Tomorrow's post will detail how I got back together with Jolz, which was pretty much the last thing I expected out of this relationship. Today, I want to focus on a change that occurred in me as a result of being involved with someone who was considered obese.
I always felt like I had changed very little since I was 15 years old. I thought my outlook on life, my personality and the way in which I interacted with others remained the same as if I were an adolescent. Back then, I didn't view women as people to have sexual encounters with. Even after I'd had sexual encounters and actual sex with women, I still do not look at them that way. (This was one of my biggest fears about losing my virginity, that I would desire conquests with women I was attracted to.)
I used to think that I couldn't find excessively overweight women attractive. I was actually repulsed and if I got any indication that one had a crush on me, it really dampened my spirits to know that the only women who wanted to have anything to do with me were those I wanted nothing to do with. But after becoming involved with Jolz, I discovered that the weight issue no longer mattered. And it also didn't matter what other people thought if I was with an overweight woman. (I will admit that what other people thought would have really bothered me in high school.)
I first realized this a few weeks after breaking up with Jolz. There was a female singer/songwriter I'll refer to as Angeled. Fraz met Angeled when she was assigned to do a story on her. Angeled was a lesbian and performed mostly acoustic pop material, none of it focusing on her life as a lesbian. Her songs were mostly positive, spiritual and upbeat. Fraz talked about her being a "fat cow" and was concerned that Angeled was interested in her. Fraz liked her personally and enjoyed her music, but didn't see herself being with an overweight woman (although Fraz herself was mildly overweight).
Fraz and I went to a showcase at the Wikiup Cafe and ran into Angeled there. I hadn't seen her in awhile and was astonished at how GOOD she looked. She looked positively SLENDER! And I don't think she had lost any weight. It was just that she probably weighed 100 pounds less than Jolz and that was enough for my brain to react as if I was looking at someone much thinner than she actually was.
I recognized right away what was going on in my head. I was no longer going to have hangups about how much a woman weighed. In fact, if a woman called me and admitted she was overweight, I could tell her that one of my ex-girlfriends weighed more than 300 pounds and if she didn't weigh more than that, I wasn't going to see her as overweight. The only problem was that I would meet these women and they still didn't want to pursue a relationship with me.
The bad thing about this is that it also impacted how I view myself. I weigh 50 pounds more than I want to right now. When I look in the mirror, I don't see an overweight person (and the BMI scale says that I'm obese). When I look at myself in photos, then I do appear overweight. However, I view myself in the mirror more often than I see photos of myself. It's hard to tell which one is telling the truth to my brain.
And it wouldn't surprise me to find that this is how a lot of overweight people see themselves. If you don't see a problem when you look in the mirror, that means it doesn't exist. The truth is that it does exist, and one thing that can't be changed is the way people view others. They have to change that themselves, and not all of them will do it the way I did.
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