I have spent most of my life daydreaming about being thin like my friends. What would it be like to have men chase me, want to do things for me and have my pick of the best guys around. They would take me out, do things for me, like, for example, listen to me complain. Hahaha. My most “sensual fantasies” about men don’t involve bedroom time. There I am, I’m me of course, but I’m thin and you can see my hipbone through my skin. I would be snuggling on the couch with my fella in some cream colored pottery-barn-decorated apartment at the end of a long day whining to this man with broad shoulders saying something like “I hated the drive home today it was so long and my boss was mean to me…” and he would say back something like “Oh babe, he was mean to you! That’s not okay. You deserve better. That makes me mad.” and “…you’re so pretty when you talk about how much traffic. What can we do to cheer you up?” That’s my “erotica”… a man that thinks I can’t do any wrong or annoy him because I live high up on a pretty pedestal.
This is embarrassing, yes, but I tell you this story, because it’s the truth. I wanted a man and a world that would make me happy. When I felt bad, he would cheer me up, he would never see me as less, he would derive joy from making me happy. This is how thin women get treated. I knew in my bones that if I got thin, this would happen. I’d finally “have everything I wanted”.
About five years ago, I was living in New York City and I hired a coach to help me with goal setting and we were talking about my weight-loss. He stopped me and asked why I wanted to lose weight. I told him the truth–that it would make me “happy finally” and he said “no, Estefanita, being thin will not make you happy.” He had a Spanish accent (so I’m incorporating it for you) and a kind of flat unsympathetic candor when he coached me. His name was Michel and he was a good man, a very smart man who did not coddle me (I believed he would be nicer if I was thin. hahahaha). I began to disagree. This meeting was in person and I remember we were sitting side-by-side on a grassy hill on a hot summer day with our legs propped on the downward slope. I turned more toward him and said “You know what? Yes, I would! You don’t know what its like to not be thin! How most men don’t like you that way. They’re not always very nice.” He said simply “…No. Thin does not make you happy. Neither does a relationship” with no smile on his face, no affect, and then continued, “you are incorrect, Estefanita, only if you work on changing your relationship to being thin, will you ever be happy.” I said “What?? I’ve lost 100 pounds! I am changing it” feeling insulted and missing his point. He continued “maybe you will be happy temporarily and then, he will go on a trip and you will be insecure you aren’t enough and these feelings will be back. Those feelings are your feelings, but you are just attaching them to thoughts about your weight. If you get thin, you will still feel this way.” He was so wrong. How could he not see it? It’s like he didn’t want to see the truth (aww, the power of my projections).
We went back and forth some more and I felt stuck. He then asked “are all the thin people you know happy?” and I said “no, of course not.” and he said sarcastically “how can that be? being thin makes you happy?” He had a point, but was still, you know, 100% wrong. He didn’t know what it was like. I think I cried and said he wasn’t listening to me and this was hard to talk about. That it’s hard to find someone “…that likes you the way you are.” He smiled (which he rarely did) and said just “it’s hard for all of us.”
Michel started to tell me a personal story about how he used to chase women and he thought he just needed to find that “one” that would make him happy. He said that he would only feel good when he had found someone new, and sure it didn’t work out, but he knew what he wanted. A few years back, he met someone and she made him feel so amazing that he was going to move away from his job, friends, and family to be with her. They had known each other for a month and a good friend sat him down and told him something similar to what he was doing with me that day. His friend asked him why her and then asked him a lot about their relationship. His friend would ask questions that Michel didn’t know the answer to. How does she handle stress? Who is her favorite person in life? What is her philosophy in life? Is she generous? He felt like his friend wasn’t getting it–he had never felt like this, all of that stuff his friend was asking would get worked out. His friend told him “this is what you do, you meet someone, tell me “you’ve never felt this way”. He protested that he had never felt this way and it was true. He hadn’t ever been willing to sacrifice so much to be with someone. His friend pushed him to see that he was blaming his unhappiness on women. That he was objectifying women and he used them to feel good. He didn’t relate to them. He didn’t want to get to know this woman. And he hadn’t gotten to know the previous one. He just wanted to feel good, and that’s not reality. You can’t leave every time it gets hard. I could picture it, the more he shared the details. In this moment, I could see my judgement of that kind of guy. He was describing someone very immature and lame.
Then, without warning, I started to think of one of my friends who had all the things I wanted to make me happy and she would always have something she was upset about. Then, I thought of my other friend who was always worried her boyfriend would break up with her, and mostly, they fought because she would accuse him of not really being in love with her. Oh crap, it started to sink in. Mich had “my number” and after that conversation I would tell him that that was “the day you killed my dream.”
Wasn’t my being fat the problem? He and I would go on to talk about this for the next year. He would probe me about why if I never lost weight, that would be bad. I would struggle but could never explain it with any rationale that made sense. “Men would ask you out more” and he would ask how that would make me feel better and then he would ask me how I would feel if they were late and didn’t call. Or, worse, what would happen if a guy broke up with me. And then I said the dumbest thing after “well, they wouldn’t because I’d be thin.” But all my thin friends had that stuff happen to then. The more we talked, the more embarrassing it got. He was objectifying women and so was I. We worked on what losing weight would mean to me and not the weight-loss itself. The more I looked, with his guidance, the more unhappy people seemed only because their expectations were ridiculous.
I was just being a victim. Google “victim mentality” I fit all the criteria #killme. I also realized how self absorbed I had been to think that my life was harder than others, and never took responsibility for a lot of the ways my life was easier and I had lots of advantages and a lot of love around me. I also was didn’t like dating. (Weird I hadn’t met anyone. Ha.)
My dream was dead, but now what do I do. I was not happy. Michel suggested I get out of the habit of suffering all the time and I look at being happy like a muscle. So, once a day, I set a timer for five (5) minutes and would close my eyes and think about things that made me happy and focus on that feeling in my body. I would connect to feeling good. Calling up any memory that would make me feel good in my body. I would think about floating in the ocean with my nieces. I would remember times I laughed really hard. I would think about how happy I was when a man I had dated years ago looked at me (which is even funnier because I was probably 250 lbs at that point and we had a lot of issues – none of them had to do with my weight- and I was always pissed off –damn Michel was so right!! #dreamkiller). I started to build the muscle for feeling joy. A few months later I noticed that I was waiting for a friend at a coffee shop and she called and said she wasn’t coming and I didn’t get in a bad mood. I was now actually losing the heaviness I felt on the inside and I would start bringing that warm happy feeling up when I wasn’t in the five minutes and I started being happier all around.
I wanted to have my cake — blame all my problems on being fat— and be thin–never look at things I needed to work on to be happy at any weight–too.
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