Look no further. In today’s economy, success is owning your own home and having $5 left in your account five days away from payday. Enjoying this level of success is eerily similar to being on the dole: forced vegetarianism, clothes falling apart, a weekly dinner at your parents’, a sense of nihilism. You’ve come a long way, baby. Full circle to penury.
What strikes me most about these photos of Lisa Past is not the awesome lifestyle I once enjoyed as a travel writer and plus-one - my parents’ house is heated to around 45 degrees, so I don’t need to pine for the tropics - but how gorgeous I was in comparison to the post-Covid model of lockdown eating and stress-face now before me.
Why did I hate myself so much then, I wonder. Why did I ever think I was fat? Where did those notions come from?
It’s like Natalie in Love Actually, whose father calls her "Plumpy" and whose weight is the film’s punchline, so oft are we reminded that she has "thighs like tree trunks" and a sizeable arse. Google her right now, she’s f-n gorgeous. Mind you, the movie came out 18 years ago, and it was hardly a feminist treatise - nobody would pity-kiss creepy Mark the stalker now, expressing his love using placards (so your husband doesn’t know he’s outside) after he’s wrecked your wedding video.
Now that I have self-esteem or reached the age where you don’t give a fark what anyone thinks - ultimately the same thing - I rage for the woman in the photo, who must have internalised those ideas of her not good-enough-ness. There’s one picture, taken in Bagan, where I’m crossing one leg over the other in a desperate attempt to make myself look slimmer. I was slim!
I remember exactly how the woman in the photo felt: like I had to apologise for the space I was taking up, that I always had to be having the best time, that I couldn’t complain, even though I had terrible heat rash and third-degree sunburn because sightseeing by Victorian bicycle was cheaper than hiring a covered tuk-tuk. I remember that sense of always needing to please, to offer myself as the butt of the joke, and always, but always, feeling compelled to say how lucky I was to be there.
Eight years doesn’t seem like that long, but it’s time enough to change everything. I have learned to like myself. Yes, my thighs are bigger than I want; I guess I’m one of the Kiwis who collectively put on 2819 tonnes in the first year of the pandemic. This is a weight gain of around half a cat for each person. I call my half-cat "Buttons" after a rotten tom my sister had when I was a teenager who used to leap out of the bushes by the front door when I was trying to sneak back into the house and bite me on the ankle.
Buttons and I don’t care if we’re plumpy - we’re just concentrating on getting through the now. Like most of New Zealand, we’re in survival mode: and if that involves some comfort eating, then so be it. It’s like the Casanova says, "There are days you get home from work and just want to put something nice in your mouth as a reward for having made it. Like a whole pizza." When it comes to keeping our heads above water, there’s nothing wrong with an extra flotation device.
Moral of the story: Don’t ever let other people make you feel sh*t about yourself and know that things will always get better. In eight years’ time we’ll look back at photos from now and say, "Look at you, being a success".
And, "God, I was so much skinnier back then".
