In the scope of a person’s life, the 20’s seems to be a period much like a jigsaw puzzle, your pieces either fall apart for the first time or you are finally able put yourself back together. Putting the pieces back together often means learning to accept the little chunks of space and gaps that make the puzzle that is “you” sort of fragmented and even blurry. A comfy childhood might mean your puzzle is about to fall apart; a crazy childhood, like my own, might mean you are finally inventorying the pieces and seeing where they fit for the first time.
My family is tragically mired in addiction and always has been. I struggle to find one blood-related male on either my mom or my father’s side of the family that has not suffered from either alcoholism or addiction. For the women, the gene comes out in either a healthy dose of neuroticism or anxiety.
You would never be able to spot many of the children of alcoholics. They appear to be some of the most put-together, driven people in the world. The literature says that children of alcoholics or addicts often turn out one of two ways: They act out and become delinquent or they become overly adult. I became an adult at a really young age; I became what the literature says the child of alcoholic can become: overly responsible, an adjuster and a placater. The child of an alcoholic wants to fix everything, control everything, both as a child and later as an adult. I have told my story twice to two different psychologists and both have used the same descriptive term to label me: resilient child. I am finally learning what that means. Because I never knew what to expect at home, I came to want to control anything I could.
I got lucky. One of the first things I learned to control was my education. I knew college was my ticket out of my home and my poisonous environment. I knew this in elementary school. I would fight to be the student who read the most books in class and had the most stickers on the reading chart. In the second grade when the boy next to me was drawing a perfect palm tree, I immediately felt inadequate, went home and began drawing palm trees and anything else until I was so good everyone thought I had a “natural” artistic talent. I didn’t stop there.
I mimic this behavior with everything. If you know me, you know I appear to be good at many things. I simply don’t try things I will fail at. If I fail, it is my fault and my fault entirely. When I fail, it is like a mammoth blow, like I am back home with the alcoholism, the addiction, 5 or 6 years old plugging my ears in my room, door shut. This constant need to be good at everything, to prove I can control my achievements so that I can “escape” an environment I no longer need to escape, has to led to an overwhelming amount of degrees and skills, a perfectionism that becomes an extreme anxiety and self-brutality when allowed to erode even the least little bit.
I have started to take inventory of my past, to put the pieces together so-to-speak, so that I understand and care for myself better. At a recent Al-Anon meeting I attended, I actually learned to thank myself for my flaws to some extent. After all, many of these flaws were developed to help me survive my childhood. Before I inventory them and try to push them away, I have to accept them and even appreciate them for the function they served.
This is where my body comes into play. I am and have been such a mean person towards my body and have been since I was very little. Women’s bodies often form loci of control for the souls within them. What can you control if you cannot control yourself? Anorexics and bulemics often use their intake of food as a metaphor for control or the lack of control they have in their life. These diseases aren’t always about faulty body image. For me, I detested my body because I couldn’t control it. It was the one thing in my life that I couldn’t be overly responsible about, couldn’t adjust or placate. It was there and it drew attention I didn’t want, both positive and negative. The parts that drew attention wouldn’t shrink or hide. I didn’t want to deal with it, in addition to everything else. I wanted it to be less obvious, but it refused. So I learned to hate it, to become anxious about it, to hide it as best I could. But, just like I am learning to understand why I want to tear myself apart over getting a B in a class, I have to learn to understand why I was so mean to my body. The first step is accepting it. Second, I have to thank it. This is what I am doing. I am saying thank you to my body for helping me to survive a tough childhood. Finally, I have to thank this body for housing a brain that, despite its quirkiness, has helped me to excel beyond anyone else in my family, has helped me become a resilient child and now a resilient adult and also has constantly carried (even if sometimes latently) the sense of pride I feel in knowing I am a survivor.
I’m tired of magazines
teenage clothing. This was about the time Britney Spears showed up in a music video dancing down a school hall in pigtails and a porno-style catholic schoolgirl uniform (I could write a whole other post about this). Needless to say, I, like many other girls, took up this trend enthusiastically. However, my enthusiasm wasn’t for the trend itself. I was convinced that the knee socks made my upper thighs look slimmer because they plumped the look of my calves creating a more balanced appearance (I would tell myself anything to make myself feel more comfortable in public). Thus I wore them incessantly for that reason and that reason alone. When that trend passed I think I kept on wearing them because they had become more than knee socks; they had become my first use of clothing to extra-ordinarily camouflage parts of my body I believed had become too obvious, offensive, even.
Much of our body image is learned from our mothers (see articles below). They are often both our worst critics and most fervent supporters. Mothers know our bodies more intimately than anyone else on the planet. They are the first hands to dress us, smooth our skin with lotion and touch places later only felt by our own fingers, a doctor or the intimate hands of a lover.