Wondering How Honest I Should be (Vent post, TW self-image, abuse)
I have an appointment at my new gym tomorrow (free with sign-up) that is essentially a personal training consultation. They'll take my body-composition (which I do not want to do because that will remind me of how fat and mannish I am, down to my very skeleton), and ask me what my goals and motivations are.
He will ask, "What are your goals for fitness?" and what I will want to say is something along the lines of: be so skinny I make people concerned, and that I make my father suffer for destroying my self-esteem as a fifth-grader, and make the doctors who never believed me about my abuse because I was too fat and ugly want to kill themselves.
That's what I want to say, but I bet I can't.
He will ask, "So, what are your motivations?" and I will want to say: get rid of the body I was abused and assaulted in, get rid of the body that made me an easy target to abuse and an easy child to disbelieve, and punish my body for existing so disgustingly and wrongly, and punish God for making me this way.
But I bet I can't say that either.
I probably could say, "I want to be skinny." Everyone wants to be skinny. But I don't want to be healthy-- I want to be skinny. I don't want to do the song and dance of pretending to want to be healthy. I want to be worthy of respect and love. I want to be good enough as I am. I want to be freed from self-hatred. I want to be freed from expectations.
Even things that are health related... I worry they're just ploys to get the attention off the fact that all anyone would ever want me to do in a gym is get myself to weigh 100lbs. "I want to work on my upper body strength." Do I? I think I do. I do neglect my upper body. I preach to others about how important it is. But what do I want? If there were no eyes on me, what would I want to look like? I'd want to look like someone who could never be abused. I'd want to look like someone who could and would kill her abusers. But being strong just makes me more of what I hate about myself-- it makes me more of the disfigured person that was never believed because who would want to abuse that thing.
The crazy thing is, I actually do have a legitimate health thing I need to talk about-- I injured my back badly at work, and I need PT to help it not lock-up. That didn't cross my mind once. My fiance remembered and made me mention it.
What do I want? I want not to exist. I want to never be around another person again. I want to go away.
