Cradling her swollen belly the woman mourned. Tears dared not stream down her cheeks, so instead, she wept inside, overwhelmed by her shame and disgust at her bulging figure.
This heaving cavern that she carried around was neither teeming with the promise of life nor doing the awe-inspiring job of incubating a new soul.
No, instead, it harboured the evidence of her gluttonous “sins”.
A broiling mixture of self-pity, disgust, misery, loneliness, and self-loathing swilled around the cauldron that was her mind, stirred by the haggard, centuries-old witch, Pride.
•••
What have pride and self-loathing got to do with one another, you ask? Surely if one is prideful, they can’t possibly hate themselves, rather, the opposite, one might argue. A prideful person is more likely to be a narcissist than a meek, mild, downtrodden self-hater. And vice-versa, a self-loather cannot possibly be prideful.
I, however, argue differently. It is that very expectationof different standards of oneself, than what is human, that smacks of pride. You must think you’re too good to be addicted to food. So why should such a thing happen to you? Why should obesity befall you like it does “the rest”? How dare obesity visit itself upon your body, a squatter in a mansion it will never be able to afford? Something foreign in you has caused the downfall of your mighty image of beauty and perfection, and you detest it for dishonouring you. In so doing you deny your own humanity and your own vulnerability, and look down upon yourself from an astronomically high, imaginary pedestal of your own making.
Though I’ve just exposed the brutal thought pattern behind the feeling, anyone who has experienced this feeling will know that it’s hardly ever (if ever) as conscious as this. This is what your negative mindset says to you, but you don’t even realise it, because this goes on sinisterly intrinsically- in your subconscious.
This is why you can’t walk past a mirror without saying to yourself: “fat”.
This is the reason why it is a ritual for you to step on the scales and torture yourself with the number you see on it.
This is why you slowly descend into a place of hopelessness and despair, because you’ve given up.
You hadn’t noticed you were doing these, perhaps, because they are abusive habits that have become a part of you. The message you hear and the “truth” you have come to believe about yourself is the toxic message of worth (or the lack thereof) being equal to appearance- specifically weight.
Your mind has told you you are worthless, and you’ve believed it. 😔
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