I Don't Hate Myself
Recently, I heard Mindy Kaling say this in an interview and something clicked which is what prompted me to write this piece:
“It’s not that I’m into myself. It’s that I don’t hate myself.”
It was so simple, and yet so poignant. I don’t hate myself. I felt like it was the most accurate description of how I feel about myself and my physical appearance.
I have talked about my journey with my weight quite a bit on this site because I feel like a lot of people talk about the before and the after of a weight loss, but not many talk about the during. Like the really nitty gritty details of the during. And I wanted you guys to know about it, so that you don’t feel alone in your journey or if you feel awful about how you did in gym then you can know that someone fainted during their first yoga class – you can’t possibly top that.
When I was at my physical biggest, I knew that I was big. My insecurity was that I was big. Unattractiveness came second because I felt and was made to feel like since I was big, I didn’t qualify for any other positive physical descriptions. Never mind my features, or the whole “happy girl glow” or the “content with my life glow”. I was big. Those who cared to know me more talked about my intellect and other positive qualities like how I’m funny or caring. But the fact that I was big was always there and it diminished everything else about my physical qualities. This wasn’t even one of those “Yeah she’s dark, but she’s pretty” kind of thing. I was big, end of story. This groomed a “I’m big, but I’m also smart and funny” attitude in me. I knew my insecurity and I owned it.
Then I started losing weight, or in my case, sizes, and I became aware of my physical appearance more than ever – the concept of beauty started sneaking in, I had started working a proper job around this time and ideas of how I should present myself started sneaking in, the pressure to start dating and settle down started sneaking in and all that just exacerbated my body image issues.
The thing about weight loss is the fact that it actually defines quite a portion of you and your life whether you want it to or not. I so badly want to tell you that losing weight won’t make you happy or make your life easier, but the messed-up thing is, or at least for me, it has. My life is genuinely different before, during and after I lose sizes and things got genuinely easier as I lost sizes – some from the confidence in having lost sizes, and some from the size loss in itself. The doctor took me more seriously when I bring up issues, and they no longer start at asking me to lose weight. I used to stand on trains and buses because I was embarrassed about taking up more than the one square that was allocated for each passenger when I sat down. These days I sit if there’s a seat because I can fit into one and I don’t really worry whether I look like a pile of melted chocolate ice cream. It’s a whole lot easier to shop for clothes and I don’t have to pay more because I am bigger, I catch the attention of guys I would have previously considered (okay fine, still consider) out of my league and of course, I sleep better. Furthermore, when I started going to the gym and pushing myself, I got a certain hold over myself. I started to feel more in control and like I had a better handle of things and that started to ripple over other areas of my life and I feel like somehow it shows too.
At 3 years shy of turning 30, I know my intellect and I own it. I do my research on things and I make sure I know what I’m talking about. So anything brain-related, I’m on top of it and I’m confident. But the minute someone goes “Hey! Your hair…” I involuntarily hold my breath and I don’t release it until I hear the rest of it and figure out whether it was a compliment or not. Sometimes I wonder if people are being nice to me because I am smaller in size and I wonder if it will be gone the minute they find out how big I used to be. There were also issues like what if I lost weight and I was still considered ugly? What if I never got that healthy person glow everyone was talking about? What if I lost weight and I still felt side-lined? And it carries over – I am at my physical smallest now and some days I worry even more about my physical appearance than I did when I was at my biggest. I feel like I have to put my best smaller self forward.
It doesn’t help that women who are confident in their beauty is not something that’s portrayed well in the world around us. We are constantly fed these images on what beauty, happiness and contentment looks like. Those women are confident, charming, perfect, they walk into rooms and heads turn and here's what I feel like is the biggest lie - no one seems to be threatened, offended or put off by their confidence when we all know this is not the case in real life. And this creates a dissonance because we don't look like them, we don't get treated like them and we are not happy like them. Does this not happen in our everyday lives because we don't look exactly like those women? Where people who look like me – size, skin tone, ethnicity, are severely under represented. Never mind American television and Hollywood, I’m talking about within the Indian community fairness continues to dominate. And the chink in my self-esteem gets bigger. I also feel like part of this comes from how women are socially and culturally ingrained to brush off or even reject compliments. How many of you can think of a time where you told someone “Hey! Cute dress!” or a “Hey! You are looking GOOD today!” and they owned it with a happy, confident “I know right!” or just humbly accepted it with a thank you and a smile? Most likely you get a “This old thing? It was on sale for $20!” or a “I tried something different with my makeup today, I saw this video where they did this hack for glowy skin and I tried it out”. Why do we continue to push these compliments outwards? Why do we continue to act like these things are not in our control, or that a positive body image despite not conforming to “traditional” standards of beauty is unacceptable, or that we can’t disclose how much effort we actually made to look good this morning? (#effortlesslybeautiful). And most simply, why shouldn't we own our body image?
I can honestly tell you that I’m not crazy into myself right now when it comes to my physical appearance, no. But I am able to catch my crippling thoughts about my body image and I try to turn them around. I’m not exactly bone thin at the moment, so I still get comments about my size. People talk about what I can do to lose weight, what I can eat to lose weight and ask if I should be eating something when I decide to treat myself. I’m sure they mean well but it’s also awfully intrusive.
And while I hate the unjust of working out so much to lose a paltry two kilograms, and I hate how my insecurities about my body image take over me at times and I hate how just because you are bigger you automatically get less respect because your size is intuitively ascribed to laziness even though so much can cause one’s physical size, I don’t particularly hate myself.
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