There are some words that you just don’t say because they are painful to hear. I’m not talking about swear words. There are words that have power like: love, God, breathe, good and evil. Words that have power invoke a feeling, a memory. Then there are heavy words, words that you almost stop yourself from saying. Heavy words bear down on the back of your throat not only in the consonants they tend to carry but in the taste they leave behind. They are usually extreme circumstances or rarities. When you say these words you hope they don’t invoke a feeling or memory. You hope you go your entire life without hearing them, understanding them or worse: experiencing them.
Fat. Hate. Rape. Assault. Abuse. Suicide. Did you have a guttural response to any of those words? Did they hurt to read? To hear in your minds voice? If they have happened to you, then they probably did. How many of those on that list do you think apply to me? How many apply to you?
As I read the words back, fat doesn’t seem as severe as the others, but it’s a word I use all the time. Its makes people visibly uncomfortable. I, of course, only use it in context for myself. My old self. When I do, people want to correct me. They want to soften the blow of what it really was and what I really looked like. I lived in that body and I knew it best. I was fat. No matter what you call it, I still was. I’ve heard it all: But you have such pretty eyes, but it’s really about the personality, but………… It doesn’t matter.
Calling something by a different name, doesn’t change what it is. Sugar coating and denial isn’t helping anyone. It hurt to refer to myself as fat for a long time. Then eventually, the word lost a lot of its weight for me. (Pun not actually intended this time.) It became lighter to say and to hear. Now, I’m surprised by other people’s sensitivity to the word because it is normal to my world. Then the other day I heard a word that broke my world.
I’ve not really understood most of the reasons for being fat until this last six months. I still think there were multiple layers for me but one of my biggest blankets has been mislabeled for a long time. Sometimes you think what happened to you is normal because you’ve never asked anyone. Sometimes you think it’s happened to everyone. Not knowing its name didn’t change its effect on me. Not calling it what it was didn’t make it ok. I turned out pretty screwed up just the same. It scarred me; regardless of its name.
While chatting with a newer friend recently, she said one of those words. And she meant it about me. And she meant it about what I just told her. **I do mean to be intentionally vague. There will always be parts of my story that aren’t public for everyone. It just has to be that way.**
I didn’t hear what she said for a long time after that . I just kept hearing the word over and over. Then I ran checklist. What do I know about trauma victims; people that have experienced rape, assault and/or abuse? High level of anxiety, ‘walking on eggshells’ feeling, love hard and fast, tendencies toward worry and guilt…….oh shit.
The word hurt. To realize it described me hurt worse. It hasn’t really stopped hurting since that day. She said it so freely, I knew she’d experienced it too. Takes one to know one I guess. I’m hoping the more I understand the word and how it’s effected who I am, the less weight it will carry. The less weight it carries, the less it will hopefully bear down its weight on me.
I think this has been a missing piece of my puzzle for a long time. Truly understanding my past is changing my future. Things about my personality that I’ve been trying to rewrite are now making sense. Parts of myself that I’ve been trying to fix now seem fixable.
If you are on a journey, any kind of journey, you gotta dig deep. You have to get to that bottom and figure. it. out. There’s things you’re avoiding. There’s words you don’t want to remember. There’s times that changed you, molded you to where you are now. Find it. Fix it. Heal.