BDD Demons

Ever since June 25, I have been more and more obsessed with Michael Jackson. I have been voraciously taking in, daily, anything and everything I can find on him. I have perused You Tube, watched countless interviews with him and with people who knew him, sat through footage of videos, older and newer, even the press coverage of the now infamous sex molestation trials.

Over the past month, I have obsessively searched for an answer to the question, "What happened?" His premature death is haunting me, and the more I read about him, the more perplexed and fascinated I become.

The last time I had really paid attention to Michael Jackson was when he came out with "Bad." After that, I got turned off by the constant plastic surgeries and reports of his increasingly strange behavior. He ceased to be an amazing artist and began to be a tabloid caricature, not worthy of more than a passing glance and a shake of the head.

But he was always there, someone who was part of everyday life, appearing now and then in the press as an eccentric has-been, who dangled his (suspiciously white) baby off a balcony and further distorted his already messed-up face every 6 months. I would read yet another weirdo Jackson story, roll my eyes, and pay zero attention to any and all music and work he released.

I was actually on Twitter the moment TMZ reported that he was being taken to the hospital, in cardiac arrest-- and I remember thinking it must be a mistake.

The man was, give a few years, my age, and way too young for heart failure.
An hour later, I sat there, unable to believe the words on the screen: "Michael Jackson has died."

Michael Jackson, dead? Impossible. People I've "known" since childhood who are my age can't die. They can't. Especially slender people with dancer's bodies, who get a lot of exercise and have personal chefs cooking up nutritious meals.

I had no idea, at the time, of his drug habit, his insane usage of anesthesia, of all things, for sleep, nor of his anorexic tendencies. He restricted himself to one meal a day. He would go for days without eating, and, when he was working, sometimes his manager would feed him his usual once-a-day meal of broccoli and grilled chicken, as one would feed a child, because Michael would be so engrossed in what he was composing that he just would not take the time to eat.

The next few posts will be about Michael Jackson.

Why? What does this have to do with an exercise blog?

Ah, glad you asked. You see, Michael was suffering from a horrible thing called Body Dysmorphic Disorder.
In an interview I saw with Oprah, he admitted that he could not look in the mirror because he was never happy with what he saw. That when he was a teenager, his father had called him ugly and teased him about his face, making him so self-conscious that he cried, wanting to die.

Gee... sounds familiar.

I still hear my dad saying, "You are fat. " The last time he said it wasn't too long ago; it was when I was pregnant with my older son. I was so proud of myself, because I only gained 22 pounds over the course of the entire pregnancy, and yet at 5 months, when all I had was a teeny bump, he said, "Yeah, you've gained weight, but you will lose it, I'm sure, later. Oh, but your belly will be stretched. It's going to hang."

I was devastated. I truly expected, "You look wonderful and are doing so well, controlling the weight." But, no, as he had beginning when I was 13, he went on and on about me being fat and how I had to "Take weight off."

Parental tapes are so deeply embedded in the subconscious. Even after our parents stop criticizing us, the tapes play in our minds, over and over again, and they are very, very hard to tune out.

Some of us are lucky, and find a support system that keeps us from repeatedly listening to the tapes, and hopefully stops us from being self-destructive. Others, who are not so lucky, go about battling their demons alone, and end up irreparably damaged and full of self-loathing.

And some end up dead.

I stop here tonight, and am posting a picture published in Ebony in 1985. It is an artist's rendition of what Michael Jackson might look like when he turned 40. Of course, back then, all he had done was narrow his nose, making him absolutely adorable. He didn't need to do a thing more; he had a gorgeous facial structure, sexy lips, soulful eyes, and a smile to die for. Tragic, that he was unable to see just how beautiful he truly was. Even more tragic, that instead of looking like this when he turned 40, he ended looking like...well, like exactly what he tried so desperately to avoid.