Comedy, comparison, and Mental Health Awareness Week

TW: Weight loss

Mental Health Awareness Week felt like a time to share something that has been rattling about in my head and in various drafts for a while. Stand up comedy has been quietly transformative to me and my mental health, that progress is very slow but it’s still progress.

Comparison, as they say, is the thief of joy. And as a relatively new woman comedian on the open mic circuit last year, comparison was absolutely rife. I have just tentatively started making baby steps on the circuit compared to my sisters in arms, but nonetheless I have already established a recurring theme amongst those giving feedback; prior to us all going into Lockdown, several strangers have sought me out at the end of shows just to tell me how much I remind them of Rebel Wilson. 

 Every time it unleashed a whole torrent of conflicting thoughts, hurt, because - despite best efforts to rail against it - societal pressure has conditioned me to equate comparison to someone else fat as shorthand for being unattractive - I am inner-wired to default to fatphobia thanks to a lifetime of diet chat, magazines, and even my friends and family inadvertently canonising and celebrating a thinner frame, and then guilt for feeling offence and hurt,  as I think Rebel Wilson is glorious, as a performer and as a beautiful woman. It is clearly always meant as a compliment and it is flattering to be compared to someone so successful but she isn’t known for stand up. Rebel Wilson is an actress who plays strident, bold take-it-or-leave-it characters on screen. Her roles have often centred around her size, something I very carefully navigate away from in my material, and she is very physical whereas I rarely take my hand off the mic stand, like it’s the only crutch keeping me standing. I've been all around the houses trying to rationalise it, and I've come to the only conclusion I can really come to - the similarities are primarily that I'm blonde, around the same age, and overweight, suggesting the comparison is a shorthand unwittingly based on looks, rather than style.  

 There is a phrase bandied around and in hundreds of memes that thin doesn’t make you happy, a riff on Kate Moss’s ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’. I find both statements complicated as there are some unfortunate personal truths to both in my lived experience, despite knowing that Moss's view is deeply flawed, and she has clearly never had the cornbread from Caravan. Being slimmer did not hand me the life of my dreams but, as someone with some very faulty mental wiring that made any mirror into a funhouse where what I saw depended on how much I loathed myself that day, dieting and feeling lighter quieted the beehive that I keep somewhere in my head that was telling me I was not good enough. Dangerously, it was positively endorsed by everyone around me telling me I looked amazing and gorgeous and well, when I was actually miserable, swooning from hunger, not enjoying anything I ate because I boiled it all down to syns or celebrated self restraint. It was treating the symptom (badly) not the cure, but it was addictive in itself. 

 I have historically had a very unhealthy relationship with food that seems to push me to exist wildly swerving between two states, feast and famine. When I have been in a process of one of my slimming phases and things I have ‘outgrown’ - my wardrobe spans 5 sizes - suddenly fit, I do feel temporarily better and more at peace. And in terms of Kate’s depressing truth, even in full feasting mode, the spectre of the consequences of enjoying indulgent food is usually on my shoulder whispering in my ear, cutting through even the noisiest crowd on the happiest occasion. This disordered way of thinking has led me to some pretty stupid choices in the past, from the weeks in my first year at University where I ritualistically ate only a tin of sweetcorn and a half of a Supermarket egg fried rice every day to a thankfully brief spell of taking amphetamine based slimming pills acquired by somewhat nefarious means.

In the last couple of years I kept the bees at bay through less extreme means by regular trips to the gym, the physical act of going seeming to buy me some mental space without resorting to unhealthy measures as feeling fit has made me feel strong and powerful and more at home in my body, but I've more or less made my peace that this is something chronic that I have no choice but to build mechanisms of varying success to live alongside. Social media has kickstarted a movement to love yourself that has no doubt been transformative for a lot of people; more representation of people living and enjoying a life that typically has been coded to belong to a specific type of body is a Very Good Thing. I passionately see nothing but beauty in those fierce, amazing and gorgeous women who are strident in their body confidence but I don’t know if I can ever apply this same rational, objectivity to myself.  Loving myself and owning my weight won't make people less likely to make a judgement on me, won't erase years of knowing that you're likely being measured up in most new rooms you walk into, and that size has connotations. The world is not kind to fat people and while it's getting better, the dial is not moving quick enough to erase years of learned-behaviour, for both fat people who expect and are braced to be judged, and those who judge those who are fat without even thinking about it - these prejudices often run too deep to be spirited away. 

 Lockdown has been a stressful proposition for me, with my disordered behaviour patterns. I’m aware I’m not as active as I typically would be, by a long shot, and I’m haunted by the spectre of putting on ‘too much’ weight - whatever too much is - but also being ashamed of my own fatphobia. At the same time, anxiety has eaten away at me, and I’ve inadvertently lost mass in a short , unsustainable space of time - not something to be celebrated, I’m very troubled about how much I like it. I’m rummaging through the cupboard looking for the things that now fit (again) - and the niggling voice in the back of my mind that reminds me it might be easier if I tried not to put it back on adds to the pressure that was already building up over my lack of activity. It’s tiring, and the realisation that this mental fuckery that has haunted me for years can still drag on me like Japanese knotweed makes me miserable. There is every reason in the world to be worried about everything BUT THIS, it’s toxic, meaningless and unproductive ...  and I’m still giving it preferential headspace, and feeling guilty in all kinds of ways for doing it.

I would love to be one more example for other bigger women who are living freely despite being outsize of societal acceptable bodies, but the battle to accept myself on any given day can be so draining that I don't have the energy to be the change I want to see. I still, at low points, wish I could wake up one morning and find that I'm a size 10, because life would likely be much easier, it shouldn't be, but it would. 

Doing comedy has forced me to make my peace with a lot of things - when you are on stage, you're fully exposed from the top of your head to your feet, there is no clever angle to hide behind. Braced, for years, to reject all photos and videos of myself that aren't to a very specific self-taken brief, I've relaxed a tiny bit because I can see the happiness and energy I feel when I am on stage making people laugh and that is beautiful. I'm even sharing photos I hate, because I'm so proud of what they represent in terms of how far I've come in finding something I love that much. This comforts me that maybe I'm not a lost cause. I don't think I'll ever feel truly 100% positive in myself, I’m not really wired that way. But feeling more neutral? That is something I could give a shot.