Re: Few more thoughts....

[Guest guest]

, I get it, but here is a reframing. Even when I have been quite thin (thin enough that my therapist was worried, so fairly thin!) I had a hard time with "normal" sizes. My bust is quite large compared to the rest of me. So even when my bottoms where "normal" my tops were big. So I wouldn't call it normal or typical. Its arbitrary and stupid! What if a shoe store only went to size 8? I wear a ten so I'd be screwed. Not only do I wear a ten, I'm a 2A. Can't say my feet are fat. But who carries that size? No one! (or very few!)Find a store that works for you. For me it is Talbots. I can get my size from women's, petite's or misses' or even women petite's. And I do. And then I get it tailored! And don't worry about the stupid sizes. I used to cut them out! Reframe. Nothing wrong with you. And now they lost a customer. Patti

I think my lowest point this past weekend was when my friend insisted on stopping by a boutique she'd spotted. Of course I didn't have to go in with her but I didn't really think through what would result...

As you might guess there were no clothing items in the store I could even come close to fitting into - and, adding insult to injury, a very skinny woman shot me a look when I stepped through the doorway. (Anyone here ever been told by a store clerk "we don't have anything in here to fit you honey"?)

My friend tried on several things while I wandered around pretending to look at purses and scarves while actually struggling with the voices of my internalized fat hating squad screaming at me about how dumpy I looked compared to the skinny women in that store.

I did manage to insert a few thoughts about size not being the value of the person, but it was a painful reminder of why I've worked so hard to diet myself into acceptance. My entire day wasn't ruined - but I certainly did hit an old, familiar and painful wall in that speciality store. By the way, my speciality stores look very different and don't have politely snotty men with standard poodles running them... not that I feel resentful or anything...

Loving my body as it is and giving up my idealized images of how a person (including me) should look is huge. It's huge because my sense of self value has centered around what I weigh and how I look or don't look as long as I can remember.

Now, ever so dimly, I'm realizing that having been so obsessed with body size and with diet/binge thoughts for many years, I've never spent the time and energy developing my interests.

My innate gifts languish on the sidelines of my life, my goals have been long superceded with self-consciousness and self-hate and my dreams are long fogotten. Sometimes now when I go to bed at night and all defenses are down, I feel a huge wave of deep sadness that almost overwhelms me. My life has been centered around the failure to be a certain size for so long that I don't really know who I am beyond that unachieved goal.

So... in sum... there's the dirty look from the skinny woman, the need for every American woman to wear single-digit sized clothing and the reality of a life that's waiting for me to start inhabiting it for real this time.

That's it - I'm just going to sit with that for a while. Thanks for listening.

Sandarah IE since 8/11