Tag Archives: humiliation

Shouting About The Hard Stuff

Reflections on past times, , ,

shouting

Blimey, yesterday’s post provoked quite a reaction from you lot. I’ve had a ton of messages about it, to the point where I actually feel a bit fraudulent accepting all this love for being brave enough to talk about something so cringe-worthy. You all totally get how embarrassing it was.

At the time it happened, I wrote about falling out of bed on my personal Facebook page, much to the amusement of my friends. I made sure to leave out the bit about actually breaking the bed though…that was never going to make it into print. Until now, right?

I didn’t feel particularly brave yesterday when I was writing the post, in fact it’s a very weird thing…I felt detached, almost like I was writing about someone else.  Don’t get me wrong, I can remember exactly how I felt as I stood there in front of the bloke holding the bed leg, with the hot flush of shame creeping slowly up my body, desperately wanting to be anywhere but there.  And yet, talking to you guys about it yesterday didn’t worry me at all, I even smiled to myself as I wrote down the words and imagined you all reading the bit about getting my head stuck…it was funny.

That person, the one who was 62lbs heavier than the person inside my pants today seems like a stranger to me. She’s me, obviously, but at the same time she’s not me. It’s so hard to explain, but I think it’s got something to do with the way in which I’ve peeled away layers and layers of stuff over the last few months and laid it all out for examination. Between us, we’ve picked over the bones of all manner of crap, and every time I’ve taken a step forward, I feel one step further removed from the girl who broke beds and lumbered her way through life.

In doing all that, I’m conscious that I’ve sort of become a bit de-sensitised to some of the painful stuff. I can only liken it to having a baby, you know? You start your pregnancy feeling like your body is a private thing, with intimate places which are off limits to most. By the time you push the baby out you’re so used to folk faffing around with your tuppence that you barely look up from your crossword whilst they’re having a poke around.

I’ve talked about it all so much, it’s lost the power to hurt me. To bother me.  I mean, I still remember the pain and the humiliation but I don’t feel it any more, I’m just reporting the facts about how life used to be. And besides, it’s all just between you and me, right?

You’d have laughed the other day. I had to provide some information for the people my boy works for – long story, he doesn’t exactly work for MI5 but it would take too long to explain why they need it. The form asked for my build, so I wrote fat. He was peering over my shoulder as I wrote down my details and he was horrified…mum you can’t write that!  I hadn’t even given it a second thought. I pointed out the fact that I was only being honest, and quick as a flash he said yeah well under the question about facial hair you wrote NONE…if you’re all about being honest…

Cheeky twat.

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Sleeping Downhill

In the here & now, , ,

bed

When I was talking yesterday about the cruise holiday that I enjoyed with my friend just before I took my first hesitant steps towards this new healthier life, it put me in mind of an embarrassing incident from that same holiday that I’d buried somewhere at the back of my memory bank. I actually broke the bed.

Yes, seriously. I was mortified. My friend and I had twin beds in the same cabin, and a couple of days into the holiday, I fell out of mine. The actual incident itself was too funny…I can’t even pretend that the sea was rough, in fact we were in a fairly sheltered bit of the baltic at the time and the water was as calm as a millpond.

I was also relatively sober, having only had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner but somehow, in the middle of the night as I heaved my bulk and attempted to turn over I managed to forget that I wasn’t at home in my superking-sized bed…as my full weight neared the edge of the lightweight single bed, it tipped me off and I went over the side.  Not only that, I managed to grab hold of the mattress on the way down in an attempt to save myself from falling, and pulled it down on top of me as I went.

I ended up with my head wedged between the tipped-up bed base and the bedside cabinet, with the mattress and duvet on top of me, dazed and half asleep wondering what the fuck just happened. And then, obviously, I got a fit of the giggles. My friend, who’d been asleep in the other bed, woke up at that point to utter carnage.

It didn’t occur to me as I tipped everything the right way up again and reassembled the bedding that I might have broken it, but I had a vague feeling of disorientation as I went back to sleep, and for the next couple of nights…it was only when we called maintenance to change a lightbulb in the bedside lamp later in the week that it became apparent that I had in fact been laying downhill ever since, off to one side and with my head lower than my feet.

There was nothing wrong with the bulb, turns out it was the plug which had come adrift from the wall as the bed had knocked it. And it seemed that one of the legs at the top of the bed had obviously buckled under my weight as it tipped over. As the little Philippino maintenance man emerged from underneath the wonky bed in what felt like slow motion with the un-needed light bulb in one hand, and a bed leg in the other, I couldn’t quite meet his gaze. I couldn’t bear to see the fat lady broke the bed written all over his face. I was mortified.

They swapped out the base of course, and in their polite customer-orientated way they avoided any conversation about how or why it might have happened. But you don’t need me to tell you how many times the Asshole voice whispered to me about how the entire crew would be laughing at how the lady in cabin L201 was so fat she broke the bed…or how I didn’t get a proper night’s kip until I got home because I was too scared of it happening again.

This year is going to be so different 🙂

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Don’t Ask Me That!

Biggest struggles, In the here & now, , ,

XXXL

So, how was your day? Mine was going great guns right up until the moment that a male colleague from a different department to the one I work in sent me an email asking me what size shirt I wear. Way to put a crimp in my day huh?

I should explain – I mean it wasn’t done for sport, you know like ‘I can’t help noticing you’re the size of a moose and I was just wondering how many X’s you need ahead of the L hahahaha’…or worse, ‘I’m looking around for an awning on the side of my RV and I just wondered where you buy your clothes from’ – he did have a reason to ask. I have to go to a conference next month, and everyone there representing the company will need a branded shirt. But still, you can picture my face when the email dropped in I’m sure. It was one of those moments where time stopped dead in the face of mortification and I just sat and stared at my screen.

Of course the asshole was off and away from the starting block like Ussain chuffing Bolt, diving through that open window of opportunity with a selection of carefully chosen comments designed to hammer home the humiliation. “I bet the rest of his department are gathered round his screen waiting for your answer…they’ve probably got a sweepstake going!  They’ve probably dared him to come and ask you face to face so they could hide around the corner and watch you squirm!! He’s probably moaning about the fact that you’re going to blow his whole shirt budget on that one cavernous garment, hahahaha!!!”

As the flush of horror made it’s leisurely ascent from my toes to my ears, I thought about lying. What if, I say I’m a size large because that’s big ish but it’s only kind of the big end of average…I could try and stretch it..? I mean lots of people wear a size large don’t they, so that would make me nearly normal right? And if it’s not stretchy fabric, I could go find another shirt from a fat-lady-shop and cut the branded bit off, and stitch it onto the fat-lady-shirt and nobody need ever know how many X’s are really in front of the L…that might work..?

By this time, the asshole had gone into overdrive. “Hahahaha I bet the shirt making company will have to call him and make sure he’s put the right number of X’s on the form, that can’t be right can it?  She’s really THAT big..? Crikey how many pies did SHE eat?!!!”

I didn’t lie. I styled it out. “Hi, I’ll need a size 26 please, if they make them that big (!) regards, Dee”.

Get the joke in first to let him know I don’t give a crap that he asked. Even though I do. Let him know I’m ok with it, because he probably felt horrible having to ask (I mean he’s a bloke, you guys take your lives in your hands when you mention any woman’s size, right?) so make it obvious that your size isn’t embarrassing for you. Even though it is. Note to self: Make damn sure next year you’ll actually fit into size L which by that point might even be too big on your scrawny-assed body.

By the way, no cake was consumed during this pretty shitty day therefore the scores on the doors remain Me: 1 – Asshole: 0 🙂

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A broken leg.

Reflections on past times,

200x200_chair

All that talk of armchairs the other day reminded me of an incident with a chair that happened years ago, when my son was little – he’s in his late twenties now but I think he was about 7 years old at the time. We were enjoying some hospitality courtesy of the Golden Arches, and as we made our way to a free table and sat down with our lunch, disaster struck.

Now you know how sometimes when you watch an accident unfold it feels like it’s happening in slow motion..? That’s exactly how it was. I sat down, and then he sat down, but he carried on getting lower and lower until he landed on the floor with a thump. To give him his due, he never dropped so much as a chip – he held onto his lunch like his life depended on it.

I assumed that perhaps he’d perched on the edge of the chair and that it had simply tipped over, but once I’d picked him up and dusted him off, on closer inspection it transpired that the front leg had parted company with the rest of the chair.

He was fine, other than being mortified that lots of people had seen him topple over and thankfully the only injury was a bruise to his pride but I was cross – he could easily have hurt himself. So, chair in one hand and chair leg in the other I set off through the restaurant and approached the counter. Now, picture if you will, the scene; very fat lady carrying a broken chair…what conclusion would you draw?

Yeah, me too actually. Well you would, wouldn’t you…but at the time it didn’t even occur to me until I was standing in front of the duty manager holding the offending chair leg aloft that he’d automatically think I’d broken it. As realisation dawned that he was about to blame me for wrecking his furniture because I was too fat to sit safely I felt like wrapping the chair leg around his chops. I resisted the temptation to do so, and we sorted it out but it’s true you know – fat people are usually the fall guy.

Only yesterday, a colleague was telling me about how he’d sat on a bar stool at the weekend and it had fallen to bits underneath him, depositing him on the floor. The bar owner had been full of apologies, they’d had a giggle about it and he got a free drink by way of apology. I can guarantee that if I’d been the one to sit on that stool only for it to collapse in a heap, first of all I would’ve died a thousand deaths, the asshole in my head would have gone in for the kill by immediately blaming me for being so fat (and screaming at me that everyone else in the bar thought so too), and I would have been the one apologising profusely for breaking the stool and offering to buy another one immediately.

Makes you think, doesn’t it…we all judge, based on what we see. But when you’re fat, you judge yourself more harshly than anyone else does, without question.

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If I had a pound…

Reflections on past times, Worst memories, ,

£

…for every pound in weight I’ve lost over the years I could probably give Bill Gates a run for his money. I can’t remember the first diet I ever went on, but I do remember the moment it occurred to me that I didn’t have the same kind of Bambi limbs as most of the other girls at school.

It was sometime around top class in infants, when we were doing a topic about farms – I even remember the teacher who first alerted me to the fact that I was a porker under construction, she was called Miss Baume, and I remember her looking like an extra from The Liver Birds. She called me and another fairly chunky little girl out to the front of the class, and waving her arm in our direction announced that the two of us together probably weighed the same as an adult pig.

Yes, I’m serious, she really did that. I was 7 years old and the utter humiliation of that moment was the first time I recall feeling ashamed of the way I looked. I mean AS IF you would ever, ever, ever say that? I ran home after school in tears and my mum gave me a kit kat to make me feel better.

Fast forward a few years, to around the time that the film Grease came out in 1978. I was 13 at the time, and having watched the film at least 10 times and spent god knows how many weeks coveting a pair of shiny black leggings, (which were obviously going to transform me in the same way they’d transformed Sandy), I nagged my poor mum half to death. She clearly knew this purchase had disaster written all over it but eventually I wore her down – leggings duly purchased, I was very very pissed off when they didn’t in fact make me look like Sandy at all.

I’m still not sure whether it was because my legs were a foot shorter than hers, or because my arse was at least a foot wider – it might even have been down to the fact that the only thing I had to team them with was a pair of sensible Clarks’ sandals and a poncho (stop laughing, ponchos were all the rage at the time).

But if my memory serves me right, the school disco didn’t end with me making sweet music with the year nine stud muffin. Or even the year 9 munter to be fair…I think what was in those pants on that night scared all of us, and there are several people who probably still have a phobia of lycra to this day.

Things could only get better from there, right?

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