Am I fat or do I have fat?
It bothers me when my husband says he is fat. He is putting on some fat around his mid-section. But when he says, “I’m fat” with a tone of disgust it really bothers me. One reason it bothers me is he is my very best friend. It feels like he is saying bad things about my very best friend.
Another, maybe stronger reason I don’t like it is his tone of disgust and judgment. He isn’t getting any fatter than I am. When he expresses disgust at his own fat I hear disgust at mine. Even though he has never expressed any negative comments directed toward me or my body shape.
My inner critic is strong. The voice of my inner critic sounds a lot like my mother’s voice. In 52 years of life, most of them in therapy, I’ve never yet been able to shut up the inner critic. I’ve come to realize that voice will always be there. It is fruitless to try to silence it.
Instead, I need to learn how to have a different relationship to its words. I’m not old, I’m a survivor. I’m not fat, I have fat. I’m not bad, I have done bad behaviors.
In the west, particularly the United States, the word fat has so many negative connotations. We say people are fat as if it is an identity. But we don’t say, “people are pimples,” or “people are cancer.” The only other condition I can think of in which we identify the person as that condition is addiction. We say, “Soandso is an addict,” not “Soandso has an addiction.”
This type of language relating to self is so damaging. It will keep a person down without the ability to see any way up or out. I can remember when I was in the midst of active addiction telling my dad, “If I stop being an addict who will I be?”
When I describe myself as fat I am giving myself an identity. It is a lot harder to change an identity than a condition. I also had skin cancer. Never once “Cancer” become my identity. I didn’t go to the doctor and say, “Hello. My name is Jonica and I am a cancer.” I simply had surgery to remove something detrimental to my continued ability to live a quality life.
I have come to believe simply changing the language of my identity has helped me to mute the most damaging critiques of my inner critic. She still talks shit, but I flip the script on her and have become happier with myself as a result.
When she says, “Damnit, Jonica! You are such an idiot.” I say, “Jonica, you did an idiotic thing.”
And when I do this it is easier to point to all the non-idiotic things I have done in my life. If I am an idiot, I will always be an idiot. It is my identity and too hard to change. If I do an idiotic thing, I can do a not idiotic thing next time.
You get the point.
Now, all I have to do is implement this, consistently, into my life and learn to love myself.
Jonica is a writer, rancher, painter, and poet. For the past ten years, she has been living and working on a ranch in Texas with her husband, 2 dogs, 1 cat, 2 goats,12 sheep, 5 chickens, 1 llama, and 2 turkeys. She writes about all of this and her many, varied life experiences. Jonica is a mental health advocate and shares her experiences in the hopes of de-stigmatizing mental and emotional conditions. She does not like the words “mental illness”, “disorder”, and “should” among many others. Jonica is proud to be a novelist and a poet and a Very Bad Influence where she sometimes edits stuff.
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This article originally appeared on Medium in The Bad Influence
I like your thought process here, it is an interesting perspective. I too have had my share of issues in life one way or another, I have done stupid things from time to time, some idiotic things too, though I have also has many acomplishments too. To behave foolishly on the odd occasion should not define who we are.