On a path a Michelle Jones type situation

Self-Hatred, Self-Love, Peace and Me

You might consider settling in with a beverage, this one is going to be long.

This post has been brewing for a while now and a brief Twitter conversation with Cecily last night was the tipping point for making me actually sit down and write it. It’s going to cover a few different issues. The title of this post covers the general themes but more specifically I’m going to talk about self-esteem, happiness, melancholy, body issues, my Judaism, biological family and chosen family.

It was roughly one year between when I first approached my rabbi and I took the big dunk and had my conversion ceremony a few weeks ago. During that year I changed in fundamental ways. Obviously I legally became a Jew. Yeah, that’s the big one. But I also became a person who valued my own happiness and my own self worth much more than I ever had before. I became a person who came to realize the harsh reality of what I do and don’t feel toward members of my biological family while trying to be better toward my entire biological family. I came to even more greatly appreciate the members of my chosen family and made peace with losing or cutting loose friends and acquaintances whose lives I have no place in and who don’t really have a place in mine. I became someone who has a spiritual and community home, someone who feels incredibly connected to a new place and a new people and on some fundamental levels a new way of life. I became someone much more connected to and concerned with the world around her. I became someone for whom living a life of kindness, compassion and doing good is important, is in fact more than important, it is of utmost importance. Oh, and I gained fifty pounds.

While I was doing all this spiritual growth and community finding, life and the world kept right on moving. My uncle died, B got even more busy at work, I drifted away from some of my biological family and got closer to others, I struggled with work and the grind that is the freelance hustle and B and I ran into some relationship issues. Things got awfully damn heavy around here for a while and I got heavier physically. I’m still nowhere near as heavy as I was 5 years ago but I’m 70 pounds heavier than I was 2 years ago. Am I happy to weight 70 pounds more, well no, but I’m not really despondent about it either, well I wasn’t until I invited my mother to visit.

Leading up to my conversion ceremony I was really stressed about the weight I had put on. I wanted to buy a beautiful dress and be the best looking physical version of me that I could for my conversion ceremony. There I would be on the bimah with all eyes on me and I wanted to look as good as I could. Vanity sucks I know but it’s true, that’s how I felt. I struggled to find a dress that I liked because we all know retail hates a fat girl but eventually I found one I liked and I looked ok on the day of my ceremony. The important part of this story is that I don’t think anyone in my congregation could have been any more warm and welcoming to me. Like I honestly don’t think it’s possible. I could have been 50 pounds lighter and wore a more beautiful dress but the laws of physics and this universe wouldn’t have changed to make those people embrace a smaller version of me more. And the months of beating myself up for gaining weight kind of disappeared. I’m not saying I totally fell in love with my body but I came to realize that it really isn’t, forgive the pun, the biggest deal in the world. Yeah I do want to lose at least 50 of these 70 pounds again but that’s because I really don’t want to get diabetes or any of the other obesity related morbidities. I want to be mobile for a really long time and to do that I need to weigh a bit less. But I don’t need to be smaller for you to love me or for me to love me or for my community to embrace me. That’s a hard, hard thing to learn and accept and maybe 6 months from now I’ll have stopped accepting it and be depressed about my weight again. But at this moment I’m not. At this moment I can say objectively “I need to lose 50 pounds for my health but if you love or like me less because of these 50 pounds then you really do suck.”

And then I invite my mother to visit. My mother and I have a………non-traditional relationship. I don’t think my mother was ever more proud of me than when I was at my smallest weight. Though my mother has never been obese she is a typical American woman who stresses a great deal over weight and has watched her own weight fluctuate semi-significantly. Though I don’t think you could have rightfully said my mother and I were close before we have grown even less close over the past year. I speak to her rather infrequently and see her even less. So she hasn’t seen me since December I think, and we’ve spoken only a handful of times during that period. A new restaurant opened in town that I think my mother will enjoy very much so I’ve invited her to come for dinner this weekend. When I made the invitation I found out that my mother is in one of her periods of extreme concern with weight and ostensibly health. It is one of the primary topics of every conversation. “Am I still on Weight Watchers? Have I seen this website for tracking calories? She’s been exercising a lot but has only lost ten pounds?” and on and on. Now, is all this talk my mother’s way of poking me about my gained weight? I cannot say, I can only say that it definitely feels that way. I know that my mother’s own weight is of interest to her and she is legitimately exercising and reading the websites she wants to talk about. But when she doesn’t ask about work or my conversion or much of anything else it certainly seems like she’s sending me a message. So here I am very much worrying over what I’m going to wear to dinner this weekend. Here I am starting to beat myself up just a little bit over the stomach and the thighs and the ass that I’ve got. It’s a crappy way to feel and I’m making the decision not to stand for it. Like I said, I’m not the same person I was a year ago and I’m better equipped now to take ownership of my life and my happiness.

You know for a long time I wore my melancholy spells like a badge of honor. They took strength to get through them and I thought they were part and parcel of the little bits of creativity and talent that I have. I never wanted to get on medication because I thought that it would decrease my creative thinking but I’ve got to admit that truthfully I didn’t want to get on medication because it made me a little bit different, it made me a little bit accomplished. I mean some of those melancholy spells really kicked my ass but I made it through them. I haven’t had a melancholy spell in a long time and I am in no hurry for them to come back. Did Judaism cure me of melancholy/depression/whatever you want to call it? No, but finding a spiritual path and becoming more at peace with myself and the world certainly helped. The more happiness and peace I have the more happiness and peace I want. I am so laid back compared to how I used to be. I almost laugh at how uptight and quick to anger I used to be. Over little stuff too, oh how I could lose my temper over some little stuff. But now that I’ve seen a different way of living I’m in no hurry to go back to the other way. That’s why I’ve got to get a handle on this anxiety I’m having over my mother’s visit. I accepted that my mother’s affection is fickle (note that I say affection here and not love) and that our relationship will always have periods of us not being even remotely close and periods of us being more so. I also know that it’s within my power to determine whether or not I’m going to stress over my mother’s opinion on my weight. I think that my mother thinks less of me when I weigh more. Is that the actual truth? I don’t know because I’m not going to ask her. She has the right to think however she wishes an
d I have the right to change the topic of conversation. I have to right, if pushed, to say “you know what? My value as a person isn’t measured AT ALL by how much I weigh.”

My mother is not a religious woman in any way. So it is not much of a surprise to me that she has showed absolutely no interest in my spiritual journey and my conversion. I did not invite her to my conversion ceremony or the party afterward. B told her after the fact that my conversion ceremony had taken place but in the conversations I’ve had with my mother since then she has not even mentioned it. Again I say that she’s not a religious woman so it makes sense that she’s not terribly interested in my religious development, on the flip side though it reminds me how much she’s not interested in me. I don’t say that as a condemnation. Once, many years ago, I asked my stepmother if she thought my biological mother loved me because of who I was as a person or solely because we had a connection of biology. My stepmother said that she of course loved me for who I was and surely my mother did too. I was not then and am not now so sure but that’s ok. Please know that I’m not vilifying my mother. I carried some hurt feelings and grudges against my mother for a very long time but in the past several years I’ve let go of them because I truly believe that she did for me and herself the very best she could do while I was growing up. My point here is that the basis of our relationship has been hammered home by the fact that she has no interest in something that is so terribly important to me and by the fact that it was not important to me to have her at my conversion ceremony.

When the date was set for my conversion ceremony I instantly knew the people I wanted to be there. I mean seriously in an instant I had a flash of the people I wanted to invite. I knew full well that a good number of those people couldn’t be there because they live so far away and had already allotted their vacation time and travel dollars to SXSW which came shortly before my ceremony. These people, the ones that I desperately wanted to have at my ceremony, are my chosen family. A number of these people, like my mother, are absolutely not religious. Yet these people have asked questions, have supported me, have encouraged me, have been interested in my spiritual path because they are interested in me and my happiness. Can I just tell you what a wonderful feeling that is? Even if the path I’m on isn’t their path, even if the choices I make aren’t their choices they say “hey tell me about this, tell me what’s going on, let me hear your passion for this.” That chosen family makes my life better every day. They are a blessing to me.

There are people in my life who are….parve (neutral; literally neither dairy not meat). They don’t make my life better but they don’t make my life worse either. We are connected mostly by biology but sometimes by loose bonds of friendship. I have found that even with my new interest in the world and new passion for kindness and compassion that I don’t have as much energy for these people and that’s ok. By releasing myself from those bonds in my heart I’m freeing up a little bit of myself each time to devote to being a little better, a little more energetic toward being good. This is not to say I have license to be hurtful or less compassionate to these people but I’ve given myself permission to disengage from some relationships. If I see them or interact with them I am the best that I can be at that moment but I try hard to not carry any negative emotions or tension beyond the interaction. If we see each other and have a great time that’s wonderful, but if not that’s ok too because they don’t hold sway over me. That change has allowed me to devote energy and interest to engage more fully in some old relationships, including with some members of my biological family, and that too has been a blessing.

So that’s twice now that I’ve mentioned blessings. I want to tell you about a person that I first met in the offline world but now communicate primarily with through social networks. He feels strongly that I became “too Jewish.” That I spoke of Judaism too often, used to many Hebrew words on Twitter, celebrated too many holidays, etc. Knowing his attitude hurt me deeply. Why did my saying “shabbat shalom” bother him? Why did talking about something that brought such joy and meaning to my life offend him? And then one day I re-tweeted the following: