body image – I am Regina Lynette

When I decided to explore my identity publicly via this blog I decided to include a photograph of myself with each post. This makes me extremely uncomfortable but I thought it was an important part of my identity – the entire topic of the blog. And I believed it would be a way to become more comfortable with my appearance and photographs.

I didn’t always hate having my picture taken. When I was a kid I photo-bombed as much as possible before it was a thing. I can remember actually crying real tears when Mommy was taking pictures of someone outside in the backyard and wouldn’t take one of me. She had one shot left on the roll of film when she finished and allowed me to pose. Did she save me the last one? Was it by chance? All of that is irrelevant because I loved the photo in my sundress, arms up and out (which seems to be my favorite pose, even now).

Above: Some of my favorite photo bombs – back when you didn’t know what you had for weeks while you waited for your film to be developed. My height worked against me but I still tried to get in there.

Below: I managed to dry those tears real quick, throw my hands in the air and work the camera.

Mommy’s insistence that I smile a certain way and pose a certain way grew old. School photos became a source of mild anxiety. If my hair was not the same as it was when I left the house that morning she didn’t understand why my teachers didn’t fix it. If I didn’t smile quite right she didn’t understand why I made that face. If flaws were shown – snaggle teeth or squinty eyes – she told me what I needed to do to correct or hide them. It sounds horrible, and it felt that way, but I do understand fully what she was trying to do. You had one shot to get a beautiful picture when using film and she believed I was beautiful. She just wanted the camera to capture what she saw.

Then as I gained weight and became a fat woman, I hated documenting that in pictures. And when I lost weight I still saw that fat woman in photographs and that was usually the end of whatever diet I was trying because why work hard if I couldn’t achieve what I wanted. And today I hate to wear makeup having struggled with acne since I’m 9, contact lenses mostly because pollen and an astigmatism, and anything other than destructed denim and graphic tees for comfort. I wear sneakers everyday and fight to cover my fast-growing gray hair that cruelly started along my hairline, impossible to disguise. I don’t like taking pictures, but I take them for one reason only – family memories. Mommy reached a point in life where she hated having her picture taken, too, and we regret not having enough photos of her to show people documentation of our memories. I know that photos are your source of remembering life events and that it’s important to have them no matter what you look like at the time.

After seeing this photo, I was literally disgusted at the sight of myself. But I didn’t demand a re-take because we were making travel memories (*a family member is the blurred and deleted image beside me)*. And no re-takes were going to make me look smaller. And I was already convinced I could never look better.

I hope to stop avoiding the camera during this phase of peeling back the layers to expose my true self. I hope that I can ignore whatever I consider flawed and begin to embrace the things that are the charm of me. And I hope that I can look back on photos and remember the joy of celebrations, the enlightenment of travels, and the love among loved ones and close ones. For now, the way that I am working on that is by posting as many photographs as I can find and take of myself (click here for the gallery updated often) while I talk about who I truly am as a whole person. It won’t be me in every post but I’ll make a significant appearance.

The women in my life during those tender years when a baby girl starts imagining what she will become when she’s older were my mother and her second child (Sissy). Mommy was 34 years old when I was born, and I was her third child. And in the end she found I had stolen her girlish figure and threw it in the trash when she wasn’t looking. To little girls imagining what she will become when she’s older, a person who hates her own body is not the person you want to become. So this little girl looked to her older sister.

Sissy was 14 years old when I was born. And what I didn’t know then but would soon realize, God didn’t design me to be my sister’s twin. And to make sure I was never confused about His intention, in His infinite wisdom and with His ultimate creative self He made us opposites in nearly every way but gender and race.

When I could see that I was already “curvier” than Sissy somewhere around age 5 (19 for her) I wanted to start dieting. Mommy was forever on a diet so I wanted to get started early so I could make sure I grew up to look like Sissy and not Mommy. Well, I don’t know what you tell a mother who understands exactly why her 5-year-old little girl wants to diet – the world was still calling her “healthy” – and also knows that it’s completely unreasonable for her 5-year-old little girl to go on a diet. It would take a couple years but unfortunately, Mommy eventually gave me her blessing and we dieted together well before my first signs of puberty. She was careful to monitor my dieting and modified it according to whatever standards she thought best and we added intentional exercise to the regular roller skating, bike riding, and running I did while playing with my friends. And I always managed to lose some weight but never in the places I wanted and never enough to keep me from being called “healthy”.

God was also constantly reminding me that I was not created in the image of Sissy. To really hammer it in that I was not her twin, He showed me just how different we would forever be. She was pregnant when I was 12 years old. In her early pregnancy, you know those weeks where your clothes are just starting not to fit but you’re not quite ready for maternity wear, was the first step toward my resignation of my fat-girl destiny. My clothes were the clothes she borrowed when her own were too tight. In case you didn’t catch it, at 12 years old, my 26-year-old pregnant sister needed to borrow my clothes. My 12-year-old clothes were maternity clothes for my 26-year-old sister. I blamed this one on God even though I was angry at the entire world around me. It just wasn’t fair.

Just before I went away to college I weighed myself and started accepting my fate as a fat-girl with less anger. I was what I judged too close to my father’s weight at the time. And then my only goal became to always weigh less than he – a man 4 inches taller than me and slim with long limbs. The day I outweighed him, I went to the “fat-girl” shops to find something large enough to drape my sow-shaped body and found little solace in the fact that the smallest sizes were too large. I was struggling to find my size – how could I be fat at Lerner New York and skinny at Lane Bryant? I couldn’t understand it and hated my body more. I resorted to what I’d done my entire life – diet and exercise and lose a few pounds, giving up after not losing enough weight and not in the right places.

I would repeat this cycle until 7 years ago when I just gave up. I don’t imagine I’ve given up forever, but I am still stuck in the give up. Just before I gave up I had lost over 40 pounds and was very excited about my progress. The first blow was that my bloodwork didn’t show enough improvement to match the effort I was putting in. The second blow was when I looked back on some photos of me as a kid and I didn’t see a fat girl looking back at me. I felt betrayed by all the people who had called me “healthy” when I was a perfectly average little girl. It was enough to push me over the edge into a depression that would take nearly a year to climb out of (with medication and talk therapy) having regained all but ten pounds of the weight I’d lost.

I had always believed that I was a fat girl. But I also had always been told (and believed) that I could fight it and become what I’d always wanted anyway – slim. And I am not sure if we’re in the middle of that story or the end.

I am a Fat Woman. And I don’t love that Fat Woman.

Tag: body image

I absolutely hate having my photograph taken.

I am a Fat Woman. And I don’t love that Fat Woman.