You Are Okay, I Am Fat

By Maggie McCarey

YOU ARE OKAY.  I AM FAT

One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
 By the time I finish my song?

     Healthy families raise children who love themselves and others as they are loved. Period. Healthy families raise children who believe in their intrinsic and unique importance at home and in society. Always.  Healthy families raise children to believe that they are not divine mistakes. Ever. On the other hand, dysfunctional families produce children who doubt their self-worth, generation after generation.  A dysfunctional family has favorites among its children and roles: martyrs, scapegoats, heroes, and clowns.  A dysfunctional family orbits around a broken and narcissistic individual who disables rational thinking and loving behavior among and between its members.  Dysfunctional families learn destructive coping mechanisms that they bring to the classroom, church, and workplace. 

BELIEVE ME WHEN I SAY:  if you have been born into a dysfunctional family, and you were tortured for your weight, you were not really rejected because you were fat.  You were rejected because your family had to assign you a dysfunction role to preserve itself.  If you weren't rejected because you were fat, you would have been rejected for having ears like Uncle Egor or being too smart, or the youngest, or the oldest, or, or, or....  Being fat just made it easier for them to assign you a role.  Hey, appearances are "everything."  How can you belong to the "perfect" family if your body is  a sign board advertising  cultural imperfection?  The only way to deal with a fat child in a family denying its humanity is to tell him/er and yourself: your fat is your own fault; you are not like us; you are different; you don't belong.

I worked several years on a psychiatric unit where a sick family  was often evident in our patients.  In fact, in family therapy. we call the patient, our IP: (identified patient) because we know s/he simply sounds the alarm for a family that is about to implode.  Seldom is the real patient hospitalized.  For example, I was responsible for taking family history with each new patient.  I remember one teenager; promiscuous, drug and alcohol addicted; belligerent at school and violent at home.  I asked her perfectly groomed and sweetly smiling mother when she first began to see behavioral changes in her daughter.  The mother replied: "when she was 9 months old."  I looked up from my notes.  The mother clinched her jaw and said: I walked into her room after her nap.  She had poop on her fingers from her diaper and I knew right then and there, that this girl was trouble!"  Her rage was so kindled, the event could have occurred the day before.  And, fifteen years later, acting upon that truth, her daughter was on a psychiatric unit, the IP of a very disturbed family.  The girl's role had been assigned at nine months old.  Your Name Shall Be Called Trouble.  I probably don't need to add that while the girl was on our unit, she was fun, intelligent, wise beyond her years, starving for love, and broken beyond our meds and psychological support to fix.

As we prepared for our January Challenge, we did our usual thing. We did a searching moral inventory of our bad eating habits. We planned deprivation or elimination.  We picked a diet of the decade or the month.   I hope that we also  planned for a different reason than we have in the past. And a different path.  No calorie counting.  No being hungry.  No weighing every day.  I hope we planned to lose weight or maintain our weight because lipedema demands that of us, and not with the idea, that we will lose enough weight to "belong."  We did everything except, perhaps, the one thing we needed to do in order to succeed: bind our wounds with the balm of truth.

One of the greatest selp-help book ever conceived was I'm Okay, You're Okay.  I haven't thought of it for years but someone mentioned it a few weeks ago and at my age I finally got it.  Brilliant! Still being sold.  Keep It Simple Silly, author Dr. Thomas A. Harris suggests that three-quarters of adults live with the belief: "You're Okay.  I am Not." That's a lot of poopy! A lot of family dysfunction. A lot of cultural erosion. Its hard to argue against Harris' number with almost every aspect of just society unraveling in every corner of the world. 

The point? I think many of us who have spent all or most of our lives as fat people in a thin world are acutely aware that we are not okay.  In fact, we could add one more distinction to Harris' book which pretty much sums us up:  You are okay. I am fat.  Until we get to the place where we are okay with ourselves... Okay... Loved...  Cherished...  Able to love ourselves when others cannot because they need our imperfect bodies to hide their imperfections, we will not be okay. It won't matter how many times we lose weight or how much we lose because fat is really not our issue.  BELONGING is our issue and I bet most of you have found a way to belong; you just haven't found away to accept  belonging to people who think you are more than okay!   We have to begin the real lipedema healing process with the aha that we are okay and we are fat. That is our challenge for the rest of our lives.  And it has become a lot easier for us since we have discovered so many others who are okay and just like us.