I have a confession. I’m nervous about going to BlogHer.
Not for the usual networking aspects that people get nervous about. I’m generally kind of comfie watching for a couple of minutes and then joining in at a loud volume. A little booze helps. I’m sure there might be a bit of that, there.
I’m nervous because I kind of have this weird thing of people always telling me to eat a cheeseburger. It drives me fucking mental.
Imagine, if you can, what it’s like to be on a diet for, honestly, 75% of your life. Spending entire days not eat at all, or subsisting on a single bagel, apple or 23 cheerios. Then, you know, you turn 28 and magically, you start to get healthier. But your body doesn’t change that much, you’re still this big-headed, thin everything elsed chick with tits.
There’s me.
I have these kind of awesome (though small) biceps, which are overshadowed by the hollows of my clavicles; solid quad and calf muscles get negated by the fact that my thighs don’t touch. I feel, sometimes, as if I look just wrong, for lack of a better word. Ribcage and hips bones jutting, flat stomach covered in stretch marks, no ass at all with kind of the perfect amount of sag.
I’m a walking contradiction. So?
After years of subsisting on 23 cheerios, a single bagel or apple and warming up between meals with a cup of fat-free hot chocolate or tea (because when you’re skinny, you’re always cold), I’ve become oddly accepting of my body. I know what its potential is, what fuels it, what drags it down – how to be more and get more out of it.
Sometimes, I can even see myself in the mirror and think, in a small voice {that’s only in my head [that I immediately quiet, because I've never learned the difference between self-appreciation and conceit]} ‘damn.’ I can know logically that I have big blue eyes and red hair and I’m taller for a chick (but not actually tall) and have 34-23.5-36 measurements and that all of those points are pluses.
All of those points have never gotten me thrown out of bed. Some of them might actually help to raise some money at a fundraising event on Monday, where a date with me will be auctioned off. Who knows.
But I can’t stop myself from seeing all of those other things too.
So?
It’s my pet peeve, when someone I care about hugs me and jokes that I’m tiny. I can’t stand it when someone tells me to eat more because I’m too thin. Worse yet, when someone says something like, “I wish I had your problems” when I’ve dared to complain about the hassle of inexpensively shopping for clothes in size 0 and lower.
It makes me feel on display, as if there’s a poster above my head written in four different colours of highlighter ‘come see the freaky booble-head. She needs to eat a cheeseburger.’ It makes me feel dirty. It makes me feel like an attention-seeker. It makes me wrong.
And I know that it will happen. Someone. Someone I’ve been looking forward to meeting, someone I’ve dared to let down the guard with and I’ve hugged, will draw back and say something like ‘wow. You’re tiny. I’m like, two of you.’
The shame will begin. The guilt. The thoughts that in a sea of mommies, I might be an aberration. I’ll get anxious and draw into myself and become shy – and I’m not shy, for the most part. I will become a fraction of the me that I can be.
But I have a way to combat this feeling:
When I arrive in Chicago, I’ll get off the plane and get a drink. And on the way to the hotel, I’ll stop with my girl friends and get a drink. And when I’m at the Room 704 party, there will be drinks.
So, if you walk up to me at BlogHer and think I’m going to hug you nervously, if at all? Don’t worry about it – I’ll be half-cut.
