“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
– Oscar Wilde
What constitutes our identity? This has been something I’ve been debating in my mind for quite some time now, trying to decipher who I am and what is it that lets people know ‘this is Danielle Montgomery’. Some people have an obvious image about themselves, a blatant quirk or visual aesthetic that can be seen from a mile off – the one with the tattoos, the one with the 1950’s style, the really tall one, the one who is in a heavy metal band. I feel I don’t possess an identity. I’m just a girl with no style, uncomfortable in most items of clothing and I copy other girls thinking they must be the ideal. But is music taste and how we essentially ‘decorate’ ourselves the only things that compromise our identity?
Talking with my counsellor, we skirted around this issue lightly. She was talking about all the things that I have going for me; my interests, my degree, my hobbies, my intelligence, but yet I sat staring out of the window thinking that these things don’t matter – nobody sees that when they look at me. The only thing I feel I want to be known for is having an eating disorder. I want to be ‘the one with the eating disorder’. And on reflection, this is sad. This is a sad desirable, but it’s an honest one. This all consuming disease has swallowed up my identity; fragments of my character lost in a fog of negativity and punishment. I crave the attention I didn’t receive growing up – whenever I was successful in a sporting or academic endeavour, the praise I received was either short and nonchalant or non-existent. I want to be noticed by shrinking away and not being noticed – most contrasting sentence ever! It’s all very confusing and hard to find the right words to string together in order to explain how I feel, but identity is something I’m struggling to define at the moment. I don’t love myself – don’t want to love myself – so therefore I avoid getting to know myself. And even if I once did, I’ve forgotten her.
The Skinny Fat Girl 