Anyway, back to RF's post. Here's a piece of it:
I struggle with mistrusting people who have a picked-up and clean house if I happen to drop over unexpectedly. Lots of us clean and pick up when we are expecting company, but I don't relate to people whose houses are always perfect. For some reason I don't trust them.Thankfully, she doesn't have that problem with ME, since I couldn't keep house to save my life. I can do it for brief spurts, but then my attention goes elsewhere and I just forget.
I did, for a while, however, have this same problem. It wasn't with people with clean houses, though. It was with thin people. I think that, in my mind, I was inferior to thin (read: anyone not overweight) people because I myself did not belong to their ranks. Somewhere along the way, I got the idea that because I was overweight, I was looked-down-on by anyone who wasn't overweight, so I just saved them the trouble of sneering at me by refusing to even be friends with them. In other words, pre-emptive rejection -- I diss you before you ever get the chance to diss me.
Down deep, however, this attitude stemmed from a profound sense of inferiority. The only thing I ever heard (and still often do) is that when a person is "overweight," it's a sign of laziness, sloth, and excess. Through the years I internalized this and assumed that I was worthless. It did not matter how talented I was... how beautifully I drew or painted, how skillfully I played the piano or sang... I was fat, and that alone defined me. "Defective" would have been too easy an epithet, because it would insinuate that I wasn't responsible somehow. No, I was fat and it was my own doing. It was a moral issue, and I was obviously immoral.
Conversely, people who were NOT fat were morally superior and more valuable.
Somewhere along the way, however, I have come to realize that this is a complete lie, on many different levels. First of all, bodies are all quite different and unique, and equipped with different tendencies and shapes. You really don't get to choose your shape, as much as you'd like to think you do. Some thin people are just thin, even when they eat a Snickers at every meal and never exercise on purpose. Some fat people really are just that way. Yeah, if they starve themselves, they can become thin for a while, but their bodies almost inevitably rebel against this and figure out a way to get back to where they're most comfortable. Some people actually have something wrong with a biological system, resulting in thinness or fatness. Some people do overeat. It's a wide spectrum of issues and cannot be neatly distilled. It certainly has NO business as the basis for judgment of anyone's character.
In the past seven years since I had gastric stapling surgery, I've had the privilege of meeting literally thousands of other individuals who have also undergone bariatric surgery. I find that each one of them has had to walk a different path, and have different experiences before and after surgery. Some of them become ill from losing too much weight. Some lose almost no weight at all. Most land somewhere in between the two extremes. Almost everyone finds that being thinner does not change who they are, and if they didn't like who they were before, they're still not going to like themselves. For some, this realization is too much to bear.
For me, I landed somewhere in the middle. I'm still fat, although not nearly to the extent that I was in 1997. I lost about a hundred pounds, and then my body equalized itself and I gained back about half that. So sue me. I'm not exactly porking out on french fries every day or anything; in fact, I still have trouble with many foods and end up having to puke two or three times a week on average. It doesn't seem to matter what I do or don't eat, though. I stay at my current weight regardless. So why make myself miserable over it? I'd rather not, personally. Yes, it would probably help if I were more physically active. I don't have the time or inclination to exercise, and I think it's a colossal waste of time that I could be spending playing the piano or painting or reading or writing or learning about something on the internet.
Besides a few pounds, something else I have gained over the past eight years is the understanding that my worth as a human being has NOTHING to do with my body shape. It's not an indicator of anything other than simply that -- my shape.
Something significant that has brought me to that understanding, besides having a husband whose love and acceptance of me has never once been based on my appearance, has been having a non-overweight best friend. I discovered that people who aren't fat have "issues" too! And if my friend can have some of the same mistaken and warped body-image issues that I do, it must not really have anything to do with reality.
Conversely, if someone who's "thin" has the mistaken notion that I am somehow inferior to her because of my body shape, then SHE is the one who's wrong and who has a problem -- not me. That's what I now understand when I hear people like Dr. Laura Schlessinger come down on fat people -- obviously all they need to do is exercise and eat less and they'll be morally superior, right? Sorry, Doc -- it isn't that simple. God gave you an energetic and hyperactive body. He didn't give me one of those. Deal, k? Spend your emotional energy elsewhere. I'll do my best to keep myself as healthy as I can, but I'm not going to spend so much time and energy doing that that I neglect to foster the things I'm really good at and enjoy doing.
I wasted too many years trying to be someone I wasn't: a tidy housekeeper, a thin person, a meek-and-quiet-wife-and-mom... and while people who ARE those things are just fine if that's the way God made them, those things are NOT me. And I have mostly gotten past the hangups that prevent me from being friendly to people -- because first of all, I happen to know now that every single person walking the planet has issues and problems and that no-one is either superior or inferior to me -- and second, that the act of being friendly to someone in and of itself will overcome whatever hangups the two of us may have about one another.
Sure, come over to my house. I'd love to have you. If an untidy household bothers you to the point that you can't get past it in order to be my friend, though, then it's your loss.
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