Weighty issue of self image
I’m catching a plane home to South Africa and my heart is filled with joy, yet all I can think is: “I wish I was thinner.” I’m going to visit my parents, and my sister and I have hatched a cunning plan where she’ll secretly fly in as well and be at the airport, too, when they collect me.
What a brilliant surprise it’ll be – it will have happened by the time you read this – and yet, like an unscratchable itch, I’m thinking: “They’re gonna wonder why I’m not thinner.”
I’ll be attending my goddaughter’s wedding but still, in the midst of celebration, it’ll be there as I hold my stomach in: “Why am I not thinner?”
I know I’ll hate all the photos, however big the smiles, however gorgeous the setting sun on this happy day, because I’ll be half-hidden behind someone else’s hip, fretting over this one thing: I am not thinner.
I’m going away with a friend, staying in a beach house, gossiping, reading, staring at the waves for as long as I want, putting on a swimsuit … and there it is, that constant refrain: “I wish I was thinner.”
I’m turning 46 in a week’s time and the only thing I can think is: “You said you’d be thinner.”
Yes, I’m a middle-aged woman, there’s no denying it, and I’ve raised two lovely young men, yet I look at my child-bearing hips, and I go: “I should be thinner.”
I’ve done it all my life, right from the day I sat beside my best friend, age 10, saw my puppy-fat thighs next to her crow legs, and said: “I wish I was thinner.”
I’ve worked with words for nearly quarter of a century, but despite everything I’ve thought, written, researched, cried over, and laughed at, every battle of opinion, each carefully crafted sentence, it feels like nothing because I’m judged by my mirror: I wish I was thinner.
And the subject I’ve returned to far too regularly in this very column? Being thinner. I think of the legendary journalist and businesswoman Helen Gurley Brown, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan for 32 years, whose friend Gloria Steinman once asked her to say something positive about herself. It took a while but at last brilliant and accomplished Helen shrieked: “I’m skinny! I’m skinny!”
Like Helen, like so many other people, I look at myself and I don’t see who I am but what I want to be: thinner.