Ghost (eBook)

Why Perfect Women Shrink

Iona Holloway (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
300 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-1717-9 (ISBN)

Infos

I am going to show you why your pain is invisible to everyone else, and why, in the struggle to be seen, your body became your battlefield. From the outside, your life looks polished. You're talented, successful, strong. Your perfection safeguards you against suffering. Everyone assumes you're fine, and you hide in plain sight. But the truth is that, inside, you feel like a fraud. From childhood, you've been gaslighted by your own gifts. 'Good enough' is impossible. But being perfect leaves no space to be human. You suffer in silence. You use your body as a canvas to scream your pain, shrinking in a desperate bid to be visible. This book is my story and the story of women I have worked with. It is the story of how vulnerability will unlock your truth and set you free. Iona Holloway woke up one day and knew she could never go on another diet. She was willing to sacrifice her 'perfect body' if it meant she felt whole-not lost, ashamed, and hopeless. She became her own guide on the hard journey of coming home to herself. Haunting, vulnerable, blunt, and stunning, Ghost is a story that reveals why strong women go to war with their bodies. In her debut memoir, Iona Holloway explores lost childhood, identity webs, hot shame, emotional freeze, love, and lineage to tell the story of how to change not just behaviours, but beliefs. How to ask for help. How to let go of perfect. Now is not the time to shrink. This book won't heal you, but it will help you find the heart to heal.

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I am going to show you why your pain is invisible to everyone else, and why, in the struggle to be seen, your body became your battlefield. From the outside, your life looks polished. You're talented, successful, strong. Your perfection safeguards you against suffering. Everyone assumes you're fine, and you hide in plain sight. But the truth is that, inside, you feel like a fraud. From childhood, you've been gaslighted by your own gifts. "e;Good enough"e; is impossible. But being perfect leaves no space to be human. You suffer in silence. You use your body as a canvas to scream your pain, shrinking in a desperate bid to be visible. This book is my story and the story of women I have worked with. It is the story of how vulnerability will unlock your truth and set you free. Iona Holloway woke up one day and knew she could never go on another diet. She was willing to sacrifice her "e;perfect body"e; if it meant she felt whole-not lost, ashamed, and hopeless. She became her own guide on the hard journey of coming home to herself. Haunting, vulnerable, blunt, and stunning, Ghost is a story that reveals why strong women go to war with their bodies. In her debut memoir, Iona Holloway explores lost childhood, identity webs, hot shame, emotional freeze, love, and lineage to tell the story of how to change not just behaviours, but beliefs. How to ask for help. How to let go of perfect. Now is not the time to shrink. This book won't heal you, but it will help you find the heart to heal.

Textauszug

I see you

You’re hungry
I know
You’re hunting
In the wrong place
I thought it was about bones
About small
Now I see
All I was hungry for
All these years
Was someone
Anyone
To ask
How are you really
And for me
To feel safe
Saying
I am not good

Women like us

Women like us. There is no one way we come to exist in this world. Some of us are starving. Some of us are stuffing. Some of us are shining. Some of us are hiding. Some of us are victims. Some of us are lucky. Some speak loudly. Some are silent. Some of us have families. Some don’t know our father’s smell.

Our lives are not carbon copies. You have your own flavour of pain. Many broken roads lead to the same cruel moment.

So hear these words. Feel it in your bones. Know what is true about a woman like you. A woman like me.

Women like us.

We’re everything they said we would be. From the moment we dropped out of the womb showing an uncanny ability to master just about anything. We are the child who takes care of herself. We grow stiff in your arms. We grow into the kid so competent no one offers a hand—or a hug. No one worries about us. Bookmark her for greatness. Our tears mean a little less. What have we got to cry about? We learn to swallow it down and work. Our gifts make our pain invisible. We sit quietly behind the couch and wonder: why don’t they see what I feel?

Women like us. We put our parents on edge from the day we ask a question they do not want to answer. Contrary. Quietly nodding. She’s different from the rest. They try to answer our questions safely. But our elastic brain has already wrapped itself around the next puzzle to make them feel useless, mere bystanders to our plots and dreams.

We grow up. Into the women no one asks about. Not because we are not loved and admired. Because we are loved and admired. The assumption is that whatever we’re doing, we do not need help. So we learn. I am on my own.

Women like us. We’re everything those watching thought we could be. We’re everything they wish they were. Diligent. Militant. A glint of crazy and blue-blooded, a heart of coal. The hot and sweaty belly of summer can’t melt our ice.

You see us on city streets. Get out of our way. We walk in straight lines. We’re careful about who we smile at. We worship our full-length mirrors or close our eyes and zoom past. Rumbling stomachs let us know when we’re doing it right. It does not matter if our jeans cut into our hips. It keeps the bite of hunger at bay. The numbers hum, and we count the calories in lettuce to make sure we keep our bodies pointed.

They comment on our discipline. It washes over us like balm on crusty lips, easing the discomfort for a moment. So we learn: small gets me the words I crave.

Women like us. We’re barely seen as women. People always listen to what we have to say. Even the bald men with dumb jokes, because they know we mean business. Our families don’t know when to call. So they don’t. They assume we’re doing fine. Not just fine. We’re winning. At everything, prize or no prize. Whether we break our backs in the process or not. For women like us, pain means we’re doing it right.

Women like us. We are not practiced in love, but we floor men and women with our wit. Like flies to a corpse. Delicious in every way. They tell their friends: She’s not like other women. Not needy. Not insecure. So we learn: they only love me strong.

Women like us. We’re fucking remarkable. A once in a lifetime kind of woman. Those close to us feel it, because we make sure they feel it. So they sink into the couch. They pale in our shadow and rest on our backbone. We will be damned if we show how much their ordinariness weighs on us.

And this armour is not built gently. Alarm off. Shoes on. Our skin is hot and wet with sweat before the cold sun bothers rising.

The normal people. They don’t dare look us in the eye. Our tenor rips through their flimsy feelings. Our stare chills their average thoughts. They do exactly what we want them to do. They stare straight through us and see exactly what we want them to see. Perfect.

Barely human

Women like us. We’re the one everyone watches, but no one sees. From the moment we were born, we had no reason to cry. They assumed we did not need a hand. They didn’t see when we had to start working. They think everything we do is effortless.

Being the one no one asks about is not a good thing.

Not overnight, but we become their lie.

Tangled in the web.

I don’t struggle.

I am perfect.

So we make how hard we work invisible. We get good at playing out the lies. They get good at drinking in the lies, like warm and hearty milk. It keeps them sleepy and quiet to our truth.

Women like us. In all our brilliance. In all our strength and in all our gifts. Our humanity disappears. That’s why we must keep moving, hunted by their eyes and a hunger that bites and feeds on our fear. Eyes flinty and focused on the horizon.

Women like us. Everything we do must position us above. Not on par, and never below. We cannot lay our head. Not for one moment. Because if we rest, we get comfortable. We get fat and sloppy and whiny. Like everybody else.

We cannot stop. If we stop, our smokescreen dissolves. They’ll see what we really feel. Who we really are.

They’ll see what we see when we stare through ourselves in the bathroom mirror. A speckling of toothpaste and the stink of fear.

A fucking monster.

When the sun comes up, we are running. We are running through people, their hearts crunching as we stomp. And we are sneering. Sneering at their obvious weakness, and at all the support they need. We’re jabbing and poking at how little they believe in themselves. At how worthless their dull lives are.

Arm’s length is the measure of choice. We cannot stop. We cannot rest. The bite of hunger steals our sleep, we wear our eyebags with sick glory. This is what we have to do to keep the truth invisible, so they don’t see what we see staring back at us in the mirror.

Fat fuck. Liar. Fraud.

Women like us. They will never see the ways we struggle. They will never realise that what fuels us to soar is not ease but salty and thick fear. The fear of being discovered a fraud.

They will never understand that talent does not mean painless. That competence does not mean effortless. That gifts do not protect us from the rocks that wreck a soul.

They will never see how hard we have been working.

All this time. To them.

We are so perfect, we are nothing.

Barely human.

Immune.

Invisible.

A Ghost.

I see you.

I see straight through you. Not in the way you want, in the way you need. You don’t have to be strong here. Because I know your story. It was my story. A different flavour, the same cruel end. No talent, no gift, no tiny number on the scale, and no capacity for work is wide or deep enough to hold you together anymore.

Women like us.

We run from the pain no one else sees.

We are Ghost Women.

We all break in the end.

I need you to know from the bottom of a once empty heart.

You are in the right place.

I’m going to help you come home.

Why listen to me?

I’m Iona. It started off perfect for me, too. I was the child who was good at everything. The precocious talent. Complicated, a little contrary. Hard to wrap your arms around. The one everyone said to watch. And I did it all. I was top of my class. In everything. I won art competitions. I wore my clothes back to front on purpose. I represented my country, Scotland. I was an All American Division I field hockey player at Syracuse University. My grades were ridiculous. Professors loved me. Bosses loved me. I got pay raises without asking. And my body? It stopped people on the street.

I had what they wanted.

I had it all.

And I would go home at night and hope I died in my sleep.

On the surface, I had no reason to feel the way I did. When my star was shining brightest, I felt the scariest feeling in the world.

Nothing.

Nothing, dotted with white hot fear.

I was terrified that people would see how ordinary I really was. So I screamed my invisible pain in the only way that still let me feel strong.

I started to shrink.

For over fifteen years, I waged a war on my body through restriction, bingeing, and over-exercising. And working. A lot of quiet and invisible work.

War served me well. It kept up the appearance everyone expected from me. A formidable force of a woman. My fucked-up relationship with food and my body made me an incredible athlete. It was my job to be extreme. Training for four hours a day was normal. It was so easy to compensate for my binges that grew larger and longer as the years passed. Every time I took a plane ride, I promised myself that when I landed, I would start my life over. That it would be different this time.

It never was.

Year on year on year, it got harder and harder to be me.

My pain hid in plain sight. No one noticed. Or if they did, they said...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.1.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-1717-3 / 1544517173
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-1717-9 / 9781544517179