Amber Unleashed: A Chubby Bunny Confessional

  

I’m going to be honest with you: I’ve had confidence issues as far back as I can remember. It doesn’t take an exceptionally perceptive person to notice this about me, but I’m willing to bet there are a few people who haven’t known me for long that didn’t realize this. I get up in front of my entire church body and sing solos and duets pretty frequently, and I burst out with silly banter and comments when I’m with large groups of people that I feel comfortable with. And when I write about my opinions, I’m bold and essentially fearless. I’m even a teacher in training, dang it! But ultimately, my self-assurance does not amount to much beyond these few things, and in reality, my confidence is more of a front than a legitimate display.

    The truth – the hard truth – is that I hate myself. I can barely remember a time when I didn’t hate myself. Even when I looked better than I ever have in my life, I still dreamed of looking better. I make up silly phrases and use goofy nicknames like “Chubby Bunny” to make light of the subject, but honestly, that’s just to make myself feel better. Better to laugh than cry, right? 

    To some degree, I accept that I am the way I am, because I know I’m the only one with the power to change it. But underneath it all, I wish I didn’t have to change my physical appearance to feel good about myself.  Why can’t I accept who I am, no matter how I look? 

DEMON CHILD!!! AHHHHH!

    In the beginning, these issues of confidence (or lack-thereof) mostly stemmed from the fact that I have a quiet and shy personality by nature; but a huge contributing factor was physical: I started wearing glasses when I was literally one year old. No lie - I was this funky little toddler rolling around on my tricycle rocking these girlie pink, big-rimmed 90’s glasses that only maximized my facial weirdness. My relatives swear up and down that I was the cutest little kid ever, or whatever it is that they say, and every time I see a photo of myself even now, I genuinely cringe. To me, pictures of myself with my tiny baby teeth all spread apart and smiling like I just sucked down an entire pixie stick, along with those honkin’ glasses taking up half my face and enlarging my eyeballs to the size of twin flying saucers, do nothing but make me think I was secretly a Gremlin before I hit puberty, and then I crossed over and forgot. Maybe I still AM a Gremlin; I just got braces and ditched the spectacles and now I can wear make-up and do my own hair so my disguise is much more efficient.

    
Anyway, as I got older and weaned myself off the glasses, I got a tad more confident. But it was around this same time that I started hitting puberty pretty hard, and not only was I coming into the staple awkward years, but I was getting chubby AND my face was be-speckling itself with the early stages of acne. Through junior high, I had only miniscule improvements on the confidence scale, which were simply due to the fact that I knew my classmates pretty well by now; but that didn’t stop me from comparing myself to other girls everywhere I looked. I had plenty of friends, but I wasn’t “popular” in the sense that I longed for; I wasn’t someone everybody knew, and I wasn’t somebody the boys pined over or even wanted to be around. I guess I wasn’t a total reject because I “went out” (if you can even call it that) with a few guys, but I still somehow felt like a social leper. 

   When I started wearing make-up my 8th grade year, I felt like I had discovered a gold mine. I was FINALLY going to have some relief from the never-ending game of Connect the Dots on my skin, and maybe I would get more attention from cute guys instead of dorky ones if I could make myself look prettier. So I made it a priority to blow dry my hair every morning, and then I would attack my face with foundation and powder until it felt like I was quite literally wearing a mask. I would then coat on about six layers of mascara and go so overboard with the eyeliner that my mother would invariably reprimand me for it. (Eventually I would learn the magic power of blush and lip color and the concept of “less is more” for everyday wear, but that was not going to be for awhile. So in the meantime, I remained a ghostly-white Halloween mask with raccoon eyes and really white teeth.)

    While I felt exponentially better about myself in the facial department by now, 9 times out of 10 I still stood/sat with my arms wrapped around my waist like a straight jacket if I was out in public. I may have “fixed” the problem of my face, but I still struggled to hide my flubbery tummy and the colonization of cellulite along my butt and thighs that liked to show anytime I wore shorts or a skirt. I thought the only thing to do was hide my fat with big, loose clothing, so I wore a lot of long, billowy skirts and huge hoodies and jackets so that no one would be able to decipher my size beneath all those layers. Even in gym class when other girls were rolling their shorts up at the waistband so their petite little cheeks could hang out the back end, I was pulling mine down past my hips just to make them longer so they covered more of my legs. I never wore shorts or dresses that went above the knee, and I seldom wore clothes that were super tight or revealing because I was paranoid of my fat bubbling over and being exposed to the world. While I do commend my adolescent self for my commitment to modesty, I certainly didn’t realize at the time that I was completely covering up my shape, including most of my curves, and overall making myself look frumpy. I also didn’t realize that I was utterly ashamed of who I was. 

    In high school, I started to gradually wise up with my fashion sense as well as my make-up application, but there was still much to be desired. I continued to gain weight and wasn’t getting any taller like some of the girls my age. I had hit growth spurts in height way before most of the other girls had boobs, so now they were finally catching up with me; but most of them were rail-thin or muscular from sports involvement, and I was good at stuff like theater and band and yearbook staff, which (normally) required little cardiovascular effort and didn’t exactly score me automatic “cool” points. So I dealt with the pudginess with more billowy skirts that almost touched the floor, and more sweaters, baggy shirts, and jackets to camouflage my blubber around the middle.

    Despite the level of my self-loathing taking residence up in the stratosphere, I dated one guy off and on all throughout high school because he saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. He told me I was pretty all the time, but it never resonated with me the way I had always imagined; I couldn’t appreciate it because I didn’t believe it. The fact that no other guys ever seemed so much as fascinated by me was a major bummer, and the disappointment delivered a pretty intense bruise to my already fragile self-esteem (because as any high school kid will tell you, popularity is just about all that matters for those four years of life). I was never satisfied with anything, and I was always feeling sorry for myself and wishing I could change this, this, and that about my body. When my boyfriend and I started having problems about 2 years into our most consecutive relationship, my confidence plummeted to an all-time low. I cried myself to sleep most nights, and I hated myself a little more every time I looked in the mirror, saw pictures of myself with my skinny friends, or had to go shopping in the women’s section because the junior sizes no longer fit right. 

    But my senior year and continuing into the following summer, my metabolism got a roundhouse-kick from a ninja and I lost 40 lbs in a span of a few short months, and all the sudden guys were flirting with me and giving me second glances and smiling and making eyes at me on a regular basis. For the first time in my entire life, I felt like a superstar in comparison to how I’d always felt before; but I still didn’t feel GOOD about myself. I still thought I was “fat”, and what I wouldn’t give to just be as thin as my friends and all these pretty college girls I was constantly surrounded by now. Every time I saw a cute guy, instead of just being myself, I would get so caught up focusing on how much prettier and thinner and “perfect” the girl beside me was that I would totally clam up and petrify. I was a self-image disaster just waiting to implode, even being that much closer to my goal weight. I thrived off of any compliments I received, and yet still chose to obsess over the compliments I didn’t receive but wanted to hear. 

   Later on in college, my weight took a turn for the worse. My metabolism finally recovered from the ninja attack and got back to its horrible norm, which meant my weight crept up and up until I weighed even more than I had BEFORE I started losing weight in high school. I got totally depressed over it and started working out like a crazy person, but I felt so out of place in the gym that it didn’t last for very long. Having to work out next to people who looked like they could be competing in America’s Next Top Model or the Mr. Universe contest was entirely discouraging and just made me feel crappier than crap. I turned to food as my comfort, and developed a lot of bad habits as well as continued to feed others I already had. I never said no to food, even if I wasn’t hungry, and my portions were completely past the point of binge eating. I ate because something sounded good, or I was craving it, or sometimes just because it was there. I ate when I was bored, I ate when I was “supposed to”, I ate when I was sad, I ate when I was happy; I truly loved and was addicted to food.

    This aspect of me has not changed. I still LOVE food; and not only that, but I love BAD food. All my favorite things are fried up in grease or smothered in cheese and rolled up in a bread coating, and the rest of my diet is almost entirely made out of sugar and/or preservatives. But this isn’t just because I like this food and don’t like healthy food; I’d eat healthier if it tasted better, was more convenient, and didn’t require a pension or a trust fund to pay for. Plus, it becomes a huge nuisance to have to shop again for everything you eat after as little as three days. I’m sorry, but to quote Sweet Brown, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” 

    I’ve tried multiple diets, exercise plans, and “mental health resets” in my adult life, but nothing has ever delivered the fast results that I expect unreasonably soon, and I would give them up too quickly when the scale didn’t change even after all that hard work in the gym and all those sacrificed ice cream desserts and chocolate chip cookies. For years, I’ve nursed this sick desire to be the perfect version of myself, and I never realized just how poor my perception of myself has always been until recently. One day I looked in the mirror at myself before a shower and I thought of how disgusting I looked, and then blushed just imagining the idea of anybody seeing me so uncensored and vulnerable as I am without my safety net of coverings. And then I looked again and thought, “Why are you like that? What’s so wrong about the way you look? That’s your body; it may have a few flaws according to society, but why should society care? Just focus on what makes you healthy, not what anybody else thinks; especially you. Your opinion matters least of all, because it’s always worse than anybody else’s.” 

    And then I realized that it shouldn’t be like that; I shouldn’t hate myself because I think other people think critically of what they see when they look at me. I can’t know what anyone is thinking about me; and even if I could, it shouldn’t matter so much. I didn’t pull that idea out of a hat. It was learned from other people; watching them, listening to them talk. I just figured it out on my own from what they said and did, figured out “how I should be.” But now, I can’t help but ask myself, why is it so important what other people think of us? Why can’t we just be content with what we have? Why can’t we be grateful? Accepting? Loving of our bodies? 

    I can't pretend that it's all the world's fault that I have these problems with myself. A lot of it actually has to do with my relationship with the Lord, and placing my identity solely in Him. This is something I've struggled with my whole life, but I also can't deny that outside of my own struggle, this issue is so much bigger than just me. As I work through my personal spiritual battles with body image, I want to share parts of my journey with others so that you, too, can be educated in the ways that the world will try to drag you down and away from God, tearing at your mentality and your emotions, making you feel alone and unloved if you don't conform.

If men had to pose the way women are expected to in ads

    This post is the first of several. While future posts on this topic hopefully won’t be so heavy, this one is my launching pad to address a serious issue in America (and ultimately, the entire world) that has spread like wildfire and infiltrated even the most carefully guarded minds of people today: warped mindsets in regards to the sanctity of a woman’s body. 

    So stay tuned for the eventual follow-up post, Your Brain on Society.