Crazy(ish) no more...

 
An eavesdropping fly on the wall one week ago might have heard the following snippet of conversation:
 
Me: I've been thinking that I don't need to see you as often anymore.
 
Therapist: I think you're right.
 
Well bring on the propeller hat, rainbow wig and bright orange rain poncho (which I assume is standard attire for such an occasion) because I've officially graduated from crazy school!  
 
Well, that's how it feels anyway.  
 
I've spent my Thursday lunch hours discussing the finer points of my emotional well-being with a therapeutic professional in a year-and-a-half long quest to find out just what the hell is wrong with me.  And to my great surprise, I think we did just that.
 
It was a personal crisis of epic proportions that led me to her in the first place. I walked into her office full of plush furniture, eclectic decor and shelves stuffed with self-help literature without knowing what to expect.  All I knew is that I felt broken, like there weren’t enough king's horses and king's men on earth to put me back together.  A lifetime of cartoon images of bespectacled, clipboard toting men asking patients lying in prone positions about their mothers didn't prepare me for the soft spoken, scarf wearing, easy smiling, kind eyed yet sharp tongued woman who introduced herself as Cynthia when she invited me to sit down anywhere on her cushy furniture and tell her all about it.  
 
There was no in-depth analysis of my dreams or dramatic recounting of childhood traumas.  There were no shock treatments or repressed memory discoveries, or creepy attempts to reenact my birth experience.  Instead there was conversation.  There was advice.  There were sometimes tears, but also a lot more laughter than I'd expected.  There was talk of the fat, but there was more talk about all the other things I am.  And--to the great delight of my inner nerd--there were worksheets, handouts, diagrams, and homework.  And, most importantly, there was progress.
 
Therapy gets a bad rap sometimes, I think.  The red-blooded American pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality that runs deep in our collective veins can sometimes mistake reaching out for mental health support as evidence of a weakness of character, a convention of a modern age that relies on science and medicine to cure what a good kick in the ass should be able to knock out of us. After all, people have survived for thousands of years without therapy and antidepressants, why do we need them now all of a sudden?  That argument is short sighted at best.  People lived without antibiotics for thousands of years to...and they died of ear infections and strep throat.  If I had cancer, I'd get chemotherapy.  I had a case of the crazies, so I went to therapy, and I'm so glad I did.  The hardest work may be over, but I'm not done yet.  
I am the same woman who walked into that office for the first time, but I am not the same person I was that day.  That girl was so lost in her fear and despair that it makes me ache to remember her.   But the woman writing this?  Her I like.  She’s strong.  She’s resilient.  She knows where she's going, and she’s tough enough to keep working to get there
 

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky...

I believe that we are all essentially the product of our experiences, and that as our lives progress the memories of where we’ve been and what we’ve learned combine to form the core of who we are and help to steer where we’ll go next. In my nearly 40 years on this earth, experience has let me to believe in a few fundamental truths:

Number 1: If there is someone or something in your life that your family doesn’t like (assuming that your family is functional and good for you), then you can be assured that in nearly every case, they are usually 100% right.

Number 2: If you’re going to accidentally wear your shirt home inside out after a night involving activities of a questionable nature, it’s best to make sure that it isn’t one with shoulder pads sewn into it.

Number 3: There’s something wrong with me.

I was talking to my therapist the other day (which is good, since that’s what I pay her for and all. I suppose I could sit in her office and silently crochet for an hour, but that seems like a waste of $120 and since I only know how to crochet one thing I don’t know what I’d do with all the resulting pot holders), and she was grilling me about my childhood. And by “grilling” I mean she was asking me pointed questions in a polite tone. And by “pointed” I mean normal questions a therapist might ask when presented with a patient who says she had a good childhood but still manages to be moderately bat-shit crazy in spite of that fact. And by “moderately bat-shit crazy” I mean that despite all evidence to the contrary, it turns out she doesn’t think very much of herself. Where, she wants to know, does this stem from?

The truth is that I did have a normal childhood. I had two parents who loved and supported me, very little in the way of chaos (unless you count that ten pound bundle of joy they brought home from the hospital when I was six and have always liked better than me), and certainly no abuse or trauma in my past that might have been the sparks that lit the fire of self-doubt. There are a lot of reasons people grow up with an impaired sense of self-esteem, but none of them seem to apply to me. I was not berated tirelessly for my faults, my family situation didn’t force me to assume responsibilities far beyond my age, and I didn’t suffer indignities at the hands of those who were supposed to love me and protect me. I got good grades, I won recognition for my talents, and I managed to eventually grow into a responsible adult in charge of raising another human being who happens to be a pretty great kid. There just isn’t any reason for me to doubt my value as a person. Except one.

It always comes back to the fat, doesn’t it?

I’ve spent about 35 of the last 39 years struggling with my weight. I’ve written before about some of my experiences as an overweight kid and all the ways that my parents tried to help me shed the pounds. I am adamant in my insistence that there was no malice in their efforts, and that every attempt to help me slim down was made out of a desire to make my life better. But it turns out that even my sincere belief in the purity of their intentions doesn’t change the fact that, from a very early age, I knew that there was something wrong with me. Something that needed fixing. Something that was so bad that they’d do nearly anything to change it. Something that I could fix if I just wanted it badly enough and worked hard enough that I could give it to them…and I never could.

Somewhere along the line, the knowledge that no matter what else I was or how much I achieved, the fact that I did it in a body larger than anyone else I knew became the mitigating factor to every achievement (or failure) I racked up. The fat became the cornerstone of my self worth, the broad and wobbly foundation upon which all the other things I am have been laid. My weight has been a defining force in my life, a barometer of my greater success over the years. It’s how I’ve judged who I am, and what I deserve…and I didn’t even realize it until recently.

Do not mistake this revelation as an indictment of my parents in any way. They are wonderful people who continue lovingly support me as they have my whole life. There are millions of people with legitimate parental grievances to air and I won’t pretend that I am among them. The truth is that my feelings about my weight and how it’s defined my life are much less about them than they are about ME. I am a muller, a thinker, a dweller of thoughts. Plant a seed in my brain and I’ll nurture and fertilize it until it grows in to a sturdy plant with deep roots and an impressive canopy of branches…but I just might look up and realize that I’ve been fostering a weed. I’ve been mulching and pruning and watering this sucker for decades, it seems. What a colossal waste of time.

Its time tend to the rest of the garden, to see what else might be hiding under that big fat weed’s leaves just waiting for a chance in the sun. I think I’m ready to find out.