More than Pounds
If I was going to write a letter to a younger me, I’d choose 18-year-old me. I’d have to overcome some resistance, a reluctance to be entirely honest. It would require effort and courage, and I might try to reason myself out of it but it would be important to do. It would be important to you, I’d say to myself, and I know you’d rather avoid it, but there’s a small detail of you I want you to focus on. It’s small detail but a significant one, you’ll realize, when you’re my age and look back at your life.
It’s your weight. But it’s not just your weight. It’s your body, and your feelings. Not just your feelings as in bodily sensations, but as in emotions. How you feel about your body, about your looks. About men. About women. It’s about eating, and drinking, and smoking, and drugs, and trash media. It’s about how you will, over the years, use all those things to try and fill yourself up. To chill yourself out, or pep yourself up, or numb yourself to the feelings you’re afraid of. It’s not just your weight, it’s all the things we do, that we don’t talk about.
How to write about all that, in my letter to younger me? I shouldn’t start there, with that small detail of huge significance. She won’t want to read something that starts with a lecture, and I don’t want to do that, don’t want to lecture her. Instead, I’d start with the memory of a wedding — my wedding — and something else that happened that day…
What I’d want to tell her, my younger self, is that one year ago today I was two pounds away from reaching my goal weight. It had taken me ten months to lose those pounds in a healthy way and that day, one year ago, I only had two more pounds to lose, to reach my goal. Today, I got on the scale and saw that I’m two pounds below that goal. Which means I reached my goal weight, and have stayed under that weight, for an entire year.
It’s a big deal, achieving that goal I set for myself and maintaining a healthy weight for a year, but I haven’t made a big deal of it publicly. I’m a person who spends way too much time on Facebook, but I haven’t posted much about this major accomplishment. I wonder why that is?
I think it has something to do with being a woman, the way we compare ourselves, and compete with each other. Something to do with shame around mental health and substance abuse issues. Something to do with me not being able to say I’m proud of myself without feeling like I’m bragging. Being unable to crow about my success, for fear someone will hear that as a commentary on their failure.
These are weighty issues, pun intended. So instead of posting about them on Facebook, I’m writing a letter in my imagination to my younger self. I can’t jump right into what I’d really want to say to her, so I’ll start with a memory, a story about something that hasn’t happened to her yet.
I’ll tell her about waking up the morning after our wedding, to the news that Princess Diana had died. Years later, friends will say they remember our anniversary, even though they don’t usually remember other people’s anniversaries, because of the media coverage of every anniversary of Diana’s death. That’s not the point of me telling this story to younger me, the connection of our wedding date with this tragedy. The point would be, to talk about Diana.
I could tell 18-year-old me about what Princess Di would mean to her, and to other young women in the 80s. How we’d watch the royal wedding on TV, spellbound by the image of Diana stepping out of a horse-drawn carriage in that puffy-sleeved gown with the full, flouncy skirt and the long, long train of a veil, trailing from the tiara atop her head. How from that day forward Diana, a modern day fairy tale princess, set trends for hairstyles and fashion.
I could tell her we learned a new word — paparazzi — for the photographers that stalked Diana, capturing her every move in images for the covers of magazines and tabloids we’d see at the market. I’d tell her the public gobbled up every tidbit of scandal reported about Diana, the rumors of her husband, the prince’s infidelity, of her mother-in-law, the queen’s disapproval, of Diana’s eating disorder, of her request for a divorce.
And through it all, I’d tell her, there was scrutiny of Diana’s appearance — her eyeliner, her workout attire/maternity attire/casual attire/formal occasion attire, her trademark skinny jeans and flats. There was speculation about her “baby bumps” and the time it took her to recover her “after-baby body” following the birth of each of her sons.
I’d tell my younger self the press continued to hound Diana after her divorce from the prince. Photographers pursued her relentlessly, culminating in a high speed chase into a Paris tunnel that ended in a fiery crash, taking her life. On the night of the day I got married on the other side of the world.
Periodically, there’s renewed interest in Diana. For years, it was the anniversary of her death that had her back in the headlines. But lately, it could be anything. A new documentary out. Another season of the TV drama, The Crown. An interview with her son, the youngest prince and his wife, describing her troubles with the palace.
I read about a sweater — a jumper, the British would call it — that sold out when Diana wore it, and is trending again, now that it’s retro chic. A red sweater covered with sheep, all of them white but one, a lone black sheep. It was considered a statement at the time, when Diana wore her black sheep sweater, a symbolic dig at the royal family. How sad is that? I’d write, in my imaginary letter to 18-year-old me. All Diana was saying, if she was saying anything with her sweater, was how lonely it was, not fitting in.
