Mirror, Mirror on The Wall

While driving today, I heard Karen Carpenter's "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas". I've heard her voice described as hauntingly beautiful. They say you can hear her pain/agony in her voice. I just hear it as depressing. Anyway, it made me think about anorexia nervosa. It's a disease that plagues many young females and a few males. Before I had taken psychiatry class, I remember thinking it wasn't real, that these girls were just being stubborn and all you needed to do was put a Pizza Hut Meat Lovers pan crust pizza in front of them and they would cave. I mean who could resist Pizza Hut's buttery crust?

I remember first talking about it in psychiatry class. Our professor was a beautiful, well dressed, physician, who was also a psychiatrist. She talked about the disease with some gusto. And she talked about how delicate the self-esteem of many of these patients were. Motivated by her beauty (and not wanting to bomb her exam--you know so she wouldn't think I was a dummy), I studied these personality disorders too. I started to see it as a personality defect, rather than something that could be cured by sliding some food under the noses of the patients. It was their egos, their self-images that we were dealing with and not their stubborn not wanting to eat stance.

Okay, I am getting to a point. Later on in my Kaplan review class, a different professor told us that we have to watch what we say to certain loved ones. The people who hold us in high regard. He said we (males) as boyfriends, husbands and fathers had to watch how we projected our images of what is beautiful to our wives, girlfriends, and daughters. His speech was hilarious--he told us things like "don't cop a feel when your wife/girlfriend wants to be held because they were upset".

The point I'm trying to make--I know I ramble: is that a person's perception is sometimes shaped by what people say to us. I've posted in the past how working out has not done anything for me. That I still feel somewhat overweight and chunky. Today at the gym, some chick told me that she could tell us I was losing weight. Of course she told me as I was stepping off the weighing scale (making me self-conscious). She said that she could tell that I was working hard to lose the weight.

Later, while changing in the locker room, I looked in the mirror. And my image was replaced by a somewhat thinner me. I guess that what I see, or what I've been looking at is not what others are seeing.

Okay, I'm waiting for "South Park" and so I rambled a little and I'm unsure how to tie all this together. The idea was there while I was on the treadmill, but once again, I forgot how I was going to post this. Sorry!!