just words

If my life were a movie, it would surely be part of the “body horror” subgenre. 

For context, I'm about 6'2 on a good day, and last time I checked, I weighed around 185 lbs, but this was years ago, because I haven't gone to a doctor in like forever and I'm deathly afraid of scales. My wife says I'm very thin, but I don't believe her. Herein lies the problem. In regards to my appearance, my reality and the reality of those around me do not align, they seem to be vastly different, like we’re in totally different movie genres, almost.

Because every time I look in the mirror, I see a monstrous human blob, and then I see myself lifting my shirt, counting my ribs, squeezing at the flab around my stomach, suddenly overcome with the urge to cut the fat out with the nearest sharp object, thinking maybe that will slay the monster. Often I push my face real close to the glass and trace my jawline, which seems to me to just melt away into my jowls and neck, so I practice sucking my cheeks in to add some much-needed contours to my face, because otherwise I look like some sort of nasty toad creature. Sometimes I even lock myself in the bathroom, sit on the toilet seat, and attempt to create a circle around my thighs using the thumb and index finger of both hands, as some sort of thinness test, and when I can’t get my opposing thumbs and index fingers to touch, because my thighs are too thick or whatever, I end up feeling like a literally massive failure. And whenever I go out of the house and come across a mirror, like in the Target clothing section or whatever, I stop whatever it is I’m doing and pull at the loose fabric of my shirt so that it’s flush against my skin, then I obsess over the outline of my stomach and love handles, which puts me in some sort of fatass funk for the rest of the day. I now shun clothes whose fabric rests too close to my skin, because it makes me very body-conscious, thinking everyone can see how fat I actually am, so I wear incredibly baggy clothing, like sweatpants two sizes too big and sweaters, all to avoid these body-horror blues. I often fantasize about leaving my body entirely, releasing my consciousness from this sad sack of skin, my soul or whatever drifting away without fleshy constraints. And I have no impulse control whatsoever so sometimes I'll eat whole bags of candy and feel guilty like what the hell am I doing to myself, the whole obsessing-over-my-weight thing and lack-of-impulse-control thing constantly in conflict with one another, like some sort of mind-body dissonance that wreaks havoc on my psyche. Back in high school, I abused amphetamines and sometimes didn't eat for days, one time even passing out in my bedroom for a few hours, yet, to this day, I still think about getting a new Adderall prescription, mainly just to kill my appetite. And I only eat like one meal per day, and, for the last seven days, that meal has been Kraft Mac & Cheese Spirals, which is approximately 660 calories according to the nutritional label on the box. And I do push ups and sit ups throughout the day, not to get in shape, but to burn those Mac & Cheese calories off. I take supplements so that I don't die, although sometimes I want to die. And I'm acutely aware of when the waistline of my pants seems tighter than before, taking distressed mental notes whenever I need to use a new belt notch, and I become despondent whenever these things happen. And sometimes I eat snacks, usually saltines or pretzels, but this makes me feel like an expanding flesh balloon, so I tell myself no more snacks but somehow still end up eating snacks every day, which contributes to the whole mind-body dissonance thing. Sometimes I feel like I never grew up mentally beyond the age of sixteen, what with all my crippling self-image issues, like I’m trying to be thin and attractive for some high-school crush or something, yet my wife claims I’m already thin and attractive, so I have no idea who the fuck I’m actually trying to impress. I don’t want to feel this way. It's juvenile, vain, and ultimately unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I know this logically, but I can't help it, these body-horror blues seem to be totally outside of my conscious control. It has been something I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. This is not a plea for attention. I am not looking for hugs or compliments. These are just the facts.

I guess I wanted to write this because, first, I’ve never really captured these feelings in text before, and second, I thought perhaps maybe writing about the body-horror blues would bring me closer to understanding why I even experience the body-horror blues to begin with. 

And when I begin to analyze the “why,” two main things come to mind.

I grew up in the age of MySpace. Everyone at my schools, plural because I went to many, had a MySpace. This was also the era of the “scenester,” which was this emo-adjacent cultural phenomenon amongst teens at the time, typified by skinny jeans, screamo bands like Senses Fail, Thursday, Boys Night Out, and Underoath, and these flat long uneven haircuts with bangs that fell down across the face like dark daggers with blonde highlights. Every scenester kid’s MySpace had pretty much the same profile picture, which was usually shot with a digital camera held way above the head pointing down to capture both the frankly ridiculous haircut and the skinny jeans, this camera angle also made everyone look thin as hell, often the hair would completely cover the eyes and the kid would be wearing a scowl, many had bite-mark lip piercings, and sometimes they would PhotoShop a black heart with an X over it into the picture or something. I was not really one of these scenester kids, per se, I was always a bit of a contrarian, but I hung around kids who fell into this crowd. I also had my own MySpace with my own embarrassing profile pictures, and many of these scenester kids were on my friends list, and we all followed these MySpace micro-celebrities, like Jeffree Star, for example, whose entire shtick was that he was thin and beautiful and androgynous, and he, due to his immense popularity on the site, proliferated this sort of image-is-everything attitude among young impressionable teenagers who spent far too much time on MySpace, myself included. I had been prescribed Adderall from the age of ten, but it was around this time, the MySpace epoch, when I was like thirteen or so, when I started to use Adderall as an appetite suppressant more so than a medical aide. And I did this because, in my mind, to become popular on MySpace, I had to be thin and beautiful like Jeffree Star. So I strived to become thin and beautiful. I cannot say if I was ever very successful at being beautiful, but I did gain a decent following on MySpace over the course of that year, and I attributed this popularity to being if not beautiful at least thin as fuck, like I was obviously putting in the effort and the MySpace micro-celebs could tell, and, as such, they treated me like one of their own, communicating with me and putting me in their “Top Friends” section, which resulted in even more image-is-everything minded followers, and this felt nice, for a time. Until, eventually, one girl from my class made a huge picture collage of all my embarrassing MySpace photos. She had printed them all out on this huge board, not to make fun of me or anything but literally out of some weird kind of stalkery admiration, and she had tried to gift this collage to me. And it was then that the whole MySpace thing started to feel a little embarrassing. Because when that girl showed me the collage she had made, which again included all my embarrassing MySpace photos, many of which were taken with a digital camera from a top-down perspective, many of which I tried very hard to look like a brooding skeleton who hadn’t eaten in days, because I hadn't, when she showed me this collage, at school one day, I immediately thought to myself “fuck I can’t bring this home, my dad would probably send me off to a camp or something,” so I actually took the collage, hid it in the janitor’s closet, and just left it there. To this day, I have no clue what ended up happening to that wretched thing. But it was then that I realized that I was pretty much uncomfortable and embarrassed about the whole MySpace scenester thing, and very soon after, I deleted my MySpace and kind of removed myself from the whole scenester image-is-everything crowd, becoming somewhat of a hermit who just sat around at home all day listening to old 80s pop music and playing video games. But for whatever reason, the desire to be thin and attractive never really went away.

So, yeah, MySpace was certainly a contributing factor in my body-horror blues, but that can’t be the only reason, surely something primed me for falling into this MySpace, image-is-everything trap at such a young age, and the only thing I can think of, outside of perhaps some sort of biological inclination toward vanity, is something that, on its face, seems a little arm-chair-psychology-ish, something a little Freudian and amateur, something that seems kind of like an excuse almost, as if I lack the agency to control myself or something, and that something is just how I was raised, my upbringing.

From a young age, both my mom and grandma, whom I had primarily lived with, would constantly make comments about my weight. As a young kid, I had the impulse control of like a cat chasing butterflies in the garden or something, meaning, if I saw food that I liked, I ate it, without a second thought, and because of this, I was a pretty chubby kid. And I remember my grandma would always say things like, “your face is getting a little puffy” or “that shirt is a little too tight on you now” or “how about unbreaded chicken and whole-wheat crackers instead? It’s a little less fattening.” And my mom would constantly buy me low-fat diet snacks and make half-joking comments about my belly and my “baby fat.” And even to this day, when I visit them, the first thing they mention is something about my weight, “you’ve filled out a little bit,” or, if I’ve lost weight, they like break out into song and dance almost, “have you been on a diet, you look great, have you been working out,” as if the first thing they notice about someone is their weight, almost like, to them, image is the most important thing about a person. And it’s been like this since as far back as I can remember.

But, back then, when I was a kid, none of this really bothered me. I certainly didn’t consciously internalize it. I didn’t really give a shit. I just wanted to keep eating and doing my dumb kid stuff. But now, as an adult, thinking back, and this is where it gets a little arm-chair-psychology-ish, I wonder if perhaps, even if I didn’t consciously internalize all this stuff, maybe I subconsciously internalized all of it? Perhaps this constant subtle reinforcement of image-is-everything from a very young age is what led me down the path of body-horror blues?

So, I guess, if there’s a lesson to be learned here, be careful what you say to your kids.