Ma'am, Your Jeans are Tight
Hey you,
Last year I wrote a piece on “When the Fat Girl Cries” and reflected on the process of my education about body image, health, and losing weight. I’m probably a weird person (the jury is still out) but sometimes I think it’s easier to readjust my self image than to actually just stop eating less. If I can say this in a straight way, I like girls with curves. Slender is its own kind of very pretty, but curvy looks so… fulfilled, somehow. <insert grin> However in my case it’s easy to rationalize things away until a good wake up call, like the other day when I realized my pants were getting harder to put on. Eeep.
It made me panic a little, to be honest. I had already decided to get my eating habits back on track because I knew sugar was getting the better of me, and I was watching pieces of my health lose some glow. This was the final straw. Having been a yo-yo dieter back in the day, most of the panic was because I know what kind of a psychological mind game weight loss can be. I abused it in my early twenties and never want to go back to that mental and emotional roller coaster again.
What I hadn’t remembered is that I had put six years of work into my mind castle, and begun to actually care for my emotions instead of squash them into closets and smaller size clothing. It paid off, because after the initial panic about my clothes having gotten tight without me noticing, I found it easier to be gentle on myself. Last year was the hardest on me since age 14, and I’m not the type of person to fade away to nothing when I am distressed. One of my favorite quotes by Oscar Wilde is:
As anyone who knows me intimately can tell you, when I am in really great distress I refuse everything but food and drink.
It was time to pay attention to my health again, and I put some strict rules around desserts and portion sizes. I also knew that if I wanted to be successful in getting my physical self to a fit and healthy point again it was going to involve taking a look inside.
LET’S GET REAL ABOUT SHAME A MOMENT
I learned about shame, running out of my room naked at four years old. It seemed pretty normal to me, just run around in the buff, right? Mom saw me and I well remember her asking me in German if I didn’t have a… well, there is no good English translation for this word. For lack of anything less literal, it meant something like “shamer.” Probably she meant conscience. It really didn’t bother me or make me feel ashamed, it was more the feeling of puzzlement. What else didn’t I know about that I might be doing wrong?
I don’t say this to reflect on mom, I mean really, what do you tell your four year old who will have to learn sometime that people wear clothes?
It’s a difficult conversation to have. Even as an adult it’s a question I think of a great deal. Why in some contexts do I feel happy and comfortable and attractive in the clothes I choose to wear, and in others wish I had a mumu? And why do curvy girls get criticized sooner for wearing the exact same clothes no one minds if slender girls wear.
“Does she know how her butt looks?”
I heard that one recently and it made me a little angry afterward. It was a windy day! Just how was she expected not to have her dress plastered against her? If she had been wearing pants, she would’ve been judged for that, as well. Sometimes there’s no winning when it comes to the female form.
It’s a vast, complex subject, this subject of shame. Something has really been bothering me about it. There’s the aspect of shame that is taught, and then there is the aspect of shame that just is because humanity is bent and we try to hide it. It’s no one one’s fault, it’s everyone’s fault, but in these cases, the blame game gets us nowhere. We’re all in this together.
I’m 100% for leaving shame out of either being overweight or underweight, but I’m concerned that with all the emphasis on not shaming, we’re flipping to the other side of not being lovingly honest with ourselves: the shame that comes from who we are when no one else is around. Who we are when we stop playing the blame game. Who we are under the test of true love. If we love unconditionally, we will love without trying to change. If we love unconditionally, we cannot be a part of enabling ourselves and others to sit in shame.
It goes beyond measurements of beauty and health, or scales. In fact, some of the most beautiful people I know are far outside the cultural standard of what looks best. What I’m talking about is when we pretend that the real topic is something like fat or skinny shaming, and what is actually going is we are still living ashamed inside.
It would be so easy for me to go on stuffing cookies and snacks into my mouth at midnight and glare at the world, “don’t tell me what to do - you’re fat shaming me!” If I catch myself taking a reactionary stance like this I can be pretty sure something didn’t get healed up inside.
I could say to myself, “you stupid person. Why do you keep eating? Just stop. Stop stop STOP.” But then even if I could pull my behavior or habits together temporarily, it wouldn’t actually change anything going on with my emotional, spiritual, or mental state.
That’s the worst, when all your affirmation and power has to come from the outside because the inside is so neglected.
Sometimes people don’t approve of us, and it’s hurtful, but in the end (for adults) all they can really do is push those little child buttons. It is not the pushing of our buttons that is the problem, it is when the those buttons connect to the part deep inside us which has not experienced restoration and healing. The obvious caveat to me here, is that sensitivity is still something we can practice because some people have big wounds and there’s just no call to go poking around unless you really, really know what kind of fire you may kindle. What pain may be inflicted. There is room for kindness and sensitivity, as long as we recognize that these things open doors, and as such are important, but the rest of the work must be done by love and truth.
I think we have to acknowledge that true love is two opposite things, it loves unconditionally and renovates us completely. See the tension there? Bent humanity wants to say “no, you have to love me as I am, and I want to stay this way! Anything else and you don’t love me.”
Sometimes I think our culture loses sight of the fact that while we now know shame is bad, we haven’t found an effective way to deal with it other than accepting people in their shame. This is step one, but there’s a step two. Step two calls us out of shame in truth and love. Neither of those things will let us sit in our graves.
God is pure love, but he never beats me over the head with his truth. It’s a mystery. He not only loves me as I am, but calls me out of the grave. Here is the thing. Even God, whose love is perfect, is misunderstood by us; how can humans, who are really imperfect, ever understand how to love one another?
It’s impossible to get this right, as any human can tell you, and I say to you there is not a one in a million chance we will get love and truth right without God. In fact, I’d like to submit that we’re asking the wrong question. It is not a matter of how to love the right way.
Let’s take this to an extremely practical level. My jeans are tight right now, I know it, and if someone were to come up to me and point that out critically it would crush me. But let’s just say they come up to me and say instead, “how are you doing? How are you really doing?” In their question is a much, much bigger concern than simply the way my clothes are fitting and I feel cared for as a whole person.
The answer is in wholeness, it always has been. Loving the whole way. We will always have individual things wrong with us. Sometimes they will be quite big things with quite big repercussions, however if we only care about the parts of people and not the whole, we will create cultures of shame, dishonor, and mistrust.
If we care about people and love them, truly, we will be able to speak to parts of them effectively because we also care about the whole. It doesn’t mean they’ll respond well, because remember what I said about soreness and buttons? However if we take the time to get to know the whole person, it will change everything about the way we love and “truth.“ We do this for ourselves as well. I was sad at the turn of the year to realize how many ways I’d failed or fallen in 2019, but the shock came when Jesus said quietly, “you fell, you’re bleeding, but you have fought well. Well done soldier. You are honored in the heavens. It’s time to get back up.”
It takes more courage to get back up than anything else I’ve ever done, but I’ll do it for someone who is proud of me.
If you are a fallen soldier, if you have done wrong, if you have failed, turn to Jesus. He’s the most gentle, truthful Person. He won’t let us stay wicked or lazy or indolent, if that’s something that is in you or I that needs to come out, but neither does he condemn us. He wants our honesty, and failure is contained in that. All kinds of failure: moral, mental, physical, professional, emotional, whatever it is. Maybe you weigh more than you want because of illness, maybe you have been an emotional glutton (like me) maybe you are smoking again, or watching porn, or you have been yelling at your kids a lot. Maybe you’ve been skimming money from your company, or you stole from someone, or you don’t know if you’re doing ok at your job. Maybe you’ve been sleeping around. Maybe you’re abusive, maybe you have gotten the scorn of society for misdeed. Not all failures are moral, not all are classified as “sin” so much as bad habits. Regardless they leave us feeling fragmented. Broken. Less than. The question is not if we fail or fall, it is when.
Humans, we have to regulate justice for our behavior and often our methods of judgment reflect order that we are obliged to keep in the law of a fallen world. God didn’t send us more methods of regulation, since the most unregulated thing in the human world is our hearts and not our behavior. Here’s the thing, he didn’t even come to regulate our hearts. He came to make them work the way they were supposed to in the beginning, when things followed an order of love, and not a law.
God, who cares about every detail, knows that the solution must begin in our hearts where only he can go, and he will never interfere without our blessing. If we ask, he’ll meet us in our deep places and take care of those hurts and wounds, bad things and “pus” about ourselves that come from those wounds.
You might say, “gosh, it’s just losing weight, woman, you didn’t have to go so deep.” Sure, it is just losing weight, but if we are trying to heal one part of us and leave another behind our healing will never be whole.
Someone suggested to me that I may have come near a mental breakdown last year. It seemed crazy to me at first, but as I’ve taken the time to reflect, there may be truth to it. To me it is not coincidence that I gained weight during this time, we all compensate for what is going on inside in outer actions and habits. Mine was to eat when I felt raw and unable to cope. It was something, at least, that I could do. Some people stop eating because they can control this action, and others go to a range of other emotional and moral comforts, whether or not they are good and wise or holy things to do.
One more thing.
Every surface action begins somewhere inside, but not every surface action needs to be interpreted immediately. We need to be aware of the state of our inner world, but having attended to this, we can also let go and enjoy our world. In fact, I think it’s healthy to come up for air and just float.
For every deep there must be a shallow. For every serious thing there is lightness. For every weight and mass, there is space. I think in these moments where we find ourselves coming out of seasons of darkness, stand up, and pull ourselves together, it’s good to remember the little joys, flashes of hope and wonder. One of the best feelings of my life has been a perfect northern lake in late summer, out on a boat, diving in, and just… floating. Relaxing every muscle past all reason, and letting the water hold me, even if it is 60’ deep beneath me and I could drown. It doesn’t make sense. How can complete relaxation work as buoyancy? The only answer I’ve found is oxygen. We have to come up for air, and breathe. We must sometimes rest. It’s the same in our external worlds. We work, sleep, and have weekends, vacations, sabbaticals. It’s also ok to work hard on who we are inside, but then to take breaks and just enjoy the little things of the world.
Last night was one of those times when it was ok to forget all the serious stuff in my life. I drove home from work to get some things for a meeting, and there was a big, hazy moon hanging out betwixt the branches of my favorite trees across the street. I was starving with no chance for dinner yet, so I grabbed a banana and headed out.
Going and returning from the appointment, I put on an audio book which had me totally engrossed; it’s a wonderful story about woman in Scotland who is working her way through childhood trauma in a pragmatic and sometimes hysterical fashion, and the accent was the bees knees. Secondary to her character (aside from her obviously unstable mother) is a loving, bumbling, secondary character with a dad bod and awful style, and a few bad habits, whom you just can’t help but want to know.
I had put a spaghetti squash in the crock pot earlier, so I was excited to come home, starving again (it’s actually a good feeling to be hungry again) and scoop out the flesh, top it with a bit of melted bacon fat from the bacon I had just fried, bacon, shavings of Parmesan, and salt.
Evening routine. Mornings, work, and hustle. Story. Life, quiet, and green, and lovely.
On your way through the depths of your soul and body, don’t forget that we have a Creator who exults in the surface of the water so much as the depths. He will be there in both. He made our souls and bodies and loves both. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some chocolate to eat.
Love,
L. Raine
Photo by Derick McKinney on Unsplash
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