One of the tools I have learned for trying to make sense of my own life, and my reaction to it, is to trace reactions and impulses to the places in my life of crisis where they developed. I was thinking about body image today and remembered one of the incidents which contributed to my skewed image of my own body and my skewed image of the motivations of those who react to it positively.
I was at the hospital. I don’t remember what exactly for, but I was a fairly sickly child with multiple allergies, asthma, a persistent infection in my foot, and of course an obesity problem. I believe it was an evaluation for an exploratory surgery, but it might have been a follow up to having my tonsils removed. The doctor seeing me was a young, close-cropped hair type with the best of newly graduated intentions. He would not look straight at my mother, and barely at me, as he spoke about the concerns he had for my health and development since I carried “so much extra weight.” My mother has an obesity issue as well, and looking back I can understand why he might have been nervous about speaking with her about my weight issue without being at liberty to discuss hers. Adults do funny things at each other when kids are around. Anyways, the crux of this incident was when he reflected that I probably would be able to get a girlfriend despite my weight since, “there are some girls who are attracted to overweight men, called ‘chubby chasers’. Usually skinny girls who didn’t get much food as they were being brought up.”
Great! Thanks, Doc! I have a future of relationships with odd ball anorexic gals with fear of starvation. That’s really going to work out well as I pig out and they shiver with worry that I might eat all the available food and relegate them to starving again. Perfect!
Luckily for me if I ever met a girl with terrors of being underfed who was physically attracted to me I was too shy to notice. Thank God for looking out!
It’s a wonder how insensitive we can be sometimes with kids. But, what is more remarkable to me is how much of my evaluation of the relationships in my life have been informed by that one instance. Psychology is a weird, and very delicate thing. Looking back now I can have a conversation with that small, chubby boy who was me and try to set him straight. I can help him (and me) to realize that the Doctor’s words were well intended but truly ignorant. I don’t blame the Doctor for what he said, even though I do think at that moment he was kind of an idiot, but I can take responsibility now for how I continue to let his words affect me, and how much I can let them go. We can’t change our past, bur we can re-frame our understanding of it and reform our reactions from it.
