Sensory processing #1: feeling overweight

From around the age of five, right through until I was 19, I was overweight. The reasons for that are a complex dynamic I'm not ready to fully explore right now, but I am thinking about the feelings it brought up. 

I've always been incredibly sensitive to my surroundings as well as my own internal mechanics. And now I'm starting to understand it as a feature of my brain. Autism, ADHD, both, neither, I'm not sure, it's not important for me to decide right now. But what is important is that I'm accepting it as part of myself that I can't control, that I can't be blamed for and that can't be remedied with tough love, gentle coaxing or even therapy.

This week I spoke to a therapist I've seen over the last few years. We've explored EMDR, to liberate traumas from my timeline that might be stuck in my brain, and CBT, to create new neural pathways that might drive my behaviour in more constructive directions. But we're not doing either of those now. An ND brain doesn't need fixing; the way I see and feel things isn't wrong. I won't change - both because I literally can't, but also because now I've given myself permission to accept that I don't need to.

Being overweight was such a huge feature of my childhood, a part of my identity I couldn't shake and an affirmation that I was a lousy, unlovable and rotten person. Despite tons of evidence pointing to the contrary, I could never see past it. 

In my second year of university, I suddenly found a way to control my weight, and it came to define me in a new way. I became thinner than everyone else, and terrified of that changing. I looked in on myself through everyone else's eyes and saw the reasons for newfound validation. It was intoxicating, and I felt less rotten - though crucially, I was probably less humane as a result.

In those days of restriction and starvation-driven disassociation, there were lots of new discomforts, but there was also a feeling I couldn't get over. Carrying less weight, I felt lighter. All the external stuff - feeling desirable, desired and morally superior - was a sidenote. It was that I felt physically lighter, like I was floating freely along, no formless sacks blocking me from seeing my actual body, my limbs leaner and my bones visible and accessible.

Despite all of the bad bits and ways I knew I was harming myself, at the same time there was this sensation of ease and freedom that I've never been able to see as a negative.

And so, here I am now thinking: it's obviously linked to sensory processing. Feeling things so intensely, becoming overwhelmed by the physical as well as emotional, of course carrying extra weight is a discomfort that I find unbearable. 

All those cultural reasons for wanting to be thin still exist, doubled by my brain's obsession with perfectionism and need for constant validation. But it feels like a huge release to understand that it's more than that; from a sensory perspective, my brain is not equipped to manage the presence of the extra padding that obscures my body's truth.