Kill Her Darling!

CONTENT WARNING: Suicide, childhood bereavement and body image issues.

I spoke in my diet failure blog post about how if you give me a set of rules or a task I will follow it to the letter. This month, while exploring this theme of failure, I have been thinking a lot about where this all began, this fear of stepping outside the rules, of “getting it wrong” being a bad thing, and as usual, it comes back to my dead dad.

If anyone has experienced parental loss at a young age and found themselves in therapy, it’s sooooo annoying, but also liberating, to find out that a lot of the reasons you are the way you are is because of that loss. It’s particularly surprising when you feel that the incident didn’t really affect your life at all growing up and now at age 33 you find out it’s the reason for everything and you’ve just been living a trauma response to protect yourself, like a clever clogs.

My da died from suicide and, at some point, I internalised that it was my fault. That I had done something wrong and that’s why he did it. Obviously, the adult me knows that is not true but my younger self absorbed that on some level and became very afraid that if she got things wrong, behaved badly or crossed the line in any way, then someone would go and kill themselves. This was also reinforced by strong ideas of right and wrong, heaven and hell, from my Catholic upbringing and schooling as well as a world where I received love and affection when I did things well and ridicule when I didn’t.

Now, take this idea that there is a right way of doing things and combine it with society's ideas of body image and you have a girl who believes that there is a right way to have a body. Holding this belief to be true meant that there was also a wrong way to have one. TV and magazines told me what the right way to have a body was. Boys will be interested in you if you have the right body. Zero boys were interested in me. All of this meant there was only one logical conclusion - I had the wrong body.

My deep fear of getting things wrong and the consequences that might cause, meant that I found this really distressing and I began to hate myself. I began to imagine this right version of me. Perfect Amy. She was thin, had great hair, knew how to dress properly, always said the right thing at the right moment, was super confident and all the boys fancied her. Every time I looked in the mirror or at a photograph, I didn’t see Perfect Amy. I saw Wrong Amy.

Perfect Amy has followed me through my whole life. Everyday, every look in the mirror, every caught reflection in a car was a reminder that I was failing. At one point, in University, I got the closest I have ever been to looking like her and yet I still didn’t feel like the beautiful, confident person that Perfect Amy was.

Exploring failure this month has led me to have lots of different conversations with different people about this idea of the ideal version of yourself and the pressure and sadness that can come from believing deeply in their existence. The constant daydreaming of what it would be like to be that perfect. The constant sense of failure. I now feel that having this belief that there is an ideal version of yourself is not a positive manifestation but a seriously harmful idea, one that is destroying me having any sense of appreciation for how my body is and how I am in the present.

I really do feel that the idea of an ideal body is simply ludicrous (simply think of how drastically ideal body shapes for women in the western world changed throughout the 20th Century) and that there is no right way to have a body. Plus I would never want anyone I care about to be using the thought of a better version of themselves to bully themselves in the present. I know all this intellectually but Perfect Amy is still whispering in my ear that I should be walking out of my lockdown cave on June 21 looking like her otherwise I will have failed?

In scriptwriting, "Kill Your Darlings", is the term for getting rid of a character or a scene that you absolutely love and think is brilliant but that is not serving the film or play in any way.

It's time to kill off Perfect Amy.

I'm just not sure how you kill someone that lives inside your head.