GIFT # 9 - Who do you say you are?

I had an unexpectedly delightful encounter this week which made me think of my self-perception. It made me want to blog about it and as usual, my first instinct was to bolster my blogpost with findings from all sorts of scholarly articles about self-perception. Why “dafuq”* am I still doing that? Feeling the need to prove my point? Make myself sound “smart” by quoting studies by even smarter people. I guess I’m still “hustling for my worth” à la Brené Brown. Sigh. This old mental model is such a huge block to my writing and to my act of creating. Why do I keep carrying this old baggage?

Stuff the baggage. Again! And stuff the scholarly articles (no offense to any professors reading my blog 😊). Just lemme tell you what brought a huge smile to my face.

So, I was at yet another medical appointment several days ago, this time for an ultrasound. Yeah, my doctors are doing their diligence looking for answers to questions brought about by blood test results. It’s been a while since my last ultrasound as my youngest is now 17. The technician was professional and she was friendly. The procedure began with the cold oeey-goey gel on my abdomen. She engaged in minimal small talk while paying attention to her job of recording her findings. I joked a bit about how difficult it was to see things at my last session which was to check in on my fetus of a son. After all, I had untrained eyes, right?

The technician exclaimed with pleasure: “Oh no! You are so easy to read. You are thin!”

Me: Did you call me “thin”?? Oh my goodness! I LOVE YOU!!

Technician: (Laugh out loud)

Me: No, seriously, I’ve been struggling with weight issues for years! Can I bring you home with me and you can tell my circles that you think I am “THIN”??? I mean your professional opinion counts!

Technician: (almost fell off her rolling chair from laughing so hard) No, really. You do not have a thick layer of fat that makes it difficult to see what we need to see. (This she said even as she asked me to turn around while I was lying on the examing chair/ bed and I could hear my belly "plop" over even as I did what she asked)

I repeated my love for her pronouncement of my “thinness” and mentioned my efforts in the last five years to regain my health. She congratulated me on my journey thus far and encouraged me to continue because, from her perspective, I was “thin”. It was incredible how this one small exchange with a stranger lightened the invisible baggage of a label had been carrying since I was young. Before even puberty, really.

You see, back where I was born, people seem obsessed with weight. Yes, I was a bit chubby growing up but in my older teen years, I was closer to normal weight than I was to obese weight but I believed and internalized comments other people kept making year after year. I spent some of the best years of my young adulthood thinking I was ugly and chose to hide in embarrassment. Rather than to show my true self and explore the world more fully, I kept to my limiting self-perception. What a total waste of time, energy, and years. Every time I returned to visit my home country, one of the foremost concerns and questions to my parents would be, “Is she still fat?”

Frankly, is that all there is of value to me? My size? So what if I am fat? Does my being fat mean I cannot make a difference in my world? Does it mean I can make neither input nor impact in my circles? Does that mean I am less than ordinary? So what if I am imperfect by the world’s standards? So what if I am fat in your eyes? So what if you are short-sighted? What’s important is that I am NOT. Short-sighted, that is. I am more powerful than you believe I am.

Where does your sense of worth come from? Who do you allow to control how you see yourself? Why do you give power to those who cannot see your capacity?

As for me, I know my value.

And yes, I'm still the perfect balance of chub that makes the wrinkles of my age almost impossible to make out even though I have lived a good chunk of half a century. 😊

*this term comes from an intrepid Malaysian cyclist who took two years of his life to cycle around the world to 7 wonders of the world to raise awareness and funds for childhood cancer. Check out his incredible journey on his SevenWunders Facebook page.