The Weight of Words: Self-Acceptance Doesn’t Have to Be a Solo Journey

I don’t want my self-worth to hinge on a relationship. But vulnerability is a practice, and for me, it has been a valuable one.

I have been concerned about my weight since I was ten years old, right before my last baby tooth fell out. I was standing in the dressing room of a JCPenney while my mom double-checked the tags on the clothes she had me try on.

“这怎么可能?” she muttered to herself. “How could this be?” The clothes that had once dangled off my skinny frame were now too snug, the fabric stretched too tight across my body. She told me to wait while she came back with some larger sizes, shirts from the teens section.

“Kids your age shouldn’t even be wearing these sizes,” she sighed. I learned to look in the mirror and let out those same sighs, hating what I saw.

*

For most of my childhood, I went to a small international school in Beijing, where most of my classmates were thin Asian girls. Although I was (and still am) considered “average” weight by American standards, in China I was one of the heaviest girls in my grade. I could never find clothes that fit me properly.

In middle school, I became aware of all the connotations of being a girl who is fat. You’re the one who never gets asked to slow-dance. The one whose crush acts horrified and runs away. The one who consequently learns not to ask if anyone has a crush on them, because they already know the answer is no. My body became a target for bullies. Smirks and giggles behind my back in the locker room. Fat bitch, pig, fatass, whale. Your crush will never like you, posted on Geocities or Tumblr. Was this what I deserved? I wondered. Was my body not only something to be gawked at, a problem to be solved, but also somehow tied to my character? Did it make me unlovable?

I came to believe that once I slimmed down, I would be deserving of love. I knew it was irrational to think there was some magical number on the scale that would mean I’d start turning heads, or that having a boyfriend would suddenly make my insecurities about my body disappear. But it didn’t stop me from believing the simplistic equation I’d internalized over the course of my entire life: thinness = love = fulfillment = self-acceptance.

Although I was considered “average” weight by American standards, in China I was one of the heaviest girls in my grade.

In college, I continued to believe that weight loss was the answer. I “dressed for my body type,” meaning a predominantly neutral wardrobe with no crop tops, no tight clothing, no loud colors that drew attention. I avoided beaches and parties and vigorously monitored pictures I was tagged in on Facebook. Any time I came close to being intimate with someone, the words of my middle and high school bullies came back to me. I told myself I could wear what I want when I lost weight. I could exist in spaces—physical and digital—when I lost weight. I could have sex and fall in love when I lost weight.

In the middle of my junior year, I finally began to look beyond my obsession with weight loss and see the other things affecting me: guilt, shame, depression, loneliness. The number on the scale was my worst enemy, yet I didn’t know how to stop worrying about it.

When I went home for the winter holidays, my mom was shocked by my weight gain in the four months since she’d seen me, and again, she asked, “这怎么可能?” How could this be? Part of me felt too guilty to answer. Another part didn’t know how to answer, because I wasn’t sure myself. Our halting, tense conversations about my weight that always ended with her sighing and me in tears.

She suggested that I see a therapist when I got back to school, and I would later be glad she did, although I wished she could have done so without the body shaming. Therapy forced me to confront all the uncomfortable things I believed about myself, the ways in which I was hurting. I began to unlearn the language I thought was normal, like “cheat days” and “guilty pleasures,” slowly decoupling the equivalency of food with my self-worth. I relearned how to eat, focusing more on mindfulness and how to be present during meals. In dialectical behavior therapy, I learned how to regulate my emotions and minimize how often I engaged in disordered eating behaviors.

I found the group sessions, where I was able to hear other women speak about their own complicated experiences with food and how this impacted their lives, most helpful of all. In one group session, a woman spoke about the stress and expectations around Valentine’s Day: lingerie, nakedness, physical intimacy. Her partner would expect those things, even though they also knew her eating disorder made those things challenging for her. She didn’t know how to tell them that she’d rather skip the holiday altogether, avoid the additional spotlight on her body.

I didn’t know what I found more surprising—that you could have a partner who loved you and still grapple with body acceptance, or that you could actually confide in someone about your deepest vulnerabilities and ongoing insecurities.

At the same time, this introduced a new worry for me: dependence. Previously, I’d only craved the validation I thought love would bring me. Now, that validation seemed like a potential addiction, one that could create its own kind of harmful spiral. If I did this much self-flagellating while single, what would I do to maintain a partner’s acceptance and approval? How could I be vulnerable with someone without basing my own worth on their opinion? This new fear nestled itself in the back of my mind, but the possibility seemed so far off that I found myself focusing on another realization: If I put off dating and falling in love until I was 100% happy with my body, I would be waiting for a very long time.

*

Despite downloading Tinder like a good millennial, I ended up meeting a guy at a Halloween party during my senior year. Our first date was an open mic night at a coffee shop. While a bunch of guys strummed songs by The Beatles on acoustic guitars, we bonded over our mutual love of spreadsheet tracking (books for me, films for him), Carly Rae Jepsen, and the trials of being the youngest sibling in the family. I didn’t have to downplay my intelligence or worry that I was talking too much; for us, there was no topic too weird (ClickHole’s seminal Garbage Sons quiz) or nerdy (the gender dynamics of rom-com “man candy,” like Mark Ruffalo in 13 Going on 30). Rather than shaking his head at my bad jokes and puns, he fired back with equally bad ones (“Why does a moon rock taste better than an Earth rock? It’s a little meteor”).

Throughout our first months of dating, I yo-yo’d between excitement and fear. I worried he was too embarrassed to be seen in public with me, only to have him introduce me to his friends and hear them say that they’d “heard a lot” about me. I braced myself for judgmental looks in the bedroom, but my boyfriend only ever looked at me with appreciation. I feared the day when we would have our first fight, wondering which synonym for “fat” would be his weapon of choice. But when we had our first argument—around the sexiest of all topics, logistics and planning—we never strayed close to personal attacks, and it ended with him saying, “I love you and I want to work on our relationship.”

Despite all the time I’d spent in therapy learning to reframe how I think about my body, to be kinder to myself, to think less in punitive or extreme terms, a deep-down part of me was still unable to let go of the belief that my value was intrinsically tied to my body. I was scared that if I ever confided in him about my struggles, he might brush it off. Or worse—say that he liked me in spite of how I looked.

One day, when we’d been dating for about half a year, he and I were walking around Lake Michigan in the last few weeks before graduation, reflecting on our formative experiences in college. I mentioned “going to therapy,” and he was quiet and nodded along, giving me space to talk. “It’s not easy to say, ‘I really need to talk to you,’ but if you do need to talk about anything, please tell me,” he said. I finally began to accept that our relationship was not one of low expectations or begrudging acceptance.

*

While I still worried about my body often, our first year together was a whirlwind of change—a new relationship, college graduation, first post-grad job, moving to a new city—and that kept some of my issues in soft focus. Then a new year rolled around, with mentions of holiday weight gain, gym membership ads, and New Year’s resolutions about achieving “the perfect body.” When I went to the doctor for an annual physical and saw the number on the scale, I panicked. I was not thin, therefore I was not deserving, and at any moment the person I loved would realize that, too.

A few weeks later, I burst into tears as he and I were heading out to meet some friends. All of the worst things I thought about myself, my body, and our relationship came spilling out. “What do you think is the worst thing that’ll happen?” he asked, handing me a tissue. There was no sarcasm or dismissiveness in his voice, just genuine curiosity.

I feared the day when my boyfriend and I would have our first fight, wondering which synonym for “fat” would be his weapon of choice.

I thought of an essay I’d read just a few weeks earlier by Ashley C. Ford, exploring her body image within the context of her relationship. She’d written about how much it meant to be honest with herself and her partner: “For the first time ever, I told someone—whom I wanted to be attracted to my body—just how unattractive I actually felt.”

I took a deep breath and decided to do the same.

“I’m afraid that you won’t find me attractive or desirable anymore,” I said. “That you won’t want to touch me, that you’ll realize you’re better off with someone else.”

I told him how difficult it was to have an eating disorder that I was still so ashamed to name. I told him there were days when I didn’t even feel comfortable eating in front of him, nights when I preferred to keep a shirt on during sex. I told him I wished that eating—such a basic human function!—wasn’t so immensely difficult for me, and how the fact that it was made me feel weak. I told him I worried that no matter what I did, no matter what I accomplished, it wouldn’t matter because of how I thought I looked.

“You never have to worry about me not finding you attractive,” he said while I dabbed my eyes. His tone was measured, as if he were carefully considering his words, looking for just the right ones. “But also, attraction is about so much more than just what your body looks like naked.” His eyes were glassy with tears, too. I’d never seen him cry. He slid his fingers through mine. “It’s about going through this world, and the fact that I need you in it.”

In that moment, he saw and heard me, including all the horrible things I’d internalized about myself over the years. He even observed things I hadn’t picked up on, such as my propensity to fall into shame spirals. He told me it meant a lot that I could talk about all those things with him, and that he supported my going back to therapy if I felt I needed to.

Sometimes I still worry that I’ll become dependent on external validation from him, from others. I don’t want my self-worth to hinge on this relationship, or any relationship. But vulnerability is a practice, and for me, it has been a valuable one. Just as my experiences in group therapy were validating, words from a supportive partner can be healing, especially when you have never had that kind of support from loved ones before.

I spent years bombarded with messages—from family members, friends, complete strangers, the media—that I was not worthy of being loved. For a long time, I believed them all. While I’m still far from my goal of being body-positive (at the moment, I’m just aiming for body-neutral), I now have support to help me get there. When you’re your own worst critic, sometimes you need someone you love and trust to help you acknowledge and counteract those hurtful thoughts; to bring you out of your own head. Loving and accepting yourself does not always have to be a solo journey.