introspective periscope : peeking inside since Y2K ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the selfie stick fat-bottom girl - 25 may 2o15 "...it took me too long to realize that i don't take good pictures cuz i have the kind of beauty that moves."~ani difranco it was a perfect beautiful day at the beach yesterday. my parents, the baby, and i had piled in my the car for an unplanned trip to boston to see my sister and to hit the beach one last time. it was a sneak attack adventure; i thought last week's had been my last trip there before i ditch new england. last week, it was with a little bit of a heavy heart that i'd made that drive home last week, counting the last time i'd cross the border from massachusetts to new hampshire and then into maine: open for business now go the fuck home, the last stop i'd make at the kennebunkport rest stop to see that old giant bronze moose. but here we were, heading back to boston for a day at the beach--a reward for having gotten most all of my apartment packed up and ready to go when the truck rolls this week. we enjoyed a saturday afternoon cruise with coffee and my favorite bangor to boston playlist on the radio. the baby was a trooper of a traveler, sleeping soundly on the interstate south. we made it to last rest stop in new hampshire before we even had to stop. we slid into the parking garage under my sister's building, everyone cooperating to get the unpacked quickly. we worked together to get the baby changed and fed and to cook for ourselves, too. my father is the fucking scout master and we've all just kind of gotten good at setting up and breaking down camp...and even when we're not in the woods, it feels like that's exactly what we're doing when we arrive somewhere or depart together. the sun was setting when we sat around the giant coffee table in my sister's small apartment living room to have a little family spaghetti dinner. i can't remember the last time i ate pasta, honestly. i had a small bowl, twisting the linguine and tomato sauce on a spoon like my father taught us to do. yeah, it's probably a truth about me that i'll judge the hell out of you if you cut your noodles like don't you know how to eat spaghetti?... which is totally dumb and unfair because it's not your fault my dad who isn't even italian or anything didn't teach you how. there is constant chatter around our dinner table...my parents always insisted that we eat dinner together every night and it wasn't until i got older that i really appreciated that. dinner at our house is like one of those old 4c cheese commercials where everyone talks at once and there's all this food being passed around and invariably, someone is gonna spill something on their shirt and my dad is gonna say something smart-assed about it. i watched my family dig deeply into long al dente noodles and pass a plate of buttered italian bread and drink soda or whatever they were drinking. oh my god carbs, i kept thinking with each bite...because this is how i think now. i was only a few bites into my bowl when i started to feel the pasta in my stomach expanding and uncomfortable. i was done already and the bowl was still mostly full. i just don't eat a lot of carbs anymore because my eating habits have changed so much over the last few years. when i do eat them, i notice and i don't particularly care for how they make me feel....and then there's all this guilt about food that i carry with my anyway, admittedly. i promise myself that i'm going to let my son take what he will eat versus putting it on his plate for him. if he's done eating, he's done eating...i'm not going to make him sit there for hours until his plate is clean even if he's going to barf it up. i don't blame my parents for how they raised us but sometimes, i feel like they raised gluttonous kids by making us eat more than we really needed to eat. it has taken years to just stop eating when i'm no longer hungry and that's not such an easy thing to unlearn. there are a lot of reasons i don't really eat pasta and stick my nose up at americanized italian food in general because it means a lot of noodles and cheese and heavy food, usually. and this is what my family grew up on. seriously, every thursday night was called 'clean out the refrigerator night', a variation of prince spaghetti night! which was really the same thing but just what dad happened to call it when we were younger and he was the one at home cooking our dinner when my mom was at work nights. dad didn't know how to cook much back then other than gussied-up ramen like he ate in the airforce, spaghetti, and pot roast. we were poor as hell and as kids we didn't even know it because meals were adventures of what-could-we-possibly-dump-in-the-ramen-to-make-it-more-awesome since mom isn't home and we can do whatever we want, kids*!...and this lesson is precisely how i also managed to get through my college years. you put a couple eggs in the broth and a bunch of vegetables and maybe, if you're really having a fancy night, a little meat. imagine my shock after having these (not really) fancy cheap meals to find that people actually just eat a bowl of ramen. i mean boring. so, on clean out the refrigerator thursdays, my dad would dig through the recesses of the fridge that 5 of us shared and find what he could. whatever that was ended up mixed in the jarred red sauce...the idea was that this practice was making it go further and cleaning out the fridge without waste and making room for the new groceries mom would bring home saturday. totally responsible reasonable logic that i still value as an adult. nothing makes me more angry with myself than wasting food in the fridge for no good reason. we were a store brand (blech) or prego family--none of us would eat ragu because it was so sweet. i don't think i minded the repeat pattern of spaghetti thursday much until i was in high school. at our house, you either ate what was on the table or you elected to go hungry. i'd do anything to avoid eating dinner at home on thursday nights because spaaaaaaaagheeeeetti. i think that probably started when, on some thursday, he'd found leftover grilled chicken that had been marinated in something that was not meant to pair with tomato sauce, some leftover steak that had been grilled badly by my dad who cannot grill, leftover canned green beans and corn, and i think it was maybe leftover sloppy joe or something nasty that has no place in spaghetti dinner. on second thought, the corn probably came from the manwich sloppy joes because my mom couldn't make that without tossing in corn because you kids need your vegetables even though i discovered later in life that corn has no real nutritional value. after that hodge-podge, it was over for me and spaghetti no matter what. i rarely ate pasta in college even if it was cheap. now, with a lot of years of not even thinking of spaghetti, i don't mind it as much as long as the jarred sauce remains pure and my dad keeps his hands off it. i admit, i make my own sauce and it kills whatever they put in those jars and sometimes, i'll put that on anything else but pasta just to avoid remembering how awful spaghetti used to be for me. after dinner, we got our stuff ready for the beach in the morning. i set my alarm for the handful of hours of sleep i'd get before getting up to get the baby going and ready to leave the apartment by 6am. holiday weekends are crowded beach weekends and my sister had designs on arriving by 7am at the latest so we do what it takes to make it happen. the beach day was gorgeous. i was determined to wear my lobster swimsuit for the first time (i got it this time last year when i was pregnant and never felt comfortable enough to wear it then.) mom packed sandwiches for lunch. i slathered the day's first application of sunscreen to my own skin and the baby's, making sure to get it everywhere because i burn pretty easily. the sun was just coming up when we headed out the door. when we got to the beach, it was the usual few minutes of hey, we're at the beach and i'm wearing this swimsuit and whatever but over the years, i've gotten to where i just say fuck it and it is what it is and i try to enjoy the beach regardless of how i perceive my own beach-body. i'm never gonna see any of the other people on the beach again and i'm generally brave and good at pretending not to care...but the truth is, i do care...not about what other people think of me so much as how i think of me. despite the fact that i'm ten sizes smaller (or is it just five?) than i was at my largest--pulling on size 20 jeans now when i wore size 32 just a few years ago--i have a hard time appreciating that progress and instead focus on what i'm not. it's maddening and depressing but this past year, that feeling hasn't really popped up as much as it used to. i enjoyed the hell out of yesterday. i enjoyed watching my baby put his feet in the sand and wear his little lobster swimsuit for the first time. i enjoyed spending the time with my family and the feel of the sun on my skin. my sister and i walked over 2 miles up and down the shore and i found a few pieces of seaglass without looking too hard. i snapped a million pictures of the baby and of my family, capturing a few shots of my parents and the perfect blue sky and noting to myself that they're getting old and i want to remember days like this forever. i sent a few selfies to north carolina and posted a few to instagram. the usual beach stuff, right? i had my sister take a few shots of all of me and we laughed like idiots when we were pretending we were swimsuit models like that beautiful tess holliday...my sister killing it in her bikini and i, ackward and dumb in my modcloth lobster suit, kneeling half-heartedly in the low-tide waves. i was still laughing when i sent him the picture from my phone. it wasn't until we got back to her apartment with sand in everything from beach bags to even the shallow crevices of our bodies, taking turns at the shower, and all of us a little more tan than when we left earlier in the morning that it sunk in. i sent that picture. fuck! undo! i flipped through the pictures i'd taken and grimaced. for all the weight i've lost and the sizes i've lost and knowing that i am healthier now than i've been in years....i still hated the pictures that included myself. i started trashing them, deleting forever the record that i had even been there. i kept a few selfies for me but ones that i know i'll never post anywhere...ones i know nobody will ever see. i started freaking out in my head about the pair of folks from a blanket over and how they kept pointing and laughing at my family and how i'd written it off...and how, now, miles away from the beach where i'd never see them again, i was sure that they'd been pointing and laughing at me. they were tan and fit and looked like they'd stepped off the cast of jersey shore. at one point i'd tilted my beach chair back and tried to just enjoy the sound of the beach and i'd overheard the guy from the couple talking to a friend that had found them...and the friend had been talking to this lady and she was into him and she was so so so nice but she was fat and it disgusted him and even though she was nice he didn't even want to be her friend because she was fat. i wondered how fat 'fat' was...as if it mattered. maybe then it was already in my head but the pictures brought it back to the forefront of my mind and from there it was all downhill, i guess. so i'm in the usual tangle with my brains again and my self-esteem and self-image are up for grabs. i can objectively say that my body is my body and i know it could out-bike, out-walk, out-hike, and out-lift so many people who do point and laugh at me but i never say a word to defend myself because that's just how i've been conditioned to behave. if they say shit, just walk away and don't listen...but that isn't really stopping the shit from getting into my head or hurting or changing how i feel about myself, is it? people assume that because i'm this fat that i'm unhealthy and all of that just feeds the ugly-me that i always see no matter what i look like, i guess. it starts small and snowballs and i'm pretty much powerless to stop the coming depression and the part where i won't wear all my pretty dresses or consider shorts or go out in public in a swimsuit, wasting a perfectly beautiful summer hidden in jeans and long sleeves. it's all dumb shit and i know better but i feel like i can't overcome this so easily right now. from nerves about the move and starting a new job that will have me face to face with the public again to living with my parents for a short bit and fending off my father's consistent barrage of jokes about my weight, i'm just not up for it. it took a few stupid pictures and a couple of dumb unfortunate angles and i feel like receding into the woodwork and blending in and being quiet and being all those unhealthy things i used to be. i'm not going to, obviously because doing so would probably mean i'll end up in some weird gilbert grape-esque storyline...but that's a thing that scares me a lot about moving. coming here and focusing on being the healthiest person i can be underscored the person i've become in the last year. going back scares me that i'll go back to being a person i was...waiting for others to come out and do things instead of just doing them on my own, settling into unhealthy habits in general. it's a thing i've been determined to avoid. all of that....is my problem with selfies. i feel like i'm not telling the truth about myself, taking how many pictures to find the one that says what i want to say and deleting the ones that are probably more honest. if i tilt the phone at such an angle, it makes me look such and such a way but listen, no angle is going to make this hereditary chin disappear and my belly isn't getting any smaller if i adjust the angle of the light. selfies feel like really well coordinated lies. i feel like i'm probably about done taking selfies...because when someone else takes a picture of me these days, i'm instantly nervous, never smiling because i'm so nervous and wondering if they're going to get the right angle because anything else is just going to be a disaster i'll end up deleting...and looking at pictures of me that exist sends me into a weird internal gladiator match between what i know to be the truth about me and what the camera shows me about me. i feel amazing. i feel strong. i know i'm healthy and i eat well and even when i'm trying this hard to be even more healthy and set a good example for my baby, i wonder sometimes if i'm ever going to be anything but a fat girl who plays confident on tv. most days, i feel like i'm just fine and i'm comfortable...but it took about five pictures of me yesterday to set me on a tailspin dive to dropping completely off the radar for awhile. i'm determined to get to the woods each morning this week until i leave for a few miles. i will let the baby stay at home with my folks and start the c25k program again...enough to get me into it so i can keep it going. don't be a toothpick he says and i assure him i won't but sometimes i wonder if i'm ever going to get to a point where i'm happy looking at pictures of myself, where i feel like the outside conveys who i am inside. this will pass, i know...it's always a temporary dive but it doesn't make it hurt any less. i hate being my own worst enemy. *i should note that my mom had her own variation on this game of cooking without the other parent around called Let's Pretend Dad's Dead where we ate tuna noodle casserole and had something called party plates when he wasn't home because he hated tuna noodle casserole and sometimes, she was too tired to make dinner so she just rolled up cheese and lunchmeat and put it on paper plates and we had cottage cheese and applesauce and pretended we were at a super posh hors d'oeuvre party. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .what came before. - .what happened next. a diamond at the bottom of the drain - 20 october 2017 |
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