Scared much?

I was reading something on Mae’s blog about how she felt that her eating was a response to fear, although she wasn’t quite sure what she was afraid of.

As I read that, I started to think of my own fears and how they relate to my eating, weight and self-image. I realized that my fears are really multi-dimensional and multi-layered. And just as I’m figuring out one dimension/layer, another is presenting itself, though not with the clarity I need to decipher it.

Here’s what I mean: I know that the excess fat I carried all those years was a form of self-protection. It insulated me from having to become intimate with people. I did this because of the pain I felt after my father died when I was 13. I saw what my mother went through (she was in her mid-thirties at the time) and I vowed that I would never allow myself to become dependant on another person the way she had. Well, I certainly lived up to that vow; just not in the way I thought I would.

As the years went by, I continued to add layers (physical and emotional) that would protect me from getting hurt by anyone. I completely buried myself and stuffed down my feelings with food.

Fast forward to the time between 1996 and 1999 when I finally started to understand what I had been doing to myself all those years. Knowing what I was doing and why I was doing it was a big step for me, leading to a big weight-loss breakthrough. But to some degree, I still had a lingering amount of fear that I had not yet been able to put my finger on.

I remember when I was in junior high school seeing the movie Meatballs (about a summer camp) and thinking to myself, “If only I could lose a lot of weight, I could be a counselor-in-training next summer and meet all kinds of friends and have a good time.” I equated being thin with being popular and accepted and worthy of having a boyfriend. There was also another incident when I was in university where a guy I barely knew (and who wasn't even attractive to me in any way) told me that he thought I would be very attractive if I lost 40 pounds. Again: equating thinness with worthyness and attractiveness.

I think I flirted with uncovering the true source of my fear several times over the last ten years or so. As near as I can figure it, it is the same fear that everyone has: fear of rejection. But the way it manifested itself in me was that I equated being fat with being rejected and unaccepted, so at least I had an “excuse”. But where the fear came in was in thinking, “What if I do all this work and lose all kinds of weight and I am STILL unaccepted and rejected? Not only would all that work be for naught, it would expose that I have some other fatal character flaw that ultimately makes me unlovable.

So, here I am on this precipice of fear (so to speak), mentally and physically committed to losing the final 20-30 pounds that I think I need to be “normal” (and I know how off-the-mark that thinking is). Yet, I know that it's not going to make a lick of a difference in whether or not I am loved; that has to come from me. But it’s my lack of confidence in myself emotionally that I think might be holding me back.

It's weird, because I am so self-confident in so many areas of my life. But for some reason, things just haven't clicked for me in this one area.

Clearly, some more soul-searching is in order. More to come...