Rambling with Ange

I hate them.

No really, I hate seeing pictures of myself. I have for a very long time. If you see a pic of me, it’s usually from quite a long time ago or just a selfie and even then, I will find it awkward AF to look at. This has really come home to me lately when doing my PhD field work and having some amazing, but much younger, volunteers working with me, who would always take great pics of themselves in the stunning landscape we were privileged to be working in. It made me feel so awkward and unhappy.

And content warning – this post talks about fat shaming and mental health issues.

I’ve tried writing this post for a week, but the truth is, it’s hard to talk about. My life is a constant battle with my internalised fat shaming and there is no part of my day that is not affected by it. So how do you write about something that is so ingrained without it coming across as incoherent and self-pitying? I don’t know, so this is going to be messy.

I have struggled for most of my adult life with body image issues, and a lot of it can be attributed to frequent comments from my mum when I was young, pointing to my older, apparently pretty sister: “Why aren’t you more like your sister?” Or, pointing to larger women around us when we were out shopping: “You don’t want to end up looking like that!” These comments often came after she had bought me a piece of cake or a doughnut or a milkshake or some other rubbish while we were out shopping and she stopped for a coffee (these count as #OKBoomer moments, right). This was a common occurrence when it was just mum and I out and about, and I never really recognised what was happening until much later in life. Now, I get angry at commentary like that – fat-shaming is so common and so embedded in our social consciousness that it’s rarely called out in our daily lives, and I downright hate it.

The thing I really struggle with though, is my own fat-shaming behaviour – not of others, but of myself. I have internalised my mum’s (and my late grandmother’s) judgemental commentary and I’ve only recently become aware of just how much I do it. I love my mum, but seriously, she has a lot to answer for! (And yep, she gets told both of these things often now).

So, I have had this hate-hate relationship with my body from quite a young age. I wore baggy black clothes for a very long time, because somewhere in my youth I heard that black is ‘slimming’. But I also didn’t have much choice, because clothes for larger girls and women are so often black and horribly frumpy. That’s starting to change with pressure from body positive influencers on the market, but your everyday variety store will still mostly have frumpy black clothes – no style, no colour, no shape, because why would larger women (or men for that matter) want to look good? And if you do want to look good, you have to go to special shops with clothes designed just for you – but unless you’re also wealthy, there’s no way you can afford that. So you’re stuck with frumpy, ill-fitting and cheap clothes that don’t reflect who you are.

Finding suitable work wear for field work was a nightmare. All the everyday camping / outdoors shops don’t usually stock anything over 18, and even then, that 18 is more often than not on the very small size (and thus not an actual 18 at all). Sucks if your weight fluctuates above that size, or, if you’re me, you have an unusual body shape. That I found any is a miracle and I’m very grateful to manufacturers that actually make workwear for women – you know, clothes that are actually based on women’s shapes & not just smaller versions of standard mens workwear – but even then, I shouldn’t have to bankrupt myself just to buy clothes that fit.

You’re probably asking yourself why don’t I just change how I eat or exercise more? Why wouldn’t you? That’s what our society tells us is all that’s wrong with overweight people – we’re just lazy over-eaters. I tell it to myself every day, though I’m desperately trying not to because it just leads to more and more hateful thoughts towards myself, and I can frankly do without more reasons to hate myself. But that’s the wrong question, because even when I was ~65kg at the time of my wedding, I still hated how I looked. So whether I exercise or not, eat chocolate or not, it doesn’t change how I see myself. And as an aside, I used to exercise every day, but with age comes arthritis and other health issues that make most kinds of exercise more painful than beneficial. More on that in some future post/s.

So. It seems my internalised hatred for myself is definitely a mental health issue and this is where I get stuck. How did I come to hate myself so much? In so many ways, I have a lot to be proud of. I’m the first in my family to do so many things: pass Year 12, get a tertiary education, travel overseas, more than once, learn another language, have just 1 kid (yep, this is a thing in my family). I survived some seriously black days when the thought of just ending it all was more enticing than sticking around for another day. But apparently, I don’t know how to be proud of those things, to love myself for just being me.

I don’t know what the answer is for any of this, if there even is an answer, but acknowledging it is probably a good start? It’s something I’ve noticed more and more lately, and I’ve finally decided that I need to do something about it. Not sure yet what form that will take, but one thing I’ve decided is to start sharing more pics of myself – not just my face, but all of me – to start normalising being my whole self and not curating what the world sees of me. Stay tuned for more pics of me.