47: Tyra Banks the Teen Sleep Paralysis Monster

*TW: Disordered Eating and Body Dysmorphia*

A long time ago, in a teenage psychosis far far away… I went to sleep with a belt cinched around my waist as a makeshift corset in hopes to shrink my already-small stomach to an ideal nothingness. I had watched America’s Next Top Model religiously each day after school as I counted out almonds and fought hunger with eyes on the maddening prize: thinness. 

Tyra Banks on the show ANTM.

The weirdest part about it is that I was chronically close to underweight (ah, mental illness babes), played sports, and maintained a conventionally approved look of sporty girl-next-door, yet of course, the goalposts kept moving in the unwinnable game of dysmorphia. Who was moving said goalposts? Me, of course, at the direction of a very serious Tyra Banks declaring with more weight than a scale could measure: “Two of you stand before me, but I only have one picture in my hands”. 

In a twin bed under the postered trinity of Jonas Brothers in the abyssal glow of string lights, I hit one of the rock bottoms in a long relationship with disordered eating and body dysmorphia. 

Teen girl bedroom from the movie Stuck in the Suburbs, 2004.

At the beginning of this year, I listened to the audiobook Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger, Harm and Disordered Eating by Emmeline Clein. It reminded me of that time in my life, alongside the greater timespan that I subscribed to the media’s prescriptive idea of what size my atomized being should be, ranging from maybe age 8 to age 24. I felt that after 24, after experiencing extreme grief from the loss of a lifetime alongside escaping a physically abusive relationship, something monumentally shifted inside of me. 

My inner voice changed from that scared little girl trying to fall asleep with a belt squeezing my organs, to a grown, wild woman recognizing her hurts, injustices, and reclaiming autonomy over mind and vessel. I saw my future self and she was strong, wise, and confidently self-assured. 

Being smaller couldn’t save me.

This was one of those realizations that you “know” intellectually and in concept much sooner than you “know” psychically and emotionally. Sometimes there is a delay between the two in which actions don’t align with logic, because social pressures on women and girls never align with logic, they align with the twisted and mangled nonsense of cult patriarchy and internalized misogyny. They align with our mothers, our role models, and our social circles. 

I grew up with women family members chronically trying new diets: South Beach, Keto, Whole30, Paleo, Weight Watchers, Mediterranean, etc. I watched them eat sad salads, longingly pining for the food they prepared for the men and children in the family, for satisfaction, for thinness. I watched them try clothing on in department store dressing rooms and put every single piece back, flustered and mumbling about how they needed to go on another diet.

  I grew up hearing the same women disparage and police other women’s bodies, constantly and aggressively. “What does she think she’s doing wearing that?” “Wow, she really let herself go.” “I can’t believe he married her, she looks like a whale.” “She has such a pretty face, it’s really too bad she can’t lose the weight.” 

Hearing and seeing all of this vitriol throughout my entire childhood only further cemented society’s prescriptive expectation: be thin or be worthless. It was really quite sad to realize in my early adulthood that the women in my life were constantly scrutinizing themselves to an impossible standard, especially when they’d look at me ready to snap at how I didn’t understand because I have always been thin. Ha. Ha. *eye twitches*. I never responded because I was always rendered silent by the pure disdain channeled my direction. We are damned if we do, damned if we don’t. It would be like an angry prison cellmate mistaking my silence for amiability instead of calculated self-preservation, while we are both held prisoner by the same framework of social standards. I was not happy to be in that prison either. I was still wearing the proverbial jumpsuit too, even if it was a size small. I did not choose to be a celebrated prisoner, nor a “good” prisoner. It was a fawn response. 

Me at 14 years old. I wish I could hug her.

“Despite the vast evidence base proving that diets don’t work, often cause eating disorders and especially exacerbate binge eating, many doctors still disbelieve the psychological and physical underpinnings of bingeing. By and large, fat people with BED are still prescribed weight loss before they are prescribed eating disorder treatment. As the fat activist Dev Bergard has said, “we prescribe for fat people what we diagnose as eating disorders in thin people, and what we prescribe is perversely likely to make them larger.” As we’ve seen, dieting is correlated with long term weight gain.” (Clein)

Learning about how our medical system so consistently and catastrophically fails all of us—especially those deemed overweight—in the face of diet-based maladaptations, disorders, and -orexias, explained all of the emotional burdens I’d witnessed the women in my life shoulder in the sisyphean task of being “good enough”. Nobody helped them. And the people who thought they were helping were often doing the opposite. 

“In the end, eating disorders are a social justice issue, as eating disorder expert Kelly Douglas has said, “they are diseases that emerge at the intersection of racism, patriarchy, and diet culture. Food deserts, food swamps, blind spots in healthcare, and fatphobia, foster an epidemic and recast it as an entire population’s moral failing.” (Clein)

I was trained from a young age to fear being fat, to fear my own body instead of to fear the harm others could cause it. I wish it were the other way around every day. 

Being smaller couldn’t save me. 

Now, at 28, I try to shut down conversations that’re critical of anyone’s appearance, though sometimes I still fall silent when I should speak up. It is a journey of unlearning. I try to silence the voices of others that pop up in my head when I eat a lot or try on a tight dress. I try to disconnect my body’s appearance from a twisted and pontificating moralism rooted in fatphobia. I try to remember times in history in which social authority dictated the opposite in the long line of contradictory didacticism in the interests of control and class distinction. I try to see myself from another set of eyes and from the eyes of an older, wiser, woman. I try to see myself from the eyes of the future me. I imagine she would say something like, “You are full of youth. You are healthy and able to do all of the things you like in a body that supports you. You may not have the glow of the young forever, but you have always been innately and humanly enough.”  

Being smaller cannot save us. 

Also me at 14, ten years before I would move to the Outer Banks.