The lengths to which we’re willing to go for others in spite of ourselves… are often the same limits that keep us locked in place.
The other day, as I bounced out of my room, dressed in a new pair of pants, my mom looked at me and shook her head,
“Those make you look wide,” she said.
I smiled woefully, because those very words had come out of my own mouth, commenting on my own daughter’s outfit one day.
So I knew what she meant and I knew how to respond. The new me said,
“Mom, I am wide. That’s how I am.
And these jeans are wide to fit my new wide body.”
“Well,” she scoffed, indicating that I should make an effort to make myself seem less wide because it would be prettier… because pretty women were not wide… because men didn’t like wide women… because men like petite, everybody did and everybody knew that.
Who was I to pretend that living and breathing and walking around in the world, openly wide, was even acceptable?
It was almost a dare (or even a slap in the face) to what we all have come to know is common knowledge.
“Mom, I’ve been shrinking my body to squish myself into a size 34 for fifty years. I’m a size 38–40. That’s my size. The size of my real, strong, fit, healthy body.”
“Your body looks great Eva. But those jeans just make you look too wide.”
“Well Mom… Who gets to tell us what too wide looks like? Society? Masculine culture? People who want us to fit into a mold so we buy more stuff that they say looks good on us because they own the factory that makes it all anyway and they want to sell more of it? It’s easier and more profitable to enforce their model… Fuck society!”
“Oh,” my thin-true-size-36-mom gasped!! “Eva!! Don’t say that. People who are wide should learn to feel good about their bodies themselves, but not be hostile about society! I hate it when you say ‘Fuck society’. It sounds so aggressive. Please!!”
“Mom, I like these pants. And I like my size 38–40 body too. I like who I am now and how I feel… finally! But can you imagine how hard it is to feel good about your size or your place, when society and culture everywhere are telling you that what is really pretty and what’s really good is two or four or eight sizes below yours? Come on! How many people even fit that criteria?”
This came perfectly on the heals of the other conversation we’d been having for months… about never being enough.
I’d been telling my mother for months how trying and exhausting it had been for me never feeling enough. Never really adequate, not perfectly perfect… She took that as a blemish on her truly wonderful, optimistic upbringing… wondering how I’d ever turned so pessimistic, as if French culture and questioning and self doubt had somehow rubbed off on me.
But those core feelings of inadequacy were actually the sure key to why I’d ever been living with a Ted for all those years!! Why I’d accepted, why I stayed and why I’d been seduced at all in the first place!!
My own lack of self love and self compassion had allowed me to fall head over heals without a second thought!
Oh I’d felt self confident as a younger woman. I’d thought I was pretty cool, pretty smart and pretty pretty too. But, needless to say, I was never, ever quite enough. And it was so tiring! It wasn’t because I cared too much about what people (other than Ted) even thought… I was already my own worst critic all by myself… judging myself constantly!!
That’s what was exhausting!
I was!
I always could have said something much more intelligently, written it clearer, looked a bit differently, reacted more thoughtfully…
In which case, I could then have … met someone else or been somewhere different or gone someplace better…
And had I, I would have been much more sought after, better liked and infinitely more successful!! Of course.
Then obviously, had I done all that, I would never have ended up in the grips of a Ted at all, which was the primary reason I’d been beating myself up with for the last five years!
The truth, I’ve learned since his departure though, is really the exact opposite.
The insecure people pleaser in me was precisely why I’d been targeted by Ted in the first place. I was so busy worrying about pleasing him, that thinking about what made me happy was not even on my radar.
Ted had seduced me and I’d married him, espousing his ideas of success too… all the while working like a dog, unpaid for Ted, at Ted’s beck and call, for the jewel-box lifestyle Ted patronizingly offered me!!
And then when I questioned it, Ted’s violence had gone full throttle. That’s when he went for the jugular, like psychopaths always do. And that’s when he left me. With nothing. Because he could.
But the fear and the pain and the shame of his departure were all the more devastating, because I’d neglected myself for him all those years, prioritizing his desires over mine, ignoring my own needs completely.
Had I only learned early on in my life to prioritize me, Ted would never have been able to dominate me.
Had I realized the value of self love, I would have had more love to give, more understanding of what real love was… and would never have accepted Ted’s rotten deal to begin with!!
Had I known how to set barriers for myself, I would have scaled mountains or crossed deserts… but for me, not for him!
Had I fed my own soul, nourished my own mind, cultivated my own dreams… instead of starving myself into Ted’s mold, neither our encounter nor his departure would have impacted me as deeply or as severely.
So now, when I reflect on my days with Ted, our big homes and cars, our fancy clothes and my tiny size-34 body, wondering if I could ever fit into that image of adequacy again… I shake my head!
All that material success and bodily perfection stem from a flawed vision seared into our heads by a society that wants us to conform, but not to bloom into our own best person.
In reality, rather than sacrificing ourselves for one another, like I did with Ted, the more self love we have, the stronger we are as individuals! And the more openly and generously we move through this life, the more we share of ourselves , the better we all work together and the more we all have to gain!
Certainly and luckily, in heft and width and wealth of spirit, at least.
And none of the rest of the crap that we accumulate is going with us anyway when we croak. Right?!!
