Arbitrary Goals

Earlier this week, I started job hunting. As anyone who is unemployed knows, this is an odious and onerous task. Even when you possess good skills (as I do), it is very hard to find a job in a sluggish economy with a high unemployment rate. There are lots of people out there looking to secure a decent job and lots of others who have jobs they don't like who are looking to find something better. The market favors the latter over the former, and I'm one of the former.

As part of my job hunting, I've set up a spreadsheet of all of the ways in which I'm looking. It includes temp agencies that I have applied to, individual jobs I've applied for, the dates I've applied and responses, if any. I started looking on Monday and today is Friday, so it's a little soon for responses. However, I'll be adding in "follow-up" letters to job applications as one of the things I track soon. I think it's silly that I should have to remind people that I sent them my resume, but I've been told it is a good technique to help you stand out a bit more in the crowd.

One thing that I did early on was decide that I would apply for at least three jobs a day. I set that goal because I figured that it would push me to look more aggressively. On the third day of looking, I was struggling to find a third place to apply to and decided to send my resume for work that I had done before (residential assistance to the mentally ill), but wasn't necessarily keen on doing again. This is the sort of "last ditch" job that pays so poorly that it would be hard to live on the income, but I was scraping the bottom of the barrel that day for my third application and it fit the bill.

A problem arose when they called me pretty much immediately to schedule an interview. It became clear that I was a perfect fit for this job because I'd done something very much like it before. If I interviewed, there was every chance I would have gotten the work. Unfortunately, I didn't really want the job. Upon reflection, the prospect of doing it made me feel terrible about myself. I felt like it was a step backward and was the type of work that would not challenge me or increase my skill level or knowledge. The pay was dramatically less than I made before. Pondering taking this job made me feel less valuable and as if I would never be offered anything better. I felt like it would be cramming me into a slot that said I couldn't move on in life to better things. It made me feel right back where I started from economically (poor) and emotionally (worthless).

I've mentioned before that my mother pressured me just after college to take the first job that came along. In that case, it was work as a waitress in a mall snack bar. She always engaged in "the sky is falling" thinking and talked as if you had to take the first thing that came your way because there may not be another chance. This mentality was drilled into me as I grew up, and it is very hard for me to walk away from a job opportunity because of it. It didn't matter that the job was not "right" for my goals, the cost of living where I'm going to set up my life, or in line with my skill set. Someone was offering me a job! I "had to" take it.

As I was emotionally struggling with this, I talked about it with my husband. He said that he was worried that this sort of thing would happen when I started to job search. I told him that I couldn't just sit around and do nothing while he was in grad school (which he just started). He said to me, "actually, you can." And he's right. I can. We saved enough money to live without either of us working for about 6 years. While it isn't preferable to drain our savings in this way, it is possible, and he will likely finish his path to a new career within about three or so years tops. That means that we have more than enough to live on until he gets a professional job most likely.

Despite all of this, the only reason I gave up on interviewing for this job (and the idea of taking it) was that my husband did something he has never done before. He directly told me what he felt I should do. He told me to cancel the interview and start writing the book I should write in relation to this blog and what I have accomplished while continuing to search for appropriate jobs that I want to do. It was only because he gave me "permission" to "fail" that I could make that leap. He said it was okay to break out of the box I'd arbitrarily put myself in, and so I could. Otherwise, I don't know if I could have done it at this point in time. Since I trust his judgment more than my own, I could manage this. I  hope next time to do it on my own, but this is a leap I wasn't quite able to make alone.

One of my problems throughout my life has been the setting of arbitrary goals which do not line up with rationality or sometimes reality. I set up a set number of jobs to apply for and when I couldn't locate three, I made a bad choice which landed me in a difficult situation emotionally. Had I not set that meaningless goal, I wouldn't have applied for a job that I didn't actually want and then been put in a bad position when it was almost certainly going to be offered to me. The fact that it was so quickly tossed in my lap in a difficult job market is an indication that it is not a desirable job and that they are having problems finding someone to do it, yet I felt that I had to take this scrap that was being tossed my way because I had another arbitrary notion that I "have to" work as soon as possible.

Of course, the desire to work isn't an arbitrary one. The truth is that I want to work for a variety of reasons. The primary one is I'd rather make money than use savings, but I also simply want to be engaged in meaningful and stimulating activities. I want to make connections with people and engage in my home culture again. I also want to start paying into the Social Security system once more so that my retirement benefits will be better. Working isn't merely about making money to get by everyday for me at this point in time (a luxury I earned through decades of hard work in Asia, frugal living, and an emphasis on saving), and that is exactly why it was a bad idea to take a job which was little more than shepherding and babysitting people with physical and mental disabilities. It's not that the work is beneath me or anyone else, but just that it is not a challenge for me. I've done that already. It's not bad work, but it's not a personal growth or learning opportunity. Frankly, I'd rather go back to Asia and do what I was doing before than return to the job I did just after completion of college.

Getting back to the point, I have this tendency to set up a rigid framework for myself and then feel trapped in that box. In this case, it was the goal of three job applications per day and the absolute necessity that I get to work as soon as possible. The fact of the matter is that there is no reason for me to apply for  a set number of jobs at all costs and I don't have to start working as soon as humanly possible. There is little logic in these goals and they ignore some important realities, especially emotional ones. Primarily, it ignores the fact that there may not be 3 jobs that are right for me everyday. This is something which is beyond my control. I should apply for 10 jobs if there are that many available or none if that is the case. Beyond that, I disregarded my needs to be stimulated, creative, and to learn entirely by placing a (very small) paycheck above my mental health.

This situation is not isolated. It is part of a pattern in my life and a pattern I see among many other women who are overweight and trying to lose weight. They set arbitrary goals and then feel stressed about not meeting them or like failures. They say their goal is to lose 2 lbs. a week, 10 lbs. a month, etc. The truth is that no one has any control over how much weight they lose. You can control the actions that may lead to weight loss, but you can't simply decide to lose "x" number of pounds and force your body to do it. Your body will metabolize fat or consume muscle tissue and reduce your mass in ways you can't control.

Similarly, people will choose exercise goals which are arbitrary and try to stick to them regardless of their health condition. They will work out "x" number of days per week for "x" number of hours/minutes and if they are injured, sick, or exhausted, they will push to do it anyway because they set an arbitrary goal and they are going to make it. The goal is health and fitness, not figures on a spreadsheet. You can't have good health if you do things when you are not well enough to do them. It flies in the face of logic.

The goals we set should be logical and flexible. Rigidity only serves to create stress and conditions under which we will have an increased likelihood of failure. That applies to all things, but it tends to happen more in weight loss for a variety of reasons. One is that we don't trust ourselves and we set the bar strictly to provide motivation. Of course, if you end up defeated by a bar that is set too high, it's hardly a good motivational tool to set an arbitrary goal.

Another reason that we make such arbitrary goals is that they give us a sense of progress. It's gratifying to know by the numbers that we're doing what we set out to do. That sort of feedback is a lot more rewarding than a general sense that we listened to our bodies each day and did what felt right. Our school systems reinforce the idea that measurable goals are important and rewarding when they give us grades for our work. Striving for excellence as reflected in an "A" is something we can relate to. Getting a perfect "score" by exercising for an hour five days a week provides a familiar sense of accomplishment. Getting a less than perfect one by being sick one day and only accomplishing it for four days gives a sense of being inadequate.

I'm not suggesting that people not set goals for themselves, but rather that those goals not be arbitrary or rigid. They should be flexible and reflect reality rather than a box we place ourselves in because we feel that is the framework we need to operate from in order to measure progress or motivate ourselves. For me, I've pondered why I have this tendency in general (my husband does not, he is rational about such things). I believe that it reflects my need for security and predictability in life. I grew up in chaos and being told the sky was falling so I have to construct boundaries to make me feel protected and ensure that I'm moving ahead. Those boundaries offer the sense of structure I didn't grow up with, but they can also be prisons. This is something that I have to be aware of as I navigate my entire life, not just in dealing with my relationship with my body and food.

Member of a New Club

There's an Eddie Murphy sketch in which he explores the world as a white man in order to see how things work when you're white in a Caucasian-dominated world. The comedy works in two directions, though I imagine most people miss the more subtle second side. First, Murphy makes fun of white people and the way they walk, talk, and dress. Second, he is sending up black perceptions that white people live in a privileged world in which people hand over free cash and goods merely because of skin color. The humor works because there is truth to both sides.

Recently, I had an experience which brought this sketch to mind because I felt as if I had crossed over into the "normal" world and was being treated as a member of a different club. As Murphy made himself white instead of black, I have made myself "normal" instead of "freakishly fat". While I'm still fat, I'm in the range of normal middle-aged spread now and people don't treat me as an object of unbridled disgust and incredulity. Those who never knew me at a higher weight just see me as if this were the way I have always been or if I'd just put on weight as I knock on the door of my 50's.

I had an experience with a client in the past week in which he was telling me about the women in his office which dredged up the memory of that SNL skit. He told me that one of the women reminded him of a boneless ham because her legs were very fat and she had a habit of wearing black fishnet stockings. He went on to talk about a woman who he called a "kabuki actor" because she wore so much make-up it practically blinded him with the white that was reflected. Finally, he talked about a woman who wore no make-up and had long nose hair. In summation, he said that all the married women in his office were beautiful and the unmarried ones were not.

As I sat there listening to him ridicule these women, I had to contain my sense of anger at the way he was objectifying them and judging them based on appearances. I am not in a position to confront him about his behavior as it is simply not appropriate in the work I do. I did not condone it, but simply said that I felt sorry for those women. I also, frankly, felt sorry for him as I'm sure he wasn't aware of just how ugly a side of himself he was displaying by speaking this way and I think his need to speak of these women in this fashion reflected his own insecurities and pain at being rejected romantically. 

During his continued discussion of these women, I wondered if I would have been hearing all of this had I not been much thinner now and perceived as normal, attractive, well-groomed and known to be married. Like Eddie Murphy in his white guy get-up, I felt like a super morbidly obese person in a normal person costume sitting in on an interaction that I would not have been a part of had I not been wearing a "disguise". This is how people talked about people like me when they didn't know that I was one of "those people". 

Before I lost weight, no one even talked about fatness in front of me. They wouldn't mention it because of fear of letting on that they recognized the elephant in the room or offending  me. Now, I'm not fat enough to be viewed as offend-able in this regard so people talk like they would to other "normal" folks. Since I got the part-time job at which this occurred last April, people there have never known me at a much larger size (though they knew me at a larger size than now as I've lost another 35 or so pounds over the 10 months) and don't know what I once was. 

The interesting thing about this experience was not only that I did find that the world is rather different on the non-morbidly-obese side of the fence, but also that the flip-side equation applies as well. That is, Murphy parodied the perception of whites, but also the fantasy benefits they received in the minds of blacks. The "thin fantasy" in which life is magically better and all problems are solved at lower weights is equivalent to the "white privilege" fantasy in the skit in which money and goods are given away freely. There is some truth that there is a different world for smaller, more socially acceptable bodies, but it isn't as great as those who want to lose weight think it is.  

I asked my husband if he felt that this man would have had such a conversation with me had I been at my much higher weight. He said that this client would not have chosen to deal with me at all had I been much fatter. Sadly, I'm sure he's correct, and that's just one of the reasons I decided I had to deal with my relationship with food in the summer of 2009. Much as I can sit and hope that the world will treat very obese people differently, there is still a reality in which people do judge you and reject you whether you feel it is unfair or "wrong" or not. You can change yourself, but you can't change the world. 

Pushing Ahead

A few posts back, I wrote about how I was ready to place myself at the mercy of a food schedule which was not of my choosing by applying for a job. There was another dimension to this as well, and that was actually having enough confidence to go to a job interview. I had the luxury of not having to get the job for financial reasons. If I was not hired, it would not be the end of the world so I could go into it with less stress about what was riding on it economically.

The job, which is only part-time and two days a week, would force me to eat in a very different pattern than I have become accustomed to, including a very long delay for dinner. In essence, I would have 14 hours between waking and my last food intake of the day. This is the challenge I wanted to face and while I could schedule things this way of my own volition, I felt that surrendering control was a very important aspect of this. It turned out that I got the job, and yesterday was my first day in this situation.

Things went smoothly, though the schedule isn't as rigid or extreme as its going to be eventually. I was very hungry by the end of the time, and there was a longer gap between a snack and dinner, but I didn't ruminate on food or feel it necessary to dive into a pile of food when I got home. In fact, though I was very hungry, I ate a reasonable portion and didn't feel compelled to dive into the refrigerator and start cramming stuff in my mouth. I set up the meal at a leisurely pace. The only "problem" was that I felt strange all night because I went to bed feeling fairy "full" (definitely well-sated) and had sleeping problems as a result. I'm accustomed to going to bed with a fairly empty stomach.

Beyond this challenge, which I don't view as over but as a first hurdle that has been cleared, this experience has highlighted something which I have noticed more and more as time goes by. That is, the lack of a response to my weight. For years, when I walked into the room, eyes lingered on my body and faces registered negative reactions. It still catches me off-guard when people see me and don't react as if the Loch Ness monster had suddenly revealed itself before their eyes. During the interview and the initial visit to the workplace, people just treated me like a normal human being. Even though I'm still fat, it's not enough to set off the "whoa, look at that freak" alarms now.

I've mentioned before that a lot of people who lose weight discount the notion that they are treated better for being smaller. They attribute it to changes in their demeanor and confidence levels. I've also said before that that's a steaming pile of crap and nothing I have experienced has dissuaded me from that opinion. The world is a far less hostile place when you're not big and an increasingly friendlier place as you approach an average or "normal" weight. The silent judging mellows out (or stops) and the reactions that are animated enough to let you know how they feel but not enough to allow you to call them on it disappear. The titters, the sotto voice comments, and the overt mockery stops once you reach a certain point.

While I am greatly relieved to be spared the emotional pain of these actions, I'm also disgusted that this is the reality of life. I'm the same person as I was before. In fact, in many ways, my eating habits are "worse" because I allow myself to eat food openly that I never ate in private before (like cake). I buy donuts for breakfast once a fortnight or so. I engage in more overt "fat person" behavior now than ever, but now I'm not regarded with disgust for it. That means that the judging was never about my actions or who I was, but only about my appearance. It was about inferring who I was based on my body, not who I actually was.

Being aware of this change in dynamic is important to me on several levels. First of all, I think it's easy to respond to this change rebelliously and believe that one should just go ahead and be as fat as one wants as a way of thumbing ones nose at the prejudice and damn the consequences. In essence, the shallowness should be met with contemptuous defiance. The other reason is that it's all too easy to be treated with greater value (that is, to have neutral rather than negative value) at a smaller size and to start to incorporate this into ones worldview. If people treat you better at a lower weight, then perhaps you, too, may embrace the notion that they are correct and that weight is indeed a reflection of a person's value. This is a trap I see people who have lost weight fall into all too often, only to regain their lost weight eventually and come out with even more intense self-loathing than ever.

At the moment, I feel quite good where I am, and am content to continue on as I have with no modifications to the way in which I'm carrying on aside from those forced on me by the work I've taken on. The challenges now are in pushing ahead into a greater range of "normal" living and to ease myself into doing the types of things "normal" people do without my old fears holding me back. My fear vanishing isn't related to the behavior of others, but rather my own ability to increasingly manage my issues psychologically. I have confidence bred from two years of re-shaping my life one small change at a time. The reactions of others only serve to confirm their judgment, not the rightness of what I do.

So far, I've crossed over quite a few goal posts in a move to being "normal". I've started to eat out at restaurants regularly (once every one or two weeks), broken out of my rigid eating scheduling and become more flexible about when and what I eat, gone on a job interview and exposed myself to new people and uncertainty. All of this occurs while still operating at a modest caloric deficit and not having a set exercise schedule, but trying to just make sure I walk everyday. In fact, due to my back injury a few months ago, I have cut back on exercise for fear of bringing on another incident. And, I'm still losing weight at an expected and moderate pace.

I don't want to diminish in any way how hard this has been. It isn't very hard now, but the road to this point has been long and tortured at times. However, I'm gratified that it has been a unique path, and that the road has gotten easier as time has gone by. One of the hardest things about this all along has been not knowing if it was going to "work" since I haven't done what most people do. Stomping down your own path with people warning you that it's a road to nowhere isn't as easy as jumping on a bandwagon.

Many people are all too fond of saying, "you will fail" because you aren't doing what they feel is "right" or of value to them. Can you succeed with temptation at every turn? Can you vanquish your psychological demons and discover that the biological ones will come to heel as a result? Can you eat like a "normal" person and still lose weight? Well, the answer for me has been, yes, I can, and I'm not smug about it nor do I believe what I have done and am doing is right for anyone but me...

But, sweet peaceful Buddha, I'm so insanely glad this is where I'm headed rather than being on the road to food-, weight- and exercise-obsessed "sainthood". I have more peace in my life now than ever and it has nothing to do with the number on the scale or what I put in my mouth. The relief I feel about this is more profound than anything and I wouldn't trade this feeling for the perfect body or for large amounts of cold hard cash. So many years of my life have been spent in a state of pure psychological torture over food and I can see that those whips and chains are close to being put away forever.

The Sky Isn't Really Falling (Part 2)

(this is a continuation of a post started here)

The thing I know is that the fear that kept me at that job despite the way in which it was crushing my soul was the fear my mother gave me. The idea that I couldn't let this opportunity go because there would never be another one like it was the driving force behind my clinging to that job. It not only kept me there, but it kept me powerless to demand anything that I was reasonably due. I couldn't stand up for myself when credit was stolen from me. I couldn't ask for raises. I couldn't refuse to do things which were outside of my job description. I couldn't do anything because it might threaten my job security and the job must be kept at all costs, even at the cost of my mental and physical health.

In the end, I couldn't endure the depression anymore. I took a vacation and was more miserable when it was over than before I had left. The fact that nothing could make me happy anymore was too much to bear. With my husband's encouragement, I finally was able to take my utterly defeated self and say I'd quit. I gave notice about 6 weeks before leaving, and I cried every day for a month at the prospect of leaving. It wasn't that I loved the job so much, but that I feared the change.

Prying myself away from something I'd clung to like a lifeline for so long was like ripping the very flesh from my body. It was painful on so many levels because I'd assigned disproportionate and ill-deserved value to the company and the work in order to validate my remaining there. The truth was though that it was my mother's fears that she had so deeply inculcated into me that played the biggest role. If I left, the sky was going to fall.

Obviously, the sky did not fall. Everything was okay. I got other work. My husband and I make enough money with our combined jobs, and I finally began the process of recovering my mental health. It took nearly a year away from that job before the depression started to lift. I spent much of that year holed up in our apartment talking to my sister, playing MMORPGs, and going out as little as possible. I cocooned myself from as much external pain as possible and one day, about 7-8 months later, I realized that I could enjoy things again, though I still didn't feel anywhere near "whole" for a good deal longer.

Three years away from that job, and I had the courage to make a decision that set off my weight loss efforts. That decision is to move to a very different place where new opportunities will present themselves. The truth is that we have remained where we are, in part, due to inertia, but also perhaps due to my fear. Things are going pretty well here, so I'm afraid to leave, but the truth is that our situation keeps us both in a state of intellectual and career stagnation. I'm afraid the sky will fall if I walk away from a life of relative comfort, so I chose to stay in a place in which I am not really happy and in which I have no bright future.

My fear at letting go of the stability we have had here has been a big part of why we have remained. My husband is okay to remain out of inertia, but he probably would have left a long time ago if I had wanted to. Everyday that I think about leaving, I face my fear that the sky will fall when I move on. It's a deep terror that I realize has one foot in reality and one foot in conjured fear.

Anyone can step off the curb to cross a street and be hit by a car, though the chances of that are rather low. Chances are you'll cross that street just fine. Chances are that I'll cross that street just fine when I move on and life will be different but no worse than it has been here on the whole. My mother would have had me believe that I would certainly be killed for taking the chance and stepping off the curb. She would have had me decide to stand on that same corner forever no matter how miserable it made me for fear of that that one in a million chance of getting hit by a previously unseen car would be the result. I have decided that I just can't keep standing there anymore based on a fear that the sky might fall if I take a step.

The Sky Really Isn't Falling (Part 1)

Among the many enduring "gifts", or should I say more accurately, "boobie prizes", that my mother gave me were a number of attitudes about life. She never told me these thoughts overtly, but I learned them clearly and loudly over the years through her actions and advice. The main theme would be that the sky was always falling, though breaking it down a bit is rather more enlightening.

One of the primary messages she gave me was that life was incredibly insecure so I had to take whatever chances I was offered immediately, whether they suited me or not. If I turned down an opportunity, there may never be one again, so it was important never to turn one down even if it made me unhappy to pursue a particular path. This is a lesson that I have carried with me pretty much my entire life. It's one that had me accepting unsuitable jobs because any hesitation on my part not only made me believe I'd be unemployed forever, but brought about a rain of complaining from my mother.

The worst of these choices resulted in a crappy job as a camp arts and crafts counselor for 2 months followed by a two-week stint as a waitress in a mall snack bar just after college. My mother was apoplectic at the idea that I would wait and apply for jobs that were more suitable for someone who had a Bachelor's degree in Psychology. She'd rather I worked for sub-minimum wage than allow me in peace to search for jobs in my field. Since I lived at home throughout and just after college, as I was too poor to do otherwise, there was no escaping her haranguing. Also, quite frankly, I'd lived my whole life with her fears and had thoroughly integrated them into my mindset.

The sense that I could not walk away from anything because it made me miserable also contributed to my remaining in a job I held for over a decade even though my substantial and unique contributions were seen as valueless by the company's president. I was the only one capable of doing much of the work I did, and replacing me would have required hiring at least two people at higher wages. My immediate boss also spent a few years stealing credit for my work and quashed any attempts on my part to assist other employees (including himself) with an angry snappish comment because he was worried that I'd look more valuable than he and the president might replace him with me. This isn't speculation on my part. He told me this perfectly clearly. He only stopped covering up the extent of the work I did when the president considered firing me and replacing me with someone else. Essentially, his efforts to cover up my value had worked so well that I appeared to be someone who could be replaced on a whim for a younger, cheaper newcomer. Only then did my boss start advertising my abilities because his work would have been nearly impossible without someone of my talents and skill level.

My misery at this job was compounded by the fact that I was rarely given any but the tiniest and most insignificant raises. In fact after a year in which I did particularly excellent work, I was hoping for a bit of a juicier raise than usual. This hope was utterly dashed when my expectations were answered with the aforementioned near firing.

I spent over a year in a state close to clinical depression at that job because I was so fearful that I'd never find another job again. My husband did everything short of begging me to quit, but my sense that the sky would fall if I left kept me in place. I got up day after day finding no joy in anything that once made me happy and miserable at the prospect of going to my office. I sat in my cubicle feeling like I'd rather scream than remain another minute there.

I used to offer to do other projects or help others with their work when mine was done, and I stopped that. I used to use my down time to expand my skills (and indeed became an expert user of Adobe professional products through self-training), but during the last year or so at that company, I'd just do my work as rapidly as possible, keep my head down, and clandestinely play video games that I didn't even enjoy when I had nothing else to do. If anyone asked me to do something, I'd do it, but I was done growing my abilities or volunteering to assist others. That sort of thing gave me no satisfaction anymore.

Eventually, I did leave that job. Incidentally, when I quit, they did hire two people to replace me. It was during that job that I gained much of the weight since my marriage. I probably put on 50 lbs. due to strife with my in-laws and early difficulties with the situation after I married, but I probably put on 150 during that job. The job ate at me and I ate back in response.

People talk a lot about "eating your pain", but it really is a misnomer. The pain was right there in the open. I complained. I talked about it. My pain wasn't being suppressed nor was my sense of how crushing it could be to be so skilled and so undervalued. My boss knew it. My husband knew it. Some of my other coworkers knew it. I wasn't swallowing any of my anger, frustration or pain.

The eating part was about exhaustion, negative overstimulation, and finding some source of easily accessible pleasure in my miserable life. I liked the work, but the workplace and the general environment I lived in was oppressive and punitive. A bit of chocolate, a large amount of white carbs, and a pint of ice cream was a balm that I could lose myself in as needed, and I needed it a lot. Since the job itself was desk work and didn't require movement, and I was in too much back pain to exercise much anyway, the weight accumulated.

It sounds incredible to say I gained 150 lbs., but less astonishing to consider that that was over more than ten years. How hard is it to gain 10-15 lbs. per year? It's really not all that hard, especially when you are under a lot of stress, in physical pain, and have little comfort in your life.

(continued in part 2)

Two-faced Friends

When you're in school, you expect kids to pick on your for being different, especially if you're fat. After finishing high school though, I learned that a lot of the overt mockery slows down. After college, it tends to come at a crawl except from random strangers and children. Adults tend to exhibit more self-control in the interest of showing a modicum of social skill and grace.

That being said, I cannot say that I've been at a loss for being acquainted with adults who have made fun of my weight, or talked about it behind my back. The random strangers who make rude remarks are one thing, but the people who are friendly to your face and then stab you in the back still were able to shock me.

Shortly after starting work at a new job as a temporary employee, I was getting to know my coworkers. One of them, a man who was 28 at the time (I was 26) hit it off particularly well with me. We talked amiably, made jokes, and had a good rapport. I should note that this was all utterly devoid of flirtation or sexual considerations. I know that when men and women get on, some people believe that they only do so when there is some sort of attraction. I was (and still am) deliriously happily married and relate to all men I encounter as potential friends, much as I relate to women. After several weeks of working together, I thought that this fellow was going to be someone who I'd get along well for the duration of my time at the job. I should note that he worked one shift and I worked another shift, but there were times when the schedule overlapped.

One day, he was sitting at a table that we worked at communally with those on our shift with several other coworkers on his shift. I was working in another part of the office in private work spaces that my shift's workers were currently occupying. We swapped off in these spaces according to the types of tasks that needed to be done. The schedule for our work was set for the most part, but my schedule wasn't quite the same as that of the other worker's, so I left my cubicle early to join in on the work at the communal work table.

The cubicles were located about 15 feet behind the table that my coworker's shift was working at, so I was approaching from behind. As I was walking there, I heard him say very clearly, "what it must be like to have sex with (my name)... it must be like lying between two big slabs of beef."

Since my shift ended earlier than that of everyone else on my shift, he didn't expect me to approach and didn't hear me, but I sure heard him. I was humiliated and furious. I didn't confront him directly, but I did say something about people who pretended to be your friend and then stabbed you in the back. He pretended that he didn't have any idea what I was talking about, but this just made me angrier and more aggressive. One of my other coworkers told him to "give it up", meaning that there was no use continuing to pretend that he hadn't said something really ugly about me.

After that, all of my interactions with this particular coworker were cold and officious. In the end, he was fired and I was given his job because he was not the greatest worker. I became a permanent worker and he was headed for the door. This was gratifying because I thought he was a thoroughly despicable person and deserved what he got.

I have blotted out a lot of the immediate pain I felt at that betrayal and the two-faced nature of his actions, but the effect was to make me wonder what every "friend" I've ever had has thought about me and said about me behind my back. To be honest, I still don't trust anyone other than my husband and figure that even people who are nothing but gracious and kind to my face are probably telling their spouses or friends about how disgustingly fat I am. I take it as a given that even people who are nice to me are going to judge me and speak ill of me when I'm not around. Sometimes I wonder if the scars of the cruelty I've lived with most of my life will fade after I lose all the weight I want to or if they're with me forever.