If I could have given my younger self some advice, it would be fuck the police. Er, fuck everyone olse. I can’t emphasize to her how little everyone eles’s opinion matter. Sure, you want to be kind and thoughtful. And, yes, you want to have good friends and connect with individuals, but those assholes who want to tell you what to do? Nope. don’t give them a second thought.
I would tell her, this includes your parents. Especially. This is somethin I really wished I had known much earlier in my life. My parents should not have had kids, and it’s not on me. It’s not because I was a bad kid that they treated me the way they did. You see, as a kid, I had cause and effect backwards. This is true of most kids who experience a less-than-great childhood. It’s human nature to assume there’s something wrong with you if your parents don’t love you.
And, yes, my parents don’t love me. I realized that when I was in my thirties or so. Before that, I thought it was just that they didn’t know how to show it. I didn’t fully acknowledge it until after my medical crisis because I didn’t realize it until then. I mean, I knew in the back of my brain that they had issues and did not show their love in a way that was meaningful to me. I danced around it because who wanted to admit that their parents didn’t love them? But with my medical crisis, I had to admit it because it was costing me to pretend it wasn’t true.
I’ve talked about it before, but what made me realize it was when I came home from the hospital. It was the second day home and my mother wanted me to show my father a stretch that helped me with my back. On the sceond day as I said. From dying twice. Well, to be more accurate, a week and two days after that. She wouldn’t listen to me when I said I was too tired to show him the stretch. That showed me that he was more important to her than I was, which I had known–but I hadn’t fully embraced.
I would tell Little Me that it’s not her fault that they did not like anything about her. My mother wanted a daughter to be her clone. Or rather, to be the perfect little girl my mother wanted her to be. She made it known to me as an adult that she had had issues with her mother so part of her solution was to have a great relationship with her own daughter–which in theory was me.
The problem was that she didn’t allow for the possibility that her daughter would not be like her or like what she believes a girl should be. In other words, me. She had no idea that someone like me could even exist. Everything about me is offensive to her, apparently, and she takes it as a personal affront. She once said to me in exasperation that something being traditional didn’t mean it was wrong. I retorted that just because it was traditional, it didn’t mean it was right. That really pissed her off, but I didn’t care.
I would tell Little Me that she was perfect just as she was. There was nothing wrong with her that didn’t fall within the realm of being a human being with flaws. She was beautiful as she was. She didn’t have to change a damn thing to be a worthwhile human being. She did not have to be her mother’s confidante or allow her father to say negative shit to her in order to be a good kid. She did not have to wear dresses or not climb trees. She could laugh as loudly and for as long as she wanted without fear of being too rowdy.
She could read books for hours and write bad poetry. She didn’t have to practice her cello, eat her veggies, eschew dessert, or do her homework in order to be allowed to live. None of that was mandatory. She deserved to live just because she was alive.
I love myself. I can say that without wincing for the first time in my fifty-plus years on this earth. Not only do I love myself, I fucking love myself. I’m all that and a bag of chips. To quote the wise Lizzo, I’m not a snack, I’m the whole damn meal. I don’t have to prove that I deserve to live; I just do. These are my bonus days, And I’m going to enjoy every one.
It’s funny. I have long since known that I did not want to participate in the culture that women had of putting themselves down because it always seemed to me that it was a way of eliciting compliments from others. Or reassurance. “I”m such a terrible person.” “Oh, no, you are fantastic. I am the terrible person.” “No! You are great.” Repeat ad nauseam. It’s especially toxic when it comes to dieting and weight. “Oh, I’m so fat. I couldn’t possibly eat a cookie.” “What? You are so skinny! Go ahead and just eat one.”
In my thirties, I thought, “Imagine what women as a collective could do if they stopped caring about weight and how they looked.” Let me be clear. I am not blaming individual women for this because it’s so endemic in our society. The easiest way to put a woman down is to say she’s fat. Even Lizzo, who has been so oopen about loving herself, said the other day that it was hard to shut that shit out. When Tina Turner died, Lizzo did a tribute to her at her (Lizzo’s) show. Someone on her Insta said something about how can she still be so fat when she did all that jumping around?
Lizzo went off and said she felt like giving up music and just retiring on a farm with her man. It’s easy to say, “Oh, just ignore those comments” or point out how loved she is, but that’s probably one in a thousand negative comments she gets a day. And, yes, she probably gets ten times the positive comments, but it’s human nature to focus on the negative ones.
It sucks that this is such an easy way to bring a woman down. Even when I hated my body, I was careful not to disparage it because I knew talking about it only reinforced the negativitiy. Now that I love it, it’s so much better. I can embrace it and everything that I used to consider imperfect about it. I really wished everyone could step into my world.