Dear Sad Fat Child

I’m writing this, or at least starting it from Sunday night. This is the last night we’re spending at Grandma’s house. Tomorrow my mom will come and relieve us and Ben and I can go back to our home.

Everybody else is asleep, but I’m wide awake. As usual. So while I was sitting here putting the final touches on Monday’s blog, I started to think back to my childhood insomnia. I would wait until everyone was asleep and then I would roam the house and the yard. Sometimes I’d just stand outside and stare at the moon.

I would dream about the day I would leave, little did I know how close it was. But even so, I had plans. I was going to grow up and get as far away from this family as possible. I used to imagine people I knew saying things like “Marina, I hardly recognized you!” How good it would feel to replace every possible part of myself so that nothing that had lived in this house would survive in the new self-made me.

I would take the terrorized and angry child I was and break her apart. I’d fill her with education and false manners until she became a bastion of control: Thin, rich, with legions of men falling at her elegantly pedicured feet. Here would be a woman no man could tame, fully self-sufficient, impenetrable in every sense of the word. I would think about my clean future condo, my well trained dog, my in-home gym. No husband, no children, no complications or emotional entanglements to weaken my resolve. There in the future, surrounded by lean muscle and empty sexual liaisons with multiple partners, I felt I would finally be safe.

What a disappointment I would be to that child now. I find that growing up is a constant process of disappointing older versions of myself. Almost always, that older version had things pretty terribly wrong.

Twenty years ago, I hadn’t met a single person who didn’t eventually betrayed me. I mistakenly thought that no family would be preferable to the risk of further heartbreak.

Standing on that same spot of driveway, I felt my own despair tonight. I’ve come back here with all my original plans long dead. Here I am, still fat, still odd, and with absolutely none of the material goods I thought would protect me. And yet, I have everything I never knew that I’d need.

The answer was not to change who I am, but to become her truly. Not to look good, but to be good, not isolate but reach out. I’m the same lost little girl I always was. And I’m learning that I always will be her. But the answer isn’t to run away from that, but to bring it with me.

I used to think that in order to be happy, I had to bury myself. But that is so far from my experience. Yeah, I’m a terrified, angry fat weirdo. Some of the best people are. Life is so much more than following rules that were meant to keep you quiet or making friends who don’t know who you really are.

Even as I advocate for self love and honest acceptance, I want so badly to erase everything that reminds me of the lonely, rejected child I was. I want to draw big black lines under all the stuff that separates me from her, and by extension a family legacy of abuse, addiction and mental illness. I have a terrible habit of thinking that if I just had the right BMI, the right hair, clothes, skin tone, GPA, degree, zip code, car, vocabulary, position, accomplishments… It’s never ending. Because, like it or not, I was born this person. I started out as her and I’ll finish up as her. I fought so hard to be worth something only to conclude that worth isn’t a thing I can earn. Worth is a gift I give myself.

I have been driven by terror my entire life. Terror that I would not amount to anything; that I would never escape this house; that I would end up like them. What would it be like to be driven instead by the concept of my own worth?