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I’ve done my fair share of hiding, and I think I’m pretty good at it. At least I used to be. Spending time alone isn’t something I enjoy nearly as much as I used to. Don’t get me wrong -- I don’t mind having some solitude once in a while, but I used to spend a lot more time by myself than I do now.
A long-time reader of my blog left a comment on the Letter to My Body post I wrote last Thursday, and that’s where all these thoughts about hiding are coming from. Acknowledging that he’s never met or seen me in person, he said he was still “amazed” that he’d never known I’d had body-image issues, and reading my post made him question whether other people he knows might have gone through the same thing without ever saying anything. (To that, I say: yes, it’s very likely.) Then he posed this question:
[W]ould you think from your posts over the years -- before you started working out, and started feeling more self-confident about your body...and before you started openly posting about body image...would you think a reader of your site over the years should have known you had these issues, or do you think you hid it from us, succesfully, since you began to blog? I wonder if you posted oblique references to your concerns (whether consciously or subconsciously), that maybe I, or others, just missed -- or that perhaps we should have noted, and asked you about?
The answer is: no, I don’t think it was something that anyone reading my blog would have noticed. The people I knew in person could tell by the way I looked, and by what I ate, and by what my attitude was like, that I wasn’t my old self. But I don’t recall ever making any hints on my blog that I wanted my readers to pick up on. If anything, I was trying to hide my problems not only from the blog world, but also from the people I knew. And the way I did that was by avoiding people.
This is hard for me to talk about (but when the question was asked, I knew it was time to answer). It's easier now because I feel like I’ve moved on from that time in my life. See, I've mentioned before that I was single for many years, and it was my choice to be that way. And it was. But part of the reason for that -- the reason I didn’t put myself “out there” to have the type of encounters that would result in meeting eligible men -- was because it was easier to be alone.
When you’re alone, you don’t have to worry about questions. You can eat as much or as little as you want. You can subsist on steamed vegetables and microwave popcorn without being asked such annoying questions as, “Don’t you want to vary your diet a bit?” (Answer: no. I know exactly how many calories are in this food. It’s safe. Stop bothering me.) My diet is more varied today than it used to be, but I’ve been honest about the fact that I still find it easier to eat a lot of the same foods all the time, rather than trying something new. Sometimes I’ll go for weeks without ever eating popcorn, but yesterday I had two bags -- one bag early in the afternoon, and then another around dinner time. Old habits die hard.
So if I was doing my best to hide from in-person encounters, there was no way I was going to reach out on my blog. I was in college at the time; I talked about that. I went to Amsterdam; I talked about that. But did I ever mention that I hardly ever ate out at restaurants when I lived in Amsterdam for five months? No, I didn’t mention that. So I’m telling you guys now. I bought food mostly from grocery stores, and I tried my best to figure out the calories in what I was eating. (It was more difficult with European food, since the way they display nutritional information is different from the way we do it -- instead of calories being listed “per serving,” they’re listed “per 100 grams.”)
It’s easy to hide behind a
