Wednesday, February 22, 2012

How I became the person I am.


I think I need to give you some background.  Pictures of me, up until about the age of ten, show a skinny kid with short curly hair and a goofy smile.  When I was about 11 years old I suddenly became "the chubby kid" in class.  The important adults in my life (teachers, doctors and parents) put my weight gain down to eating too much and being lazy so I learned very early on that my weight gain was due to some failure on my part.  I wasn't good enough.  I certainly wasn't pretty enough and God knows I wasn't smart enough.  Now, no one actually told me that.  Certainly not my parents.  My sister would never do that.  But somewhere that was the lesson I learned.

What does that leave?  Well, I could be the funny kid or I could be the weirdo.  I landed somewhere in the middle.  I was picked on and teased but not as badly as others in my school.  If I had to I would put myself in the "bully" category rather than the "bullied".  As long as someone else out there was getting it I was safe and safety is any kid's deepest desire.  Safe with our family, safe in our room and safe at school.  Of course, even as an 11 year old I realised that I was hurting others to keep myself safe and that has been the biggest lesson of my life.  After that big revelation I became the kid who tried really hard not to get noticed.

It is important to note here that this all would have taken place in the early 1980's.  This was a time when women were just beginning to demand that society come through with all the social revision promised after the 60's and 70's when we became aware that change was inevitable but could be put off a little longer.  Powerful women on television wore shoulder pads to visibly mirror the men they were in constant competition with.  These same women got into cat fights on a weekly basis and always seemed to have a man who either loved them or scorned them to such a degree they felt empowered or enraged enough to reach for the top.  None of these women seemed to find ambition through a confident self awareness that said "I deserve this".  It isn't too hard then to imagine why my parents would simply believe the doctors and teachers who told them my weight gain was nothing more than inferiority on my part. 

When I look back on those days I really don't think that the media affected my self image at all.  I never looked at pictures of beautiful people and wished I was thin like them.  I looked at my friends and thought that.  I looked at the people in my social group.  I have a very strong memory of sitting on a desk in grade six and one of my classmates told me not to sit like that because it made my thighs spread out and he thought it was gross.  I jumped off that desk and hung my head in complete mortification.  Here's the thing folks, I look back at pictures of myself then and while I was no longer the skinny kid I had once been, but by no means was I fat!  That encounter boggles my mind to this day.  I didn't even like that kid.  I thought he was a goof who smoked and smelled bad.  Why then did I care what he thought?  I know my parents did not raise me to meekly put my head down and run away.  Both my parents would have told him exactly what to do with his opinion.  So who was it that made me like that?  I don't have the answer.  My parents marriage may not have survived the years but I came from a loving and supportive family.

I wish I could find that guy now and ask him why he said it.  I can't imagine that he was a horrible kid.  If I have learned anything it is that every kid out there is afraid of social ostracizing and will do anything to "fit in".  In my memory we were the only two people in the room but I wonder if there was someone else there.  Someone he felt the intense need to impress.  If I could find that man now, he would be in his forties and dealing with the same life issues I am.  If he remembers it at all I wonder how he feels about it.  Is he ashamed or does he still think it was funny.  The one thing I do know is that if I had had the chance I would have skewered him at the first opportunity.  I am sure I probably did.  A snicker behind his back in the hallway maybe.  Perhaps an "anonymous" note handed around class about how smelly he was.  Maybe his mean comment to me was just payback for a real or perceived slight by me in the past.  Now that I think about it.  How did he even know that a comment like that would get to me?  Hmmm.  I wonder if my insecurities about my weight were well known in my class.