Twenty-five compliments...

This post is in honour of Eri, my first commenter. Actually this is one of those strange moments of synchronicity that occur from time to time, because if I am remembering correctly, what I want to talk about is related to a sentiment that I think I first heard expressed by her, and I was planning on writing about it anyway.

The sentiment is: "It takes twenty-five compliments to supersede the effect of one insult."

Or words to that effect.

I thought that was a good segue into a look at what happens to someone's appreciation (or lack thereof) of their physical selves when dealing with the issue of obesity.

This is obviously a huge (no pun intended) topic and one post is only going to cover a small amount of it. There will be other posts. About vanity, and looking in the mirror. About accepting physicality at all. But for now I will talk in general about being treated as an attractive woman.

I'm not used to it.

I'm not sure I ever will be. If we take the twenty-five compliments route, and I estimate that I spent at least twenty years of my life feeling like Quasimodo, then I'll need roughly five hundred years of being treated like Esmerelda to actually begin to grasp that, yanno, I'm actually not too rough on the eyes.

This weekend I was spending time with my sister and her family. I'm friendly with some other people who live in her area, so I went visiting with them at various points during the day. So at one point I was talking to one of these friends - who is someone I like, but really more of an acquaintance - about my travelling for work and how fun it is, and he said something about my boss just wanting to be able to fly a pretty face around the world.

Maybe someone else would take that kind of comment as their due. I store it up in the compliments repository, marvel at it, take it out and stroke it from time to time. He thinks I'm pretty!

Later on I went to visit some other friends. These are closer friends. I was telling them about my various online dating experiences (which deserve their own posts, and will get them), and one of them asked me how often I meet people who it turns out have been less than honest in their online profiles. I told him that I meet something like 5% of the people who contact me. I told him that one of the online dating sites has something like 900 emails in my inbox. (of course i don't delete anything and it's been going for a couple years, but still). He and his wife made various comments about beautiful women and he joked that he could photoshop my photo to make me ugly, see if it would change things.

Again, they see me as beautiful. And these are people who did know me five years ago. Quasimodo-me.

My parents were visiting my sister as well over the weekend, and as it happened, an old friend of my Dad's was there too, visiting one of his children. He knows my sisters, but had never met me before. He's known my Dad since they were in their twenties. He was just a tiny bit too interested in me. Not in a really lecherous kind of way, and all very jokey. But enough that I could tell he found me attractive. When I left, and kissed both my parents goodbye, he joked about getting a kiss too.

Surely, I'm not that kind of girl. I don't get attention like that. I used to phrase it thus: If Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, I must be from Jupiter. I just wasn't included in that kind of appreciation.

I got a cab home from the train station. In the cab, the driver started telling me about all the people he's had in the cab, all their stories. He told me he could tell I was single because I dress well and am warmer, more open than married women tend to be. He also guessed my age at 28 - people always assume I'm younger than I am. He then went on to discuss why people stay single, holding forth with a myriad of opinions, but during the conversation I was variously described as beautiful and obviously a quality woman. Then of course, he wanted my number.

This kind of thing has happened frequently over the past couple of years, but hardly at all before that. When it did, occasionally happen, I'd just think there was something wrong with the guy. Unless it happened during one of the exceedingly rare months when a diet had worked and I was thinner.

I didn't actually have any kind of real understanding of what I looked like, and whether it was abstractly 'good' or not. Even facially, ignoring the fat. I've always liked my eye colour, which is an unusual greeny-blue. Once I worked out how to control my hair, I knew it was the type that women often envied - but I knew all too well how rarely it actually behaved itself. And somehow knowing that in abstract I had good 'parts' didn't make up any kind of 'whole' that I could approve of.

I think the first time I began to even conceive the idea that I might have decent looks, maybe even 'above average' whatever that means (and just writing this I'm cringing that people I know will read this and think I've developed an over-inflated ego because surely it's not true...) was when I joined a support group about weight loss and put up before and after photos, and people started commenting - and complimenting.

My parents never made me feel beautiful. Or pretty. Or even acceptable. In fact, the one time I remember my mother telling me that my dad had said to her he'd seen me with my friends and I was the prettiest one there, I looked at her in disbelief because it so obviously was nothing even close to what he really thought of me. Ok, my parents and their attitude to weight is at least five posts. So let's leave that for now.

Have I mentioned yet the beautiful sister with the perfect figure who was 2 years younger than me? Of course I have to have one of those, right? Someone who embodied (embodied! exactly!) everything I wasn't. I couldn't have an average sister, no, I had to have the one with the perfect, sexy figure. At one point she was literally half my weight, and we're basically the same height. Well, she'll get plenty of posts too (right now she's actually a couple pounds more than me. but then, she's had four kids. i've had none)

So, it takes twenty-five compliments to negate the effect of one insult.

I'm still storing them up.

I need them to neutralise the years of nasty comments in the street from strangers. The years of feeling not good enough, not approved of, judged in my own home because my parents couldn't bear my being overweight. The years of being absolutely ignored by the opposite sex, of knowing that I just wasn't part of that whole romance thing. Watching as my friends were asked out and dated, and I wasn't. I still find it pretty damn hard to accept being the object of romantic attention. And yes, that's very complicated and deserves several posts, too.

What can I say I have achieved? That even though sometimes when I get looks in the street I worry that I've got a stain somewhere that I'm not aware of, most of the time I now know - even if I don't quite comprehend - that the stares are actually of approbation and not disgust.

There are people in the world that think I'm beautiful - even if I'm not one of them yet.