Dysmorphia

The title should probably suggest the content warning here. 

Real talk: I'm struggling with body image right now. I'm tallish, like 5'8", 5'9", and I have always been solidly built. In junior high and high school I was pretty pudgy. Really, I've always been kind of pudgy. I tend to fat, my hips are big, my thighs don't fit into a lot of jeans, I've got big breasts. Many years ago, somewhere in the early 2000s, I was really quite poor, very likely depressed, and a bit anorexic. I refused to eat because I felt like I should suffer. It wasn't even because I felt like I should be thin. I refused to eat because I was lonely and angry about the world and I wanted to demonstrate that. I'd eat if I was going climbing or to yoga or something, but if we were at a party and there was a bag of chips out I wouldn't touch it even if I was ravenous: and I was eating maybe a meal a day, if that. And biking, and climbing, and doing yoga. I was also, occasionally, hurting myself in small subtle ways, like burning myself on the steam from the electric kettle. It wasn't a good time. 

Yeah, content warnings. 

Flash forward. Things get better. Around 2004, I really get into rock climbing. Around 2005, I start biking for transport. I start doing hiking trips. I've got a radio show, I'm into the poetry slam scene, I'm still broke but I've gotten over a lot of the emotional shit that was making me do self destructive things. I get into the best shape of my life: I'm climbing a couple of times a week, I'm biking 500km a month just getting around. 

White belt Kate!

In 2018, I get into judo. Yeah, I'm still a big girl, I still weigh in somewhere around 190 lbs and wear a size 5 gi. But I can piggyback other students, I can plank for three minutes, I can hold a wall sit for a couple of minutes. When someone in the class, or one of the instructors, mentions my size, I can laugh, and bust into an impromptu verse of "Brick House." I feel good. I take selfies in the office when I think I look cute. 

Bam, COVID-19. 

I did okay for a while. I had friends to hike with, my crew got back to climbing as soon as we could. But I wasn't biking to the office anymore. I wasn't doing judo a couple of times a week. I wasn't really getting to the climbing gym anything like as often. 

I put on weight. After about a decade or more of actually feeling all right about how I looked, I got fat. A year or so into the pandemic I hung a piece of cloth up over the bathroom mirror because I had started not wanting to take showers because I didn't want to look at myself as I got out. 

And I got weak. I started feeling reluctant about getting out climbing because all the people who knew me before would see that I'd lost a couple of grades, and anyone who didn't know me yet would look at me and think, "well, that fat fuck can't know much about climbing, she must be new." I started kind of defensively telling crusty old trad climbing stories when we did go out, so people would know I wasn't just some pudgy newb. I cried, once, after failing multiple times to even start a route I put up back in the day, saying in despair, "what if it never comes back?" to my belayer. 

So, back to martial arts. Lately, judo's been a challenge for my self-esteem. It's not that I don't want to go: I do, I still love it. But judo is a weight-reliant sport, and there are days when I go to class and my choices of partner are: thirteen-year-old, 110-pound girl; 5'2", 150-lb woman; 6'6", 250-lb guy. No one is my size, and what's the hardest, no one who I can safely work with can lift me. I don't know what I weigh and I don't want to; the thought makes me emotional. But I know that if I pair up with Robyn, and we are working on hip throws, she doesn't have a chance. And I will wind up calling over Ary, who's maybe fifteen and maybe 130 lbs, to let Robyn work with them, because I'm just too big. 

I can't do front somersaults without angling off because I can't tuck my legs in or support my weight with my arms. I can't do shoulder drags because there's too much of me on the ground. If the teacher wants us to do partner carries for warmups, I often can't find someone who is near my height and can carry me. Humiliatingly, once I got assigned to Ary, who picked me up in a honeymoon carry, walked across the room with me, and did a set of squats, when I couldn't do that with them. 

In kickboxing it matters less: range is more important: height, arm length, and speed matter more than weight. And a couple of the best fighters in the room are also carrying some weight, which makes me feel a lot better. It's the same with stick fighting: as long as I can move fast enough to counter and get a hit or two in I'm doing okay, and most of those guys are comparable in age and weight to me. I would like to be more flexible, for both of those, and lighter on my feet, but your weight isn't as omnipresent a factor as it is in a grappling sport like judo. It's hard to get through a judo class without one of the instructors saying to my partner, "okay, so it should work like this, but she's a lot heavier than you, so. . . "

I know what I should do is seek out the men in my judo club to work with. Bruce, who's 6'6" or some shit: Marcel, who's only able to make it sometimes because he's military, but is about 6 feet and my weight; this new black belt who checked our class out and is a dream to work with, Nick. But they tend to pair up together, and also I'm weaker than they are, so that's another whole set of frustrations (see my earlier post about getting hammered into the mat by Bruce and wanting to cry about it) and fears (I'm scared for my joints going up against people near my belt level who are a lot more physically powerful than me). 

So in the last class of our current session, last week, we were working on big lifting hip throws. And while I really do like working with Ary, who is a very cool kid, really knows their stuff, has a brown belt and competes nationally, and is utterly unbothered by my size. . . it kind of hurt to have them called out of the group of teenagers to come work with Robyn and me because it was clear Robyn was never going to be able to load me on her hip. 

And it's been hard lately for me to go in there and pull on the gi jacket knowing it doesn't close over my chest as much as it did. And the belt doesn't have as much tail as it did. Every time, it hurts a bit. I don't like summer because I can't change right out of the gi jacket and into a hoodie that will hide what I look like in a T-shirt. 

I know it's long and slow to get back, and it's harder the more often I get injured because I work too hard in training, and the more often I get discouraged and depressed and don't want to show up because I will feel weak. I clearly still love it enough to get over that: I've noticed I'll bail on climbing because I can't face being weaker than I was before some days and mostly. . . mostly I think I'm not doing that yet with martial arts. But it's clearly a problem, and it's clearly something I need to deal with. 

Go get one! https://www.bonfire.com/chubby-surprise/ 

The upshot, though, I think, is that it's in my head - at least, the judgement, the dismissal. We joke around but no one in my club thinks I'm not working hard or trying just because I'm heavier and weaker than I was. People in the stickfighting crew and the kickboxing class have told me outright that they can tell I'm getting better. I just have to get over feeling "fat" when I walk out the door to go learn more about fighting, and . . .  go learn more about fighting. And train to fight. 

(And maybe buy a longer belt so it feels less short when I tie it.)

One thing that has been actually a big help is Sensei Seth, the martial arts YouTuber. For one thing, he's a lot of fun, and he tries absolutely everything, and for someone like me who is really enjoying what I'm finding out from cross-training, he's an inspiration. He's also introduced me to a whole constellation of other YouTubers who are multidisciplinary and fun. But for another thing, he is a big dude. He's fast as hell and he can kick you in the head from a standing start, but he's not 2% body fat and ripped. He's a third degree black belt in karate, and he's not this wiry little thing. He marketed "Chubby Surprise" T-shirts. I'm here for it. He helps me be more interested in what I can do than what I look like again.