Body Image Cartography

I recently started participating in a Body Image Group at the same agency where I attend my outpatient program for binge eating. I’d been very eager to start this group, but Jennie the Case Manager advised me that getting my symptom use down was priority #1. (Note: “Symptom Use” is the generalized term used to describe disordered eating behaviors - bingeing, purging, restricting, etc.) Once symptom use is down, then I would have the focus and energy to look at the body image component. The longer I’ve worked on my ED in this setting, the more sense that advice makes. I couldn’t work on repairing my thoughts about myself and my body while I was still using food to stuff down my emotions and suffering through all the guilt and shame that comes with that stuffing.

As my time in the outpatient program winds down, I took the opportunity to sign up for the 10-week Body Image Group - hey! The initials are B.I.G. I like that! - and I was nervous beyond belief. I was so ready and so motivated to charge in there and say “Yes! Help me stop hating my upper arms! NOW!” but like many things with my treatment, the process takes a little longer. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let’s step back a bit.

Body Image has been a struggle for me most of my life. Everyone has a history of experiences to draw upon that has shaped many aspects of their personality. For me, so many of those experiences seem to revolve around my size and shape, and the effects have been awful. I could spend hours and hours recounting those horrible experiences, and while I do think they have value in seeing where I come from, I don’t want us to dwell in those past experiences (I’m sure you’ve had a few yourself, right?). I want to acknowledge their impact and address how those past experiences and current situations have combined to create one rather damaged fat girl.

Sometimes it feels absolutely crippling to walk in to a room convinced that every last pair of eyes is looking you up and down with a vicious scrutiny. It hardly matters that my rational brain is telling me that I’m WAY more critical of my body than others are. In my head, I KNOW they are thinking terrible things about me as they watch the way my flabby upper arms peek out of my sleeves, the way the lumps and bumps in my torso are visible even as I anxiously tug at the hem of my shirt over and over trying to camouflage them, the way my huge body awkwardly navigates the room trying desperately not to bump in to anyone and terrified of those moments when I’ll have to squeeze past someone. Party anxiety, anyone?

I like to think of the body as a land where our experiences create a visible geography. Each interaction in this world adds another piece to it - the scars on my knees from my roughhousing childhood, the flesh on my bones that has carried me through 15+ years of an eating disorder, my straight spine that comes from learning to stand tall and stand up for myself - I don’t walk away from these things untouched. It’s a map that I carry on my body. But for too long my body has been a devastated landscape, and that’s why I’m taking on this Body Image Group.

One of the first exercises we did was a drawing in which me mapped out those places on our bodies that we Loved, Liked, felt Neutral about, Disliked, and Hated. Different colors were used for each category and the result was both pretty and heartbreaking. Here’s mine:

It serves as a visual reminder to me that I Love my hair and the color of my eyes and how tall I am; that I Like my broad shoulders (and I celebrate my shoulders with a lovely art nouveau-inspired tattoo across them); that I’m Neutral about my lower arms and legs; that my breasts make me so uncomfortable and it’s difficult not to Dislike them; and that I absolutely Hate my abdomen and back and everything wrong with me has something to do with the wrongness of my torso. It’s a little shocking to see just how critical I am of my body. This Map to FatGrrl doesn’t look like a very friendly place, does it? But I didn’t write this post so that we can all get together and indulge in the long-standing tradition of Body Hating. I did this to start a dialogue about the way we see our bodies and the way we treat them.

What about you? What makes up your Body Cartography?

On hiatus soon.

Well, your Cranky Pregnant FatGrrl ™ is set for an induction on Monday, so you won’t be getting many more fun whiny posts about how much I hate gestating. Posting will be very, VERY spotty from me over the next few weeks or so, but I’ll call Morgan once I have the baby, so that she can let those of you who’ve been following along know. I’ll still be reading, but as I’ll probably be toting a new baby around, I probably won’t be posting much.

Hope you guys have a good holiday, whatever it may be!

~Ellie

Gobble Gobble

Enjoy the upcoming holidays, folks! I’m off to Canadia-Land for an unconventional Thanksgiving adventure in Vancouver.

Love,
FatGrrl

Jalapeno

Cute Canadian Geek: “Do you have Tandoori Doritos down there [in the States]?”

FatGrrl: NO!!!! I want to try those!

CCG: “Yeah, we’ve got tons of different kinds of chips. Tandoori, and jalapeno, and…”

FG: “Wait…what? Juh-LOP-uh-no?”

CCG: “Yeah.”

FG: “You mean, hall-uh-PAY-nyo, right?”

CCG: “Morgan! You cannot come up here and say that kind of thing. People will think you’re crazy.”

FG: “It’s hall-uh-PAY-nyo!”

CCG: “There’s no H in that word.”

FG: “It’s not an English word. It’s Spanish. I know you studied French in school, so you don’t know the Spanish alphabet, but the J sounds like an H.”

CCG: “That’s crazy.”

FG: “I’m going to send you a link to the online dictionary and you’ll see there that nowhere is there a pronunciation for juh-LOP-uh-no.”

CCG: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

FG: “It’s hall-uh-PAY-nyo!”

CCG: “Morgan!”

It went on like this for a while. What kills me is that Yummy McAdorablePants has the ability to keep a straight face through it all. I’m practically falling out of my chair laughing at this little Lost in Translation moment, and he doesn’t even flinch. And that makes me laugh harder. Of course, I’m still convinced he was totally fucking with my head but I will keep you all apprised if, when I arrive in Canada, I am shocked to discover the existence of Juh-LOP-uh-no Doritos.

Overheard

Scene takes place in the kitchen. Primary actors: Ellie as the Mommy, Vampire as the precocious three year old. Editor’s comments are italicized.

Ellie takes bacon out of the oven (I HATE frying bacon)

Vampire: What are you cooking?

Ellie: Bacon.

V: Making?

Ellie: No, bacon.

V: Making? (You can tell how infrequently we have bacon, no?)

E: BA-con.

V: MA-king?

E: Say “bay”

V: bay.

E: Okay, now say “con”.

V: con.

E: Put it together. BA-CON.

V: Making!

E: BACON!

V: I CAN’T SAY IT!!! MAKING!

E: *snorts* It’s okay, kid. Bacon.

V: Making.

E: Never mind. Have some bacon.

V: I like making!

E: We all like making, kid.

(Note the image. Canadian Invasion! Canadian Invasion!)

Fat Friday - Guess who’s on the cover of BUST?

Yes, my perennial Favorite Fat Girl, Beth Ditto, is on the Dec 07/Jan 08 cover of BUST Magazine. *sigh* She is looking SO cute! Check out this sneak-peek from the feature:

The photos for the feature were taken by Danielle St. Laurent (nice job, lady!), and I want to personally thank the make-up artist, Amanda Needham, for avoiding this look on our dear Ditto.

PS: I know I can overdo the Ditto sometimes, so if you’ve got ideas for Fat Fridays or would like to submit something of your own, please let me know!

Snugglebunnies

(Kiba would be the naked one in the middle.)

A playdate with Kari and her two hounds, Passion and Sparks, went much as we expected. Kari and I worked on crafts, and the dogs lounged. They do so exceedingly well at their lounging jobs, it may be time to offer those hounds a promotion. Kiba is going to be staying with Kari and Company while I’m in Vancouver over Thanksgiving (SQUEE!).

One more week until take-off!!

Return your seatbacks to the full and upright position.

Here’s a little SQUEE to start your morning:

I’m spending Thanksgiving in Canada with the Cute Canadian Geek! NINE DAYS to go, and I can barely hold myself together in the face of the pee-my-pants excitement.

An American FatGrrl in Vancouver: This. Will. Rule!

Why men with colds should have to go to Daycare.

When I worked at Giant MegaBank Inc, there was a service offered in orientation called “Sniffles & Snuggles”…specifically, it was a daycare for sick kids (basically, colds only. You couldn’t bring in a kid with Chicken Pox or anything) if you really, really had to go to work, or were a single mom or something and daycare just wouldn’t take your kids. I thought it was kind of a bonkers idea, until very recently.

They need to have a Sniffles & Snuggles for grown men. It’s time. They’d be doing the world a favor. They could have lots of recliners and TVs with cable and nurses available to tend to the constant, never-ending whining. Of course, the nurses need to be paid at least 100K a year to compensate for the thankless job.

On Friday, my husband woke up with a sore throat. Of course, this was the worst sore throat in the history of human physiology and it was necessary to whine about the inhumanity of it all at least twice every five minutes. From the amount and severity of the whining, I was expecting him to start regurgitating blood from what had to be something as serious as bubonic plague, because holy shit, did his throat hurt.

And then he got a fever. And the whining intensified exponentially. As the dutiful, loving, almost-perfect (I’d be completely perfect if I were a better housekeeper) wife that I am, I brought him mug after mug of hot tea laced with honey (for his poor, poor throat *violins*) and Tylenol, all while trying to keep from touching his germy body because I am four weeks away from my oven timer going off and I DO NOT NEED TO BE SICK.

Saturday, he whined so much I sent him to the walk-in clinic, even though I suspected it was just viral ick and not Strep (although, he wouldn’t stop whining long enough to let me look at his tonsils) and I was right. However, he was running a 102 fever for most of the day, and from the way he was talking, we might as well have started writing his Last Will And Testament, because he was as sick as a person could be without actually dying on the spot. When he got his prescription filled (they gave him some decongestants), he bought himself some Chloraseptic spray and was using it so much when he got home I told him that if he didn’t cut it out, he’d OD on it. Much whining to the tune of “But my throat huuuuuuuuurrrrts” ensued.

Finally, Sunday rolled around and after bringing him his meals in bed, along with nine billion cups of tea, I snapped. I explained (in what *I* believe was a very reasonable tone) that if he didn’t shut the hell up and stop whining, I was going to take a pillow and smother him to death with it. I then calmly listed every pregnancy ailment I was currently feeling along with the fact that I barf at least once a day, plus the boundless joy of having a bum back and a giant baby jumping up and down on my pelvis constantly AND every embarrassing detail that goes along with that.

He looked at me, blinked a few times, and then whined some more about how very sick he was. I had to leave the room or I was going to be prominently featured on the news very soon.

I swear, if they had Daycare for sick men, this wouldn’t be an issue, and women everywhere wouldn’t get these lovely mental pictures of smothering their husbands/SOs to death after the 10th straight hour of nonstop whining. It could probably qualify as a nonprofit organization, because it would be doing a service to humanity. Sigh.

You’ll never look at Totoro the same way again.

The Cute Canadian Geek pointed me to this one, a grim and deliciously creepy take on Hayao Miyazaki’s much-loved children’s movie, My Neighbor Totoro.

TonariNoTotoro-Bus Stop by *sachsen on deviantART

The goth in me is loving this. Loving this!