Self-Hatred is a Sneaky Bastard

Last week’s People Magazine featured Portia de Rossi on the cover and excerpts from her new book where she discusses her battle with anorexia. Toward the end of the article, I came across this quote:

“I didn’t decide to become anorexic. It snuck up on me disguised as a healthy diet, a professional attitude. Every time I restricted my calorie intake I would binge immediately after. I lived my life from day to day by weighing myself, and measuring my success or failure solely on weight lost or gained – just as I had done from the time I was 12. I’d measured my accomplishments and my self-worth on that scale for my entire life.”

I may not be anorexic (far from it!), but I know what she's talking about. Like Ms. de Rossi, I didn’t intend to become so screwed up when it came to food. This battle with my weight has been motivated by a lot of different things. Sometimes it was about being liked or loved, sometimes about trying to feel beautiful, sometimes about being successful, and sometimes it was even about being “healthy.” It seemed harmless enough, and at times, even like something that I was doing to make my life better. But in my head, all of those things became contingent on fitting into what society says I should look like, contingent on the number on the size label in my pants. And all the while, the self-hatred was sneaking in. And every time I squeezed into an airline seat, or walked out of a store in the mall knowing that there wasn’t a thing in there that fit me, or read an article about how some celebrity was fat because they’d gained 20 pounds and were now a size 2 instead of a size 0, it planted another seed that told me that I wasn’t ok the way I am. And those seeds have taken root and grown until they’re out of control, like the weeds in the overgrown vacant lot in your neighborhood that lowers your property values and invites people from all over to dump their dirty old mattresses in the middle of the night.

I’ve got a lot of overgrown plants and dirty old mattresses piled up in my head. It’s going to take a lot of work to clean them out. But hey, you know, sometimes people take old vacant lots and turn them into beautiful parks and community gardens. So, I may have my doubts, but I have hope that it can be done with enough effort.