I've always been overweight.
Always.
I've been powerless to my food addictions since as long as I can remember, and as a result I've suffered the stigma that comes with being a larger size. In grade school the pretty, skinny girls would stick gum in my hair in the classrooms, or wedge gum into my locker lock. They would shoot spit wads at me, ostracize me, jeer and giddily take up each opportunity that came to put me to humiliation and shame.
I learned not only that I was fat, but that I was undesirable and worthless. Social graces that are learnt in the growing years were lost on me, and I have no ability to communicate in public with regular friends like most seem capable of, because while conversation seems such an effortless and easy thing to most, it is a minefield for me, a constant struggle to deem what and what isn't funny or witty to say at ever odds with my beliefs of self inadequacy and lack of desirability.
Others go to restuarants to eat with friends and to enjoy fine foods. I went specifically to read my books and listen to music with headphones on and to binge until my stomach would hurt so much that I couldn't eat another bite over the course of an hour, two hours. That was my self treat and my socialization. That was my escape from the lonliness I've always felt. That sweet surrender into the blackout of emotions that heavy foods brought, even if knowing that I was a fat slob and that everyone was staring at me.
And I was so depressed that I didn't care.
Hygiene stopped being important. I would wear the same clothes day in and day out. What did I care if other people saw me as repulsive? They saw me as repulsive all my life, it wouldn't be any different. I stopped taking showers for weeks at a time. About the only thing I kept up with were my teeth, because those were precious tools that mashed my drug up into swallowable bites.
About six months ago I spent 500 in one week on asian buffets alone.
It hasn't always been like this. The depression ebs and flows. At one point in college I did care about my body. I was down to 180 from my then high of 240. I only ever reached a few digits above 300, perhaps thankfully to my knowledge of what worked and what didn't as far as diets went. I fought my weight back down. I got down to 230 or so.
But recently my depression came back, and the scale number crept higher. I've been beating myself back down from 260 and 270 in a constant yo-yo of about 30 pounds for the last 2 years.
Why am I so powerless? I know what I want. I want to be attractive. I want to be sexually desirable. I want to not feel the shame of being in my own skin. The shame sits on me heavier than my weight ever has. Ever present. Ever the cause for my social inhibitions.
Ever since I've begun on dietbet and on my new attempt to fight this sense of powerlessness, I've had nightmares of those years in high school. Of the girls who tormented me, who made me feel like I was less. Of the boys who pretended as though I were diseased, and moo'd at me as I walked by.
Step one of reclaiming my power must be to forgive them and to forgive myself. I can forgive them...
But I have yet to forgive myself.