, but I thought, “How can you date him while knowing that?”

I remember reading an advice column, where a man wrote in saying that he lost all attraction to his wife after she gained a lot of weight. He loved her and was afraid of hurting her feelings, but he just couldn’t take it anymore. The advice columnist replied that he should think about her health instead, and express his concern for that rather than the wife’s size. I thought, “But isn’t that a lie? When it’s that special hubby-wife time, the man isn’t gonna bust out the wife’s medical charts to get turned on by her low cholesterol and good blood pressure, he’s gonna be looking at her body.” I’ve since read many other magazine and newspaper articles, online and off, and readers’ comments on those, that urge people to think about “health,” but more often than not I get the feeling that “health” is just a euphemism for what people really want: “looking thin.”

But as in the example with the eyebrows, there’s more to looks than weight. Today, what perhaps prompted me to finally get these thoughts out of my head, was a friend posting this article to Facebook, and the ensuing comments about “women need to learn to love their bodies, no matter what size,” “Real women have curves!,” etc.

I looked through the editorial, and indeed, while I think the plus size model in the spread is more beautiful than the average thin fashion model, the spread didn’t make me feel any better about my own body because:

• She has been photographed to showcase sexiness – notice the 3-4 inch heels on her otherwise naked body
• She is shown as having perfect skin
• She is shown as having no body hair
• She is shown as having perfect teeth
• She has been perfectly made-up and coiffed
• She is posed in ways that accentuate “womanly” fat, but hide “ugly” fat

The message I get is, “It’s okay to be plus size, so long as you’re perfect in every other way. And sexy. Be sexy.”

Well, that’s a huge FAIL for me.

I have frizzy hair that can only be tamed by hot metal. I’m hairy all over and it takes hours of shaving and tweezing just to get to something approaching a “womanly” level of hair. I have acne. The gaps between all of my front teeth up to my molars are so huge nothing can get stuck between them.

All of these “flaws” could be taken care of with cosmetics or cosmetic surgery, and loads of time. I already find the amount of time I invest in my appearance to be too much, but I know that I would be utterly invisible if I didn’t to at least this much.  That’s the kind of beings humans are. Not just strangers, but friends also. Not just friends, but family also.

I don’t want to hear anyone tell me to just “accept myself and be happy.” That’s how I was for years. When I first heard the concept of “self-esteem” it was really weird for me, because the concept of thinking about oneself at all had never occurred to me. I was a kid who just went through life playing and learning. I believed it when I was told that it was what was on the inside that counts and kept going, giving not a single care to my appearance. All I did was throw on some jeans, a t-shirt, and put my hair in a ponytail. As long as I was clean and neat, that’s all that mattered, right?

I don’t think I’ve ever made a bigger mistake in judgement. I realize that now.

I tried explaining this to a friend once. The friend totally didn’t get it. It went something like this:

Friend: You really do have such great eyebrows.
Me: Hahaha, only after tweezing them like hell.
Friend: Whatever, some people can’t get that even with tweezing.
Me: You know, I actually hate getting complimented on that.
Friend: Why?
Me: Because it’s the only thing people ever say to me. People say “I love your eyebrows,” and I think, “Thanks, you just made me feel like shit.”
Friend: Oh, you’re so negative!

I was blown away by this complete lack of understanding. I got the Spinning Beach Ball of Death in my brain and couldn’t explain clearly what I meant. Only later did I realize what I should have said:

“People never compliment me on anything other than my eyebrows. Sometimes I’ll get complimented on an article of clothing, but it’s never ‘that looks good on you,’ it’s ‘that’s a cool piece.’ In other words, what’s being complimented isn’t me, it’s the item. Same thing with the eyebrows. Imagine living your whole life hearing other people get told, ‘you’re so cute,’ ‘you’re beautiful,’ ‘you’re handsome,’ but all you ever get is ‘this one little part of you is great!’ Wouldn’t that make you feel kinda crummy?”

Well, wouldn’t it?

And I hate it when people try to show that they get it after you’ve called them out on it. It’s the fat version of “I have black friends.” They’ll go out of their way to show that they like fat artists, or fat actors. Ha! What a joke.

I sometimes ask myself, “If I had a daughter, what would I tell her about all this?” I think I would tell her the conclusion I’ve come to. That people do judge based on looks. That you will make some friends, and not make others, based on how you look. That looks are trivial when it comes to choosing a life-long mate, but if you don’t even feel like approaching someone in the first place, could you even get to that stage? That having intelligence, skill, and a good character are important, but that doesn’t mean that appearances aren’t. That people should neither be consumed by a quest for beauty, nor ignore the issue completely. That I wish this weren’t the case, but it is.