I don’t care if it hurts
I wanna have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul.
-Radiohead’s song, “Creep”
Have you ever had one of those “A-ha!” moments when more than just one idea occurs to you? A flash of knowing that is more like seeing a glitch in an enormous matrix? A profound learning occurred in my life this week when I came across the term “accelerated discontent” in a marketing webinar I attended.
According to what I discovered, “accelerated discontent” is an advertising mechanism for attracting consumers to specific products by making them so unhappy with what they have, they must buy your product/service to ever be “happy” again. And, as it is our constitutional right to pursue happiness, more often than not, we take the bait.
Here is an example, everyday you walk through your kitchen. All the appliances work just fine. It’s a decade old but you don’t really think about it much. Then the New Years sales begin. “HUGE SAVINGS ON KITCHEN REMODELS” start showing up everywhere. Billboards, television, mailers, radio ads. All of a sudden you start to notice how “bored” you actually are with your kitchen. You start to think how fun it would be to have a new breakfast nook here and a new light fixture there and maybe a shiny metal fridge rather than your old school one.
Seems harmless, but pretty soon your kitchen that was perfectly good at Christmas is driving you nuts by Groundhog Day. Yes folks, this affliction has a name: Accelerated Discontent. Look around. Can you see this idea being sold to you everyday?
In the small mountain town I call home, this sort of manipulation is not nearly as present. Our advertising tends to happen more through relationships with each other as interdependent community members and business folks. This is not to romanticize my town, we have a Walmart within driving distance and a Subway. But that is about it. And many of us are so busy working and playing we aren’t bombarded by TV commercials, and we don’t have billboards forced on us either.
What I have come to love so much about my community is how real everyone is. I rarely feel pressured to be anybody but who I naturally am. If I want to wear makeup, I can. And if I don’t, no one notices anyhow. No one cares what kind of car I drive, or clothes I wear, and the feeling is mutual from my end.
However, I cannot say that this was the experience I had growing up. I can still sing commercial jingles from the 80s that I heard while watching Saturday morning cartoons. “I’m gonna wash that gray right outta my hair!” “Calgon, take me away.”
The summer after my 6th grade year, as I began to notice more and more what beauty was “supposed” to look like (thank you television and billboards), I experienced a rather defining moment. My family was a member of our neighborhood pool. I was excited about my fabulous bright pink ribbed one-piece bathing suit that made me feel glamorous. I recall lying on my back in the sun on my rainbow towel. Kid’s were screaming and splashing in the pool. Sounds of “Marco!” “Polo!” filled the air.
In the midst of all this chaos and joy, I remember staring down the length of my body over my little rounded belly to my sun-kissed thighs, thinking, “Please, God, whatever happens, give me beautiful legs. I don’t care if I have a belly. Just give me pretty thighs. Please.” Eleven years old.
I would spend a lot of money, waste a great deal of time, mental and emotional energy, and make dangerous personal choices in an effort for airbrushed-perfection legs. Images of Elle Macpherson and countless other supermodels and the products they advertised successfully accelerated my discontent with being in my own skin. I have spent years, trying to get out of this skin – this beautiful, perfectly-me skin.
In fact, an After School Special, aimed at informing kids of the dangers of bulimia, gave me a brilliant idea: I don’t have to stop eating everything I love, I can just throw it up after! I theorized that I wouldn’t die, because I would only do it for a little while, just until I was skinny. Fortunately, I was physically incapable of making myself throw up. I tried and tried, but never succeeded.
In my life I have made friends with so many women that I used to envy, and men I could only dream would ever “want” me, only to hear stories of their lifelong fight against their bodies, and of their struggle with self-loathing. I have discussed these challenges at length with anorexics, bingers, purgers, exercise bulimics (people who over-exercise out of fear of getting fat), and people hypnotized by all sorts of eating disorders and addictions. And everyone is in the same battle, like Don Quixote and the windmills in his head. We are fighting lies about who we are and what really matters. The billion-dollar diet and fitness industry thanks us.
I spent 7 of the past 8 years of my life terrified to ever be as heavy as I was at the end of my marriage. I have under-eaten, over-exercised, run until I injured myself, and stressed about making sure “I (would) never be that Heather again!” I became so blinded by this obsession that at the peak of my physical fitness, I honestly felt as fat as ever, and more discontented than I’d known to be possible. Climbing at my peak, working on and summiting Mt. Rainier, running 10 miles of mountain trails effortlessly, spending 81 days out on a wilderness course – and I would look at my body with disgust if I glimpsed it in a mirror.
This past year, my mission became clear – face this fear and make peace with my body. A major moment of departure from my old way of viewing myself and my distorted views of beauty, in general, came when my dear friend Casey, at the age of thirty, died from anorexia. I had only met her in the last year of her life and had known her as impossibly thin, but so full in her ebullient personality. I attended our community’s memorial service for her where her parents had laid out pictures of her as a child and young adult. I was stunned when I saw my soft rounded features reflected back to me from her pictures. Back then we could have been sisters. “She’s so beautiful, so healthy,” I remember thinking. Something switched in me.
Today as I lie on my tummy completely vulnerable in all my glory under the loving hands of an amazing massage therapist, I had the most freeing realization – again. “I am just here. Home in my skin. And it feels so wonderful to be me, right here, right now, free of all judgment.”
I say “again” because I have had this experience of sudden joy at being in my own skin a few times now. But each time it happens, it is like the first time because I have spent nearly 30 years wanting to be in almost any other body but my own. So these moments remind me of how much I have to be grateful for.
After a lot of delicious reflective silence, Marcus and I began talking. We talked about our work. He shared that he is working on getting licensed as a physical trainer, with his goal being to integrating it with massage. We got on the topic of writing somehow and I shared a bit about the “Clan of the Thunder Thighs” project. I shared that a big part of my inspiration to do this has been the many young girls (and boys and adults) I’ve watched struggle with eating disorders and how I feel that it’s time to change that trend.
We spoke about how until someone loves him or herself it does not matter how you manipulate the outside of a person, they will still see what they hold inside. At one point, Marcus jumped in excitedly, “Yes! You HAVE to love yourself first!” Self-loathing is one of the ugliest things in the world. And if you look in the mirror through that filter, you will never see your beauty.
It’s really good to be home. It’s feels so good to be real. As I told my sister Amy, I want this freedom for the whole world. Let’s stop allowing others to think for us. We are being manipulated to spend money, not to get healthy. Being and becoming healthy begin with loving ourselves exactly where we are right now. This kind of love gives us the strength to let go of any harmful beliefs and subsequent unhealthy habits. This kind of love clears the deck of accelerated discontent and makes way for peaceful contentment to ALWAYS be at home in our own skin.
I leave you with a line to a Christine Kane song*. This is my new song to replace the old of wanting a “perfect body” even if it “hurts.” The song is titled, “How to Be Real” from her new album “Wide Awake.” May we take it to heart and learn that it is not only safe to be real, but incredibly freeing.
Here’s to how it feels to be real.
*You can hear a snippet of the song/album and buy a download here: http://ax.itunes.apple.com/us/album/wide-awake/id337594091
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