Mirror, Mirror
I have been in a cycle of body shame for the last month.
I winced when I saw myself in a photograph four weeks ago. It was a picture from Easter Sunday. My husband, daughter and I were standing in church. Lilies circled us. The roses in my daughter’s cheeks glowed pink. My husband stood tall, handsome. I wore a white dress with a fuchsia shall. By anyone else’s standards, it was a lovely family photograph. But by mine, it was horrifying: I could not see past how chubby my face looked—how I had taken on the blurry-lined, cloud-like quality of a Renaissance cherub, again.
“Ugh,” I said to myself when I saw the picture. I had lost the lines of my jaw.
Later that night, I stood naked in front of a full-length mirror and chastised myself for all the places that that held extra weight: the pockets of my cheeks; the balloons of my arms; the pinch of skin in my armpit; the pear-like shape of my hips; the folded line of my belly button because my abs don’t hold the skin taut; the lip of my lower belly hanging over my pubic bone; the crater-like dimples on the back of my quads; the jelly-like protrusions of my inner thighs; my knees—“My knees! How do KNEES get fat?” I asked myself.
I shook my head at my reflection. “Disgusting,” I thought, my body a topographical map color-coded by degrees of extra flesh.
I vowed to run in the morning—to power-house the pounds off my body. An old, adomore lescent belief flooded me: if I were thin, the chaos of my life would order. If I just lost weight, everything would be fine.
*
Text books call this obsessive preoccupation with one’s flaws body dysmorphia.
My active eating disorder started when I was 13. My mother had just told me she had breast cancer. I’d experimented with throwing up when I overheard that my father way gay two years earlier, but it was the Stage 3 diagnosis that launched a summer of running until I had a stress fracture in my right hip. I ran five miles every morning and went to soccer practice in the afternoon. At night, I covered my blisters with Moleskin and liquid Band-Aid, but my toenails still fell off. I ate 700 calories a day of boiled potatoes and ketchup, carrots, and Jell-O.
In my mind, I was running to lose weight for high school. I’d always been “thick,” as someone once said. I carried fifteen or so extra pounds. The truth is, I was average-sized: size 12, medium, very in-the-middle-of-the-spectrum, but the more I ran, the more I believed I was fatter than the mirror’s reflection. I would get on the scale once a week and fist pump the air as the numbers went down. I lost 25 pounds and felt like I’d discovered the answer to life’s problems. I felt powerful and alive.
I never linked the running with my anxiety. I never understood that I needed the control because the rest of my world spun like a top.
*
When I could no longer food restrict because people were catching on, I started to binge and purge. I thought I’d discovered a loop hole: I could eat what I wanted and not gain weight. I never used the word bulimic, which sounded so… diagnosable, dangerous, serious. I knew what I was doing was “bad,” but I rationalized that throwing up bowls of ice cream and Cheez-Its in the family toilet was “not that big of a deal.”
“How are you doing with your mother’s diagnosis?” people would ask and I would always say, “fine.”
But my inner turmoil was as ravenous and primal as a newborn torn from its mother. So I ate. And purged. Night after night, I repeated the secret cycle until something inside of me said, you’re okay. Go to bed. You’re okay.
I mistook this self-soothing as the voice of something that knew more than me, of a parent, almost, of God. It sounded so sure. So knowing. I never heard its undertone—that I would be okay only if I did it all over again tomorrow.
With each mile I ran, each bowl I ate and threw up, each mirror-glance I stole, I wanted only to mute my burgeoning questions of mortality, sexuality, body standards, and who am I without my family, anyway?
*
If I were an iceberg, my fear of losing my family would be at the base. Decades ago, the fear voice sounded like this: Mom-is-going-to-die-and-Dad-is-going-to-come-out-and-I-will-be-left-alone-and-unloved.
Over time, it has morphed.
Just a few months ago, before my husband and I started marriage counseling, it sounded new and urgent and terrifying: more like, I could lose this family, too—my new family, my adult family, the family that felt like my salvation.
In the face of each possibility, two decades between them, I cope in the same way: I use food to reunify my worst-case-scenario thinking with the felt experience. For two decades, I binged and purged. For a decade, I drank. Now I eat bags of chocolate. Each behavior is a signal—a symptom, rather—that I am afraid. When I gain weight, it is often my body trying to get my attention. The pounds are a manifestation of my inner knowing’s expression; my inner woman, my intuition, is trying to tell me that I am off course.
“Listen to me,” the pounds say. “You’re listening the wrong voice.”
But I rarely hear this when I am knee-deep in self-judgment. I lose perspective. My masculine need to be perfect takes over. When I fall short of this unattainable standard, I become afraid that I am not worthy, or acceptable, as I am. Underneath these beliefs is a fundamental insecurity that I need someone, or something, to make me secure. As I become more convinced of this emptiness at my core, I grasp for food, or my family, to fill it. More wants more. As my muscles contract, my mind directs the scarcity drama: I, alone, am not enough. I, alone, am not steady. I am alone.
*
“More than anything in this world, I want this marriage to work,” I told the marriage counselor on the first visit with my husband. It was January 2019. We were all sitting in a beige-walled room the size of a closet.
“I believe it can,” the counselor said after the intake questions. “Let’s start by talking about your childhoods.”
And thus two worlds converged. The impending sense of doom came back as I shared how desperately I wanted my nuclear family to survive my father’s homosexuality and my mother’s cancer; how I followed my father through a fast food drive-thru to make sure he was not having an affair when he said he was “going out”; how I erased gay porn off the family computer so my brother and mother would not see; how I washed the purple lesions around my mother’s vagina and patted them dry with baby powder just weeks before she died. How I would have done anything to feel safe within the haven of our last name.
How my worst case realized: my mother died and my father came out when I was 22. My childhood family broke. I coped, of course, by eating and drinking and running from all of it. At 26, I took a new last name and brought into my marriage an insatiable need for reassurance and things to stay the same. But the world does not stay the same, nor could I control its turning.
At 30, I entered recovery. I was suffocating with grief. I had been throwing up several times a day—often whole pizzas—and doing what I knew how to do: keep secrets. Slowly, and with much help, I learned that I had to be a truth-teller with myself and in my relationships—the very things I thought were keeping me secure. I had to learn to live openly, and needed the skills to do so.
In our intake appointment, I told the marriage counselor all of this as context to how—in my new family—I was still operating in fear. How, to avoid conflict, I was vigilantly accommodating my husband’s cleanliness standards while silencing my discomfort with this arrangement. How I felt trapped and controlled even though I didn’t speak up. How a harmonious family equaled security in my mind and, yet, continuous harmony within a unit is impossible.
With each realization, I wanted to run.
After the third session, I stopped at a gas station to buy a bag of chocolate. I was a furnace of stress. As I sat in the car unwrapping Hershey kisses, calming by the mouthful, I ate down the idea of a fractured family. I ate down the thoughts of moving into an apartment across town, of throwing away the family address stamp I use on Christmas cards, of custody conversations, of waving goodbye to my daughter every other Thursday—of her someday, somehow, calling another woman Mom.
*
Halfway through counseling, the marriage counselor asked me about my response to shame.
“I hide,” I said, unequivocally, as I thumbed the thick shawl covering my tummy.
I didn’t say, I hide, and eat, because I knew the obvious dilemma: the chocolate never works in the long-run. It is like treating an amputation with a tourniquet; while it feels like a cool, liquid balm in the moment, it is only that—a topical balm. Everything still exists in the morning, but my coping disintegrates further as self-hate settles like a rash.
The more exposure that came with counseling, the more I quieted the nervous temper of my teenage self with foil wrappers.
When my husband told me he was done after eight sessions, that he “couldn’t take the intensity anymore,” I shook with anger. I thought he was weak, that we needed to keep running until we bled.
“Sometimes therapy can be wounding,” a mentor told me. I nodded, sure she had seen through my husband.
*
After counseling ended, I told my therapist that I had been secretly eating chocolate: buying it at gas stations, pushing the wrappers to the bottom of the garbage can, doing it all again the next day. “I feel awful,” I told her. “Like an ogre.”
She nodded as I talked, turned a sympathetic lip at a few moments. “Perhaps it is not the weight gain that is harming you,” she said, finally.
I twisted my eyebrows, confused.
“Perhaps the self-criticism is more harmful than the weight.”
I shook my head, unconvinced that I was even being critical of myself—more convinced that I was accurately relaying my current state.
She sat forward in her seat. “Self-criticism can be addictive. I am wondering about chocolate and your fear of loss. What part of yourself are you protecting when you eat like that?”
I stared at her blankly.
“What part of yourself are you taking care of?”
I opened my mouth to answer but coughed instead. “Excuse me,” I said. My larynx popped up and down like a bobbin. “Maybe that’s the answer.”
She tilted her head as if to say, what do you mean?
I pointed to my throat. “I guess I am protecting that part of myself—the me with no voice. The child who was scared of her family splitting and ate instead of speaking up.” I took a sip of water.
“Ahh,” she said and didn’t need to say, can you love her—the little girl who was so afraid to lose her family that she ran and binged and purged because she had no other way to express her anxiety?
Instead, she said: “How can you have compassion for yourself?”
*
Two days later, I returned to my full-length mirror.
Self-compassion is a fledgling practice for me, but it begins with embodiment. As I embody, my needs and pre-occupations diminish. I get present.
Next to the mirror, I placed a white feather and the Easter picture. I undressed and looked at myself. As I breathed in and out, I felt the air fill my perfectly functioning lungs.
“There is more going right with us than wrong,” my husband said when we left counseling. His words circled me as I ran my hands over my cheeks, my arms, my belly, my hips, my thighs, my calves: all the places I cursed just weeks ago.
I put my hand over my cesarean scar, the place where I birthed a little girl who will have her own fears, will need me to help her navigate the strategies she creates to manage her humanness. As I held my pelvic bowl and the soft roll of flesh over it—the sacral center of my inner woman, of my inner child, of my womb—I spoke affirmations. You are beautiful. You are worthy. You are safe. You are not alone. With or without a family, you are not alone.
Within the cradle of these words, I felt great appreciation for the strength in my body’s softness. I marveled at the mystery of how remarkably undamaged it is despite years of mistreatment.
“Thank you,” I said aloud: for a history that has brought me to this point. For a frame that has carried me. For behaviors that protected my baby-tender self who could not digest reality any earlier than she did. For the feminine definition of warrior. For the ability to see myself as whole despite my flaws. For gratitude as an antidote to criticism. For awakening and faith as antidotes to fear. For housing awareness all along.
Inside of me, a new voice rose—the feminine, soft-toned, encouraging voice of self-acceptance. It reminded me that I am secure despite the circumstances of my life. That indulgence is simply an outside remedy for inside needs. That the answers are, and always have been, within me. That my extra pounds are, in one sense, marks of strength—of a remarkable ability to stretch and adapt and survive.
“You are okay,” this inner knowingness said softly, but assuredly. “And you can love yourself, just as you are.”
