Don’t get your hopes up too high, I haven’t gotten below 250 just yet. However, I have had a feeling for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, and I want to share it.
It feels a little strange saying this, but here it comes – lately when looking in the mirror, I haven’t hated what I’ve seen
I need to immediately pump the breaks on this post and make sure you, the reader, understand that I am not interested in feedback or advice or anything like that on this thought or subject. I’m just logging the event, and we’ll see what happens as time moves forward.
I have for most of my life struggled with how I look. I know I don’t look bad, logically, but I’ve always found myself extremely unattractive. As a boy I would regularly have the experience, one that I’m told is common, of being mistaken for a girl. For most of my boyhood, this was in no way a bother. Boy, girl, what the heck did I care? I didn’t. At first. But as I grew into adolescence, an age where this mistake usually stops being made of other boys, it was still quite common for me. This started to bother me quite, and before long it bothered me a lot. It’s odd typing this now, honestly, I haven’t thought about this probably since that time. As I moved into my teenage years, the previously regular mistake sublimated and seemed to disappear altogether overnight. However, this wasn’t something I could take as a victory and enjoy the spoils of, as it was quickly replaced by the social stigmas common with being overweight.
Somewhere near the end of my boyhood and edging into that fraught adolescence, I had a medical procedure that cured an intestinal problem that kept me perpetually sick and quite underweight. With my guts repaired and my body finally able to keep down all that I’d eaten, I found that I was predisposed to be heavy. I remember when my Mom started to take me shopping in the “husky” sections of the retail shops around town and at the mall. At first, this was kind of fun and novel. I was bigger than the other kids, and that made me feel strong. Also, I like dogs, especially huskies, but when the meaning of the euphemism finally dawned on me, it was beyond disheartening, it was downright soul crushing. I wasn’t the energetic, plucky, precocious young person I’d always thought of myself as. I was a fat kid.
I don’t know what it’s like for kids these days, and I do worry that while some ills of our past have been cured, we certainly haven’t cured them all, and some of what was cured only made way for all new ills that plague our youths just the same. But back then, every single other thing that very well might have defined a person was lost entirely to the one singular attribute you had if you were the dreaded “fat kid”. It didn’t even take much to be a fat kid back then either, just being a little thicker around the waist was too much. I had been born in the early 80s, a time beset on all sides by images of a strange beauty standard. A standard of being so thing as to seem unwell by any other measure. I do apologize if the previous statement reads as though I think all thinness means a lack of health. I have become a firm believer that we not only do have all types of bodies across our population of humans, but that we should have such. The diversity is critical to our species special adaptations. Less coldly, I don’t think the different bodies look bad, I think they look good, though I’ll save any further chat on that for another time. I also don’t mean to say that simply to be thin is to be unattractive. There are plenty of people today whom are as thin as the models of the 90s, but those people are by and large people for whom being of that size is healthy for them. At least, that’s my understanding of things.
But back to my story and to back up my claims, let me state for those that weren’t alive or otherwise aware at the time, there was a preference, at least in media, for an unnatural thinness, so much so that it gained the label, “Heroin Chic”. Yes, people were, on purpose, becoming so much thinner than their own bodies could support, that the models of the time tended to look like they were strung out on one of our societies most notoriously unhealthy drugs.
When my insides were repaired sufficiently enough for me to keep down food and get some meat on my bones, my body overshot the goal. I’ve struggled with my weight ever since, which should be no surprise given how often it is a topic on this blog. The only respite I had was during my time in the Air Force, and not even that spanned the duration. Even during those periods where I was medically considered very healthy and fit, I still hated the body I inhabited.
I actually find it more difficult to explore how I thought of my looks in my post-military adulthood, though not from shame or anger or any of the other many complicated feelings from my youth. It’s more that those times in my life are covered in a fog, and that I was lost in the shadows of a past that stalked my every moment. A complicated and difficult topic all of its own. But I what I do know, and what I’m sure will come as no surprise to read, is that I was quite unhappy, not the least at how I looked.
I was always too girly and small. Then I was too big and ogreish. I was never handsome, athletic, or popular, like my big brother always was. I was always awkward, my clothes never fit right, and each region of my own body felt ill fitted against the other. I was short, stocky, and somehow both blocky and curvy at the same time. I’m still short. 5’7″, so not actually short but average, and I’ve rather grown to like my height. Baring the occasional extra-high shelf, I’d say I’m just as tall as I ought to be.
What bothered me most of all started somewhere around my mid-30s. When I looked in the mirror, I could not see myself. The actual person, Aaron, his body was not there. It was someone else, someone who looked similar, but the form had been so radically distorted, eyes sad and unable to fully open, smile incomplete, with sacks and sacks of overcooked grain and mashed potatoes rubber-banded together and stuffed under my shirt, like a bad knockoff of the original Aaron. It was impossible to overcome how little I thought that I looked like me, and I began to not even feel like me. Even just sitting in a chair, I could feel the overabundance of my existence spilling over into space I wanted so desperately not to fill. It was suffocating.
Speaking of which, I fear I could suffocate endless notebooks with my laments over my distaste and disgust for my own looks, but I must stop myself short or I’ll never finish this thought. So let’s finally get to that end and bring us up to the present. Lately, when I look in the mirror, the man looking back at me is me, again, finally, or perhaps the first time. Much of the sadness remains, though I think I’ve done well to chase away some of the darker clouds, and mask what lingers. But I can see the wholeness of my eyes again, my cheeks are once again my cheeks and not the overfilled squishy puffs so long have been.
And then there is another dimension. Something new. After over forty years of yearning for that feeling of being a man, for the first time ever, I can see a man when I look in the mirror. I’d lost my shoulders years ago, and my chest was never how I’d wanted. Always too small or too big, round and pointy in ways unbecoming of my desired self. In truth, I am many months and perhaps years from, if ever, achieving the fitness level and visible body definition that I’d like to see, but still, in this form, I can see me. I am there. My shoulders are beginning to return, and quite robustly at that. My chest, which I have loathed for my entire awareness, is finally something that I notice in the mirror with delight and pride.
So that’s been pretty nice. Anyway, it’s late and this is cutting into my dinner time, so let’s leave things there for now. Otherwise, you know, notebooks.