I am not a morning person. And by "morning", I actually mean "before noon". If I'm going to get up and get going in the morning, I need something, as my friend and director Julie used to say, "to take the sting out", and that usually means food. Fortunately, one of our regular receptionists subscribes to this same theory of mornings, and whenever she's in the building before noon, she comes bearing donuts. LOTS of donuts.
In my workplace, many people do not regard the donuts as a positive development. I am surrounded by co-workers who meticulously track their weight, body measurements, miles run and walked, calorie intake and burn rate, and various metrics of food ingestion. People monitor their daily grams of protein or sugar, eat "meals" of carefully measured amounts of cottage cheese and peanut butter, and replace food altogether by drinking mad-scientist-looking concoctions that they create in the break room blender or bring from home in a Mason jar. One of my co-workers appears to subsist completely on a diet of popcorn and grapefruit--when I asked him if he eats anything else, he said, "Lettuce?"
This, as you can imagine, leaves me alone with a lot of donuts.
It's a problem.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in the break room with my friend Victoria, contemplating the vast array of fried sugary goodness. She was saying that she had been really disciplined and hadn't eaten one. I was saying that I had eaten one, and that the last thing I needed was another. Victoria laughed. She said, "You skinny people. Small people always want to be smaller. I'd be happy if I was your size."
All I can say in my own defense, is that at least I had the grace to be embarrassed about it. I told Victoria, "I'm sorry. I do get the problem. I actually wrote a whole blog post about it. But it's hard, when it's yourself." Victoria, always gracious, agreed. "It is."
And I walked away kicking myself, but even then, even then, here's what I was thinking. I was thinking about how many times I have told myself exactly what Victoria said. That there are people who would be happy to be my size, who would consider themselves skinny and beautiful, who would accept and love themselves in my body, so why isn't that enough for me? If so many other people would be happy with what I have, I should be happy with it myself.
I thought about it, off and on, for the rest of the day, and until now. And I'm happy to say that at some point along the way, my thoughts about it changed, when I suddenly realized something. If being my size would really make people happy, then why doesn't it work for me??
I know. You think I already said that, right? You think I'm just repeating myself. But listen. Just hang in there with me for a minute. The words are almost the same, but follow me--think. Think about it differently. Victoria said she would be happy if she was my size, and I believed her. We both believed her. But let me ask you a really important question: would she?? Would any of the people I was thinking of earlier--if they became my size, would they really be happy with it? Because I think that if being my size (or any size) is really what makes people happy, then it would be working for me. And not just me, but all the small, skinny people Victoria is talking about who always want to be smaller. It would be working for every woman I wrote about in that blog post who is 25 pounds lighter than me but still thinks she needs to lose 10 pounds. And for every woman I see at the gym and think, "I'd be happy if I was her size," but she's still frowning later when I see her on the scale. I have been thinking of it backward. It's not that if other people
would be happy being my size, that's proof that I should be happy with
it. Instead, it's that if I'm not happy being my size, it's proof that no one
else would be either--at least not if size is what they were depending
on for that happiness.
And the people I am really envying? The people who are at peace with themselves, body and all? If they are happy, it's not because they are smaller than me. It's because they are smarter than me. Because at that moment, I see, in a blinding flash, AGAIN, the lie that has crept in yet another crack and obscured this truth:
If being any certain size would really make us happy, make us love
ourselves, accept ourselves, become witnesses to our own beauty and
power, then it would already be working for all of us. This lie--that skinniness equals happiness, or worthiness, or lovableness, or even beauty--has so deeply pervaded our cultural and individual consciousness that even when we have seen the falsehood in it, even when we are vigilant in our attempts to combat it, it still lurks there, just under the surface, secreting itself in the hidden places we will not see, camouflaging itself in the cleverest disguises, manipulating even our attempts to diminish it into mind-bending tricks that unknowingly grow its power. It is evil. And I am not exaggerating. If being the Beloved is indeed the core truth of our existence , the sacred truth on which everything rests, then this is its true unholy opposite, this lie that says we can never be perfect enough, pretty enough, small enough to be loved.
Almost every morning when I eat breakfast, I see this tagline on the back of my cereal box: "More whole grains, less you!" Let me ask you this, what kind of a message is that? Whose voice is it, that we still, in spite of everything, are allowing to say to us, "You know what would really be great here? Less you. If you could just kind of shrink down a bit. Just keep getting smaller. The closer you are to non-existent, the better that will be. We'll all like that. You'll be happy then. Trust me."
Make no mistake, people. It's not the donut that is our enemy.
