Quick Survey: Would You Read This Book?

Who better than my wonderful coterie of readers to ask the question: Would you read this book? I’m at work on one. The outline has been crafted, chapters written, and attendant performance anxiety ebbs and flows. The question is, how might it land, knowing it’s a memoir not for everyone, but for some?

My book-in-progress recounts the story of how I dealt with arrows inside the home, slung by the debilitating duo of an unstable father and less-than-nurturing mother, as well as arrows outside the home from classmates, school bus bullies, and even from friends. This disparate group all had one thing in common: they picked up on the shame I emitted and took their shots at an unmoving, extremely malleable target. To mitigate the humiliation and loneliness, I called upon food as my prime mitigator of pain (one of the book’s sub-themes), sometimes in solitude and on other occasions, with my eating-buddy father, who was either thrusting temptation in my face or forcing me to diet with him.

It’s an odyssey of self-discovery through the murky depths self-loathing, always reinforced by the Greek chorus of the adults in my young world, where I quickly adapted by trusting few people and suspecting many.

As the eldest of four children, I was first in line for the emotional fallout. When I began to gain weight as a stress response, my parents doubled-down on their disgust, giving everyone carte blanche to admonish me about proper food intake and the merits of being thin, from extended family members to babysitters. Between barrages at home and school, the message that I’m a defective embarrassment was engraved on my innards.

But the weight had its value. Without it, I would have not begun my quest to heal. I didn’t possess the ace of thin privilege that some of my peers, also from dysfunctional families, had in their pockets. Their families may have been in tatters, but they could also walk down the street in peace. I couldn’t walk anywhere in peace and without scrutiny. At the age of 21 I booked my first therapy session and the journey began. I was terrified, but there was nowhere to go but forward.

Along the way, my excess baggage was directly responsible for some pretty remarkable adventures, including a visit to a Weight Watchers destination spa in Los Angeles, where the peculiar hand of fate landed me on the set of a Blake Edwards movie one memorable evening. A few years later, I was back in L.A., this time for a four-week stay at a rehab facility for food addiction: the emotionally battered 20-something’s version of backpacking through Europe. It was a sunnier version of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ with the focus on weight-loss instead of heavily dispensed psych-meds. The thrice-daily therapy sessions were rigorous, but I slayed more demons and began significant emotional healing during that unforgettable month.  

The more I expanded my vision away from the blame-centric, critiquing nature of my family, the freer I became. Through a tapestry of therapy, 12-step meetings, and my garrison of self-help books, I began to decipher the lies and debilitating labels from my past. Thank God this all occurred long before the advent of social media when life was relatively distraction-free and concentration and focus came comparatively easily.

The unmitigated amounts of inner work even translated to a stupendous 170-pound weight loss, achieved through evening out my food choices and guidance from a fitness mentor. After keeping it off for a decade I thought I was home free – until autoimmune disease hit full-force in 2019 and siphoned my vitality. After a year on the couch, I decided more mining for the root cause was in order, and what lay buried beneath was a tangled ball of yarn: anger never expressed plus, the sorrow of self-betrayal.  I was still an obedient people-pleaser and some of my closest relationships, the ones I valued most, were built on its toxic foundation.  The one-sided nature of most of my friendships was sobering to assess. I still smiled when I wanted to scream, did for others without any cognizance of reciprocity, and automatically lapsed into a ‘that didn’t just happen’ trance when someone hurt me. I may have remade the exterior and won the approval of society, but I was still the soft target – hemorrhaging dignity, and now, the outrage was manifesting in my body.

Certainly the needle of self-esteem had moved some: I learned to stand up to overbearing bosses and co-workers, and could finally say no to telemarketers. But it was my inner circle: family and long-term friends from childhood who were still playing out the old scripts. And I was utterly blind to it.

It was time for the final dive, the one I’d been avoiding. There were ancient grievances to address and patterns of disrespect to thwart – from people closest to me.

My book is about the repercussions of being a target, (of cowardly kids, emotionally immature adults, and opportunistic friends) and how my response to it all adversely shaped my life. Yes Virginia, I indeed spent my reproductive years recovering from my childhood. This carnival ride of a book isn’t just about the emotional purge - I feel a profound need to let others with similar experiences know they don’t struggle alone.

I’ve decided it’s a story worth telling because emotional abuse is debilitating, common, and tragically minimized. It can and does decimate human potential and as a society, we can’t afford to wave this fact away with shrugs and ‘sticks and stones’ excuses.

There are triumphs over the demons and toxic characters, but my story is deliberately without threadbare clichés - and that includes the ending. Had I written this a decade ago, it would have been the played-out ‘fat girl gets thin and wins at life’ gallop into the sunset. Moving as they seem on the surface, weight-loss Cinderella stories are little more than bowing to the pressure of the wellness and beauty industries. And what a hollow victory it is if not accompanied by genuine confidence.

Perhaps the perfect cinematic ending isn’t composed of the framed magazine covers of me looking like Marilyn Monroe’s doppelganger, stomach sucked in, while flashing lots of teeth for the camera.

As it turns out, lasting happiness was found with my late-in-life heaving of the people-pleasing yoke from my shoulders and divesting from childhood programming that said my worth is tied to good deeds and meeting the expectations of others. In the end, the greatest victory for a girl who was told she’s a disappointing embarrassment and finally learns she never was one to begin with, is to simply possess the courage to see life as it actually is, and without the burdensome weight of an obedient smile.

To be continued…..