I Am Not a Pretty Girl/That Is Not What I Do

I don’t expect people to be nice or to like me.

A bit reductionist, maybe, but that’s one of the ideas presented to me during binge eating therapy that still sticks with me – along with the idea that how I interpret and then react to events comes from how I frame the world.

As of yesterday I am officially at least 2.5 pounds and possibly five pounds below my lowest adult weight ever. And these days, the frame seems – perhaps – the wrong size and shape.

Consider:

“We always like to welcome pretty girls back home.” (US customs agent, in rather non-smarmy manner, if you can believe)

“You’re a bit of a looker.” (date who favored silly American slang, via email)

“You look amazing – like Snow White, with your fair skin and dark hair.” (fellow customer watching me try on Laura Mercier red lipstick)

“You’re too pretty to be so cynical.” (taxi driver)

(Never mind the Fig, who used to tell me I was “not hard to look at,” and – once -- that I was “very good looking and very clever.”)

I’m flustered when people say things such as the above. That’s not how I think of myself. Nor do I think I would be going out on a limb – or breaking new ground -- to say the taxi driver had a point. Not that I’m too pretty to be so cynical – beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? – but that to some extent people treat you differently based on how you look. And if you’re always treated well – because you’re pretty – why would you need to develop the hard shell of cynicism to protect your, um, gooey chocolate center?

Almost daily lately I feel like the world treats me differently. I get served faster in pubs. I get chatted up more in pubs. The person sitting next to me on an airplane doesn’t sigh or roll their eyes when I sit down, and is it my imagination, or are people less grumpy when I have the window seat and make everyone get up so I can go to the bathroom?

And take last night.

I attended a black tie music industry dinner. (Forgive the name-dropping, but the demographic our magazine would like to attract isn’t interested and I have to squeal to somebody that I was seated at a table with A-ha, and they still look good enough to turn into a cartoon for.) I worried about half as much as I might have a year ago about whether I was dressed right, because I feel (rightly or wrongly) that you can get away with a lot more when you’re thinner. I shivered in the over air-conditioned ballroom (would I have worn a little black dress that was actually fairly little a year ago? I don’t know. Probably not.) and the guy sitting next to me promptly offered his tuxedo jacket. (I probably wouldn’t have accepted 67 pounds ago because I would have been too worried it would be too small.) As he handed it over, he made a comment about how big it would be on me. (See previous parenthetical.)

Is all of the above because I look different? Or because now that I look different I act different? Probably a bit of both. And in their own way, both are equally unsettling.