What It's Like to Feel Ugly (Part Two)
More readers write in about their body dysmorphia and terrible self-image.
As a thank you to our readers…
This is the follow-up to last month's Body Dysmorphia feature, and, once again, one entry after another had treacherous energy: Everyone seemed to be sharing a part of themselves that I'm sure, at one time, felt unreachable or contained too many edges for them to fully process, let alone publicly. Anonymity hides the names but the shame still radiates without them.
And I hate reading this stuff, but I also find it helpful to reprocess some of my history with this issue. I can remember the exact moment the first time when someone said "You are ugly" to my face as I stood there quivering and waited for them to follow up with some sort of explanation for their cruelty, but it never came. I didn't hate them for it, either: They simply said what I already knew. (I was 12.)
One of our contributors wrote, "Is self-loathing something we learn? Is it something we can unlearn?" God, I think so? I feel like I've had enough psychic breakthroughs over the past few years that I’ll be able to conquer some of my body issues and get to someplace kinder and less abusive. I have faith that version of me exists and will appear somewhere in this lifetime. It's time to commence unlearning. Onward.
Usual formatting rules apply: All our contributors shall and will remain Anonymous but are credited collectively as "The Small Bow Family Orchestra."
The ***** separates individual entries, as do pull quotes. Some of the super-short ones will just be pull-quoted.
And the incomparable Edith Zimmerman did the drawings.
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If I Looked in the Mirror, I Would Never Leave the House
by The Small Bow Family Orchestra
She eats like she isn't broken, like she knows herself innately.
I've always struggled with my body size, but it feels like this struggle has become more profound and pressing since becoming a mom. This is partly because my body has changed significantly after undergoing two pregnancies—yes, my pants size has changed, but also my shoe size and the width of my ribcage and the severity of my astigmatism. All of these things I never knew would shift and morph to make space for a baby.
The more I try to confine and hide my shame about my body, the more it rages. I want to set a good example for my daughter so I try to avoid commenting on my body, talking about dieting, or openly loathing myself in front of her. She's four, and she soaks up every word and observes every small detail. She eats like she isn't broken, like she knows herself innately. I don't want to be the person who breaks the trance of innocence she currently lives life in.
My mom is a product of diet culture as much as anyone, though, and she makes comments about her own appearance and flaws. One weekend after spending time with her grandma, my daughter said that her ankles were fat. My jaw dropped, in part because she said the word fat but also because this was such a ridiculous thing to be self-conscious of. I told her that what she said wasn't true and that she was perfect... and as the words came out of my mouth, I felt like a hypocrite. This little girl is my twin: my face, my build, my overbite, even my habits and anxieties copy/ pasted onto another human, only with a different hair color. I look at her and sometimes can't believe how stunning her features are, how natural her beauty is, how simple it is to love every part of her. Then I look at myself and see a swollen face, plump legs decorated in varicose veins, my 'pouch' that I'll probably have until I leave this Earth.
Is self-loathing something we learn? Is it something we can unlearn? I want to show her how to practice self-love, or even just self-respect, if I can never get to love, but it's hard to teach when I have no clue how to do it myself.
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I cannot let go of the feeling that I am better when I'm thinner.
My mom is 81 and tells friends, family, and acquaintances that she weighs "the same amount as she did at her wedding!" She is, in fact, disappearing. My dad died a little over a year ago, and since then she's been even more fixated on what she eats, how much she eats, and what is in her refrigerator. She's pathologically obsessed with not wasting food, which sounds virtuous but, in reality, looks like a completely empty fridge and tiny meals. She recently made "sorrel soup" for dinner. Classic French sorrel soup includes butter, eggs, cream, chicken stock, and sorrel. My mom's recipe was sorrel and vegetable stock, cooked for a while.
As a kid and teenager, she regularly policed my diet and brought up my weight. These tendencies continued into my adulthood. She did the same for my dad until he got sick, and then I watched her battle with the need to get him enough calories in the midst of his neuro-degenerative disease while also keeping herself tiny. I was in a doctor's appointment with them and I remember my mom flinching when the doctor said a milkshake now and then would be good for him.
All this background is to say that I am never more proud of myself than when I lose weight. I'm an accomplished scientist, I'll have 12 years sober in 2 weeks, and I genuinely enjoy my own company in a way that I never did when I was drinking and using. But....I cannot let go of the feeling that I am better when I'm thinner. Everything that my mom has said about my body is etched into my brain. "This is the biggest you've ever been! You had better do everything you can to hold onto that man- he's not going to like it if you get any fatter. I hate the way you look in a dress." The fucking maddening thing is that as a conventionally attractive cis, hetero woman, everything and everyone around me reinforces that shitty internal voice. I am in the midst of peri-menopause, it's very easy to feel (and be?) droopy and fat, and yet, if I watch what I eat closely and count my goddamn calories, heads still turn.
I don't even know if this counts as body dysmorphia. Maybe it's just the patriarchy. I regularly think about lipo and weird body freezing and heating to shrink my fat. I asked my doctor last week about Ozempic, and she said, "No- and there's no way your insurance will cover it because you don't need it."
But I'm still thinking about it.
It feels petty, small, and stupid. I don't want to be this self-absorbed, but many of the other Gen X women I'm friends with feel similarly. I'd like to do some kind of poll about dieting as a kid to see if it's a real trend, and if so, is it about the emaciated body images we were spoon-fed, or is it about our mothers? Both?
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I tend to have two knee-jerk reactions: work out compulsively and stop looking at myself in the mirror.
I haven't had a true, active eating disorder since I was 16 or 17 years old and refused to eat anything besides one peanut butter and jelly and one bowl of Special K Red Berries each day. When my mom died a year ago, I suddenly gained about ten pounds, which to me seemed like a catastrophic failure. If I'm not feeling good about my body, I tend to have two knee-jerk reactions: work out compulsively and stop looking at myself in the mirror. So in the year or so following her death, I have worked out compulsively and mostly avoided looking at my body in the mirror. It's almost like I'm on autopilot to avoid the shame I feel around not being a size 0 or having a perfect six-pack.
But then, my husband tore his ACL playing softball and he really was physically hindered by his body, rather than mentally hindered by shame. He had to have multiple surgeries and spent a full 6 weeks not being able to walk on his right leg. Because I was the only one who could walk the dog, cook, clean, feed the animals, and help him move throughout our house, there was no time to be mad at my body. In fact, most of the time, I felt an immense amount of gratitude that I could move and help us. I felt proud of my body doing yoga and pilates. I felt strong and comfortable wearing a sports bra regardless of what my stomach looked like that day. Thinking about the fact that I want my body to be healthy and capable for a long time and that I can strive towards that through nurture and attentiveness is often my saving grace.
Some days you feel awesome and capable and strong, while other days, you feel like an ugly sack of shit. The key for me is typically trying to remember that I am loved and lovable regardless and trying to make some space to help my body feel cared for.
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I avoided seeing old friends who knew me when I was smaller. I’d rather hide than be caught existing imperfectly.
In my teen and early adult years, my body dysmorphia was kept somewhat at bay because I was sure I met the body ideal. It didn’t manifest in an overt “I hate how I look” kind of way, but rather in an “I just don’t like french fries—the taste is bad to me” kind of way. Then I gained a lot of weight, which arrived in the “I hate how I look” kind of way.
My obsession with my body is programmed into me: I’m a woman with a mom who is (approaching 70 and still) near-constantly on a diet, perennially losing and gaining the same eight pounds, who has only ever had terrible things to say about her shape. When I think back to what my mom was like while I was growing up, almost all I can remember is that she dieted. It was her one and only hobby: switching from Weight Watchers to Jenny Craig to Atkins to South Beach, then starting over. I remember opening the pantry for an after-school snack and seeing our boxes of Fiber One bars and 100-calorie packs freshly annotated in black sharpie with the number of Weight Watchers points each serving amounted to. I can still picture the room of the meetings I’d accompany her to—the weigh station in the back, chairs in a semicircle—and the energy in there, a mix of shame and optimism. I felt scared that this specific kind of self-rejection could be mine in the future if I weren’t careful.
After much therapy, I now know it’s fine to be fat. I know this theoretically. I know size is separate from morality, hotness, and value. But emotionally, I can’t quite seem to shake the dysmorphia. I remain horrified that I’m not thin. I don’t post photos of myself or really date. The nudes in my camera roll haven’t been shared—they were taken only to assess my body. I avoided seeing old friends who knew me when I was smaller. I’d rather hide than be caught existing imperfectly.
Body shame was (is) one of my biggest drinking triggers: whenever I was physically around people—in a romantic, social, or even work or family context—it required a buzz to quiet.
I’m now practically three years sober and feel only marginally better about my body. I wonder all the time whether I’ll be able to find peace at the size I’m at or have to lose weight to get there. Changes in thinking this fundamental take time, I know, but I wish it all happened faster—I’m getting sick of the extent to which this shame directs my life.
I’m grateful for the relief I’ve found, though. I know even this tiny improvement wouldn’t be possible if I were still coping by drinking. It still feels especially vulnerable to talk about my dysmorphia, but I do so in therapy (often), with my sponsor (sometimes), and in women’s meetings (when I’m brave). Sobriety has allowed me to build, ever so gradually, some self-esteem. I’m becoming a little more fine with myself. Miraculously, that includes my body.
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I can’t imagine the things I could accomplish in this life if I weren’t preoccupied with food.
I read today’s body dysmorphia stuff with interest. All throughout, I wondered to myself—what if you really ARE huge and gross? I guess it’s not dysmorphia because it’s true? And that really sucks.
While I don’t relish the suffering of others, I can’t help wishing THAT was my problem—that I felt gross but was, in reality, well within the bounds of normal. That’s all I have ever wanted—to be normal-fat. Like, not-stand-out fat. I had it once a few years ago and let it slip away. I tell myself that food addiction isn’t ’as bad’ because it mostly hurts me.
As an ACOA and a parent, I’m acutely aware of creating a stable, predictable, loving home for my kids, and I think I’ve done so. But I eat and eat to cope with my own issues, and I can’t stop. I can’t imagine the things I could accomplish in this life if I weren’t preoccupied with food. And for the mirror —I barely look in it because I’d never leave the house if I did.
Thankful for this community and sharing our various issues. We’re not alone, regardless of substance.
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Fatness stalks me.
I grew up fat, with all the insecurities fatness confers. My brain churned through feelings of ugliness, shame, inadequacy, desperation, and envy of thinner peers. I slimmed down in my early 20s and maintained a "proportionate" weight for my 6'3" frame until roughly age 40. The toxic emotions about my body never left, though. I am disgusting. I am undesirable. I can never change. Now, in my 40s, the pounds have crept back onto my frame.
Despite sobriety, exercise, a vegan diet, and largely avoiding sugar, I am heavier and heavier. Fatness stalks me. As the scale goes, I've gained an average of four pounds per year since turning 40. I keep telling myself some of this is muscle. I haven't outgrown my clothes, after all. But the mirror betrays my delusion. Photographs trigger even steeper spirals of denial and self-recrimination. If the body indeed keeps the score, then photos of me document a string of losing seasons. No distorted lens or light or angle explains it away. I am the distortion.
My partner is supportive. She says I look great. She says she loves me as I am and will love who I become. On my best days, I don’t believe her. On my worst days, I am still the fat kid, unworthy of affection or sympathy, let alone love or desire. I am told I may suffer from body dysmorphia and that I need help working through this. But diagnoses don’t do this feeling justice. This shape, this weight, this dread, everything I carry every day on my frame and in my brain… it’s terror. It has always been terror. It will always be terror.
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I cherish my son but convince myself that he will grow up to be like me and it will be all my fault.
I am a conventionally very attractive person. Both men and women in my life have referred to me as the most beautiful person they know, and some have even said the most beautiful they have ever seen, categorizing me among famous people who are paid to be beautiful. It has been like this my entire life, and I believe my attractiveness has exploited it even from time to time. I have been offered every job I've ever interviewed for, and while I know that my experience and education play a role, I am not so naive as to think that my appearance doesn't give me a leg up. I am thankful for having so-called ‘good genes.”
The mirror that tells me I am beautiful is one I believe, but it resides in a long and winding hallway of other, less kind reflective surfaces, which I also believe because they are so legion that I have completely lost track of which one is telling me the truth, or if the truth even exists. The ensemble of them forms my daily lived experience. I glide (or shuffle, or lumber, it depends on the day) down the hall from the moment I wake up till bedtime, in one moment feeling lithe and limber and youthful, loved and loving, content, intelligent, in full rapture of life, before turning a corner to discover I have morphed into a dripping candle, a Botero painting, or a twice-discounted sausage. Most of the distortions are manifested in how I feel in my skin. I experience sudden, very real sensations of my belly and legs swelling up like water balloons, only instead of being filled with water, I am being pumped up with anxiety and self-loathing and a frantic need to assert control over my body and my time.
I start tracking my calories, watching 5 a.m. morning routine videos on YouTube, and downloading training plans. Over the course of my adult life I have shifted within a range of about three sizes, all of them small, but no matter my size I regularly fantasize about that scene in the movie Seven, where the serial killer slices off a pound of flesh from his target for the sin of gluttony. I fantasize about this not because I want to die in a pool of my own blood. No, I imagine slicing off the parts of me that I think are not quite right because I actually do want to love myself, and I can't shake the conviction that I will find peace once I am the best I can possibly be. I can whittle myself down to perfection, or grind through yet another personal improvement project, and heal so well and so quickly from the ordeal that the scars will be invisible.
I have enough self-awareness now to entertain the idea that no amount of physical editing, no level of personal accomplishment, will ever satisfy the critics in my head, who are separate from the alleged "real me," I am told. Never going to be pretty enough. Never smart enough. My marathon time will never be fast enough, my PhD dissertation was sorely lacking in brilliance, my fluent French and Spanish are dotted with mistakes.
I cherish my son but convince myself that he will grow up to be like me and it will be all my fault. But I don't hold him, or anybody else, to the standards I set for myself. I embrace the flawed humanity in other people, but I am not them; I can do more and better.
My other fantasy is that my therapist is wrong, that I can, in fact, achieve full self-optimization according to the constantly shifting standards I have for myself, at which point my waking hours will be spent with feet planted firmly in front of the mirror that shows me the way others see me. I will finally have done enough, been enough, to dust off my hands and give myself an A+ and a pat on the back for my flawless performance. Again, intellectually I have understood that this will never happen, but I don't quite feel it in my bones. These days, I am neck deep in "learning to love and accept myself as I am." I hate every excruciating moment, but I also know it's the only way out of here.
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Here’s Part One:
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MORE IN THIS SERIES:
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
What
by Stephen Dunn
*************************
What starts things
are the accidents behind the eyes
touched off by, say, the missing cheekbone
of a woman who might have been beautiful
it is thinking about
your transplanted life-line going places
in someone else’s palm, or the suicidal games
your mind plays with the edge
of old wounds, or something
you couldn’t share with your lover
there are no endings
people die between birthdays and go on for years;
what stops things for a moment
are the words you’ve found for the last bit of light
you think there is.
ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN
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A.J. Daulerio: Editor Person, The Small Bow.
Always heartbreaking to read and painfully relatable but I believe talking about it like this helps alleviate it somewhat. ❤️
I wish I could convince others of the importance of being beautiful inside. My wife has a heart of gold but constantly worries about her physical appearance.
When I first meet people, outward appearance is naturally the first thing I notice. Unfortunately, however, the most beautiful woman can quickly appear quite ugly to me if she opens her mouth and reveals ugliness in her heart.
I don’t think I am alone in judging people more by their character than by their appearance. In fact, I would venture a guess that MOST people find that what is in the heart far outweighs physical appearance.