Diane Nguyen: An Excuse To Talk About Myself
Sometimes I often feel that my life is too mundane to actually have good things to write about, and that’s probably at least partly true but I’ve realized that it's important to share who you are even if you aren’t the most interesting person in the world. Even if it isn’t in the form you always expected from yourself. It helps everyone feel less alone.
I finished watching Bojack Horsemen recently and I have some thoughts on the show and my favorite character: Diane Nguyen. In the final season, She at finds it hard to combat her writer’s block while attempting to write her memoir and grapples with the idea that if all her trauma and flaws hadn’t happened to be made beautiful by her writing, then what were they all for? She compares it to the Japanese art of Kintsugi in which broken pottery is repaired with gold, which arguably makes the pottery more beautiful than if it had always remained whole. After confronting some deep feelings about trying to put together her trauma with autobiographical gold, she instead begins writing a children's series to cope.
It goes well.
I think that recently I’ve been thinking of Diane because she made me feel less alone. My partner and I finished the show on the first day in a long time that I actually had time to sit down and write, like — at all. We ordered in for dinner, and he folded the clothes that had been neglected for a few weeks before I got home from work. My lunch was packed, my clothes laid out, and I’d quickly showered. I was having one of those rare days where the idealistic version of my mundane life that exists only in my head was beginning to bleed through; I was having a good day. That idealistic place felt real.
We finished Bojack Horsemen and I promptly decided it was overall probably one of my favorite shows of all time. It punches up, not down. The ending left me wanting more but only because I enjoyed the crafting of the story so much even when I was actively anxious about the poor choices the characters were making. The story wasn’t incomplete because the series baked in the concept that the stories of our lives unlike those on TV are never really complete. Even when we die, what we left behind bleeds into the lives of others. It gave a realistic picture of growth and change over time that felt honest. Not ideal, but like a really good session with your therapist where you’re crying and laughing. Not to mention they used one of my favorite songs from my teen years as the final outro and I am a sucker for music that allows me to look fondly at my teen gloominess. Kudos to whoever’s music taste was in charge of picking that one. If you’ve been speculating on whether or not to watch it, I definitely would start. It is of pretty consistent quality in my opinion.
Afterwards though I’d been struggling with the decision of the creators to have Diane Nguyen be fat. This is problematic for a few reasons — — mostly because I am and do consider myself fat, and for that reason on a very basic level, it’s hypocritical. I also consider myself body-positive, and anti-fatphobia/fat-discrimination but that ideology mostly applies to societal structure and the treatment of others interpersonally and within said structure. However, when it comes to my opinion on my body I really struggle to apply the same acceptance and support that I’d give to others to myself. In the past five years, I’ve gained a lot of weight and I’d be lying if I said it does not make me feel like a stranger in my own body.
So, Fat Diane was hard for me because from the beginning of the show I saw so much of myself in her especially when it came to her identity as a writer, being a black sheep in her family, and her being an incredibly caring person beneath her slight arrogance, sarcasm, and sometimes shitty choices. But when she began to actually look more like me in terms of physical size it bothered me for some reason. Why was I having a block in extending this love/kindness to Diane? Didn’t she deserve to be happy? The discrepancy with this reaction is that there is no real Diane that needed my love, kindness, and permission to be happy as much as there was a me having my insecurities reflected back at me by way of my over-identification with her character. Didn’t I deserve to be happy?
The problem with using fictional characters as mirrors is that there are two images to reconcile with each other. In this mirror, my history with ‘health’, food, and my insistence on reflecting a “healthy” body type by any means necessary was clashing with an actual necessity to prioritize something other than these things for the sake of my actual health. The way Diane had with hers.
I decided (misguidedly) at the top of the year that I would stop taking it so easy at the gym and actually work harder and be ‘upfront’ with myself about what I wanted to accomplish. Working out was getting stale and I was sure it was due to a lack of results (certainly not the pressure to get those results to begin with). Yes, I got sucked into the ‘New Year, New Me’-Weightloss Capitalism Machine (I don’t want to talk about it). I tried to give myself consistent challenges to:
- Get in better shape.
And
2. Be thinner.
I knew my motivations weren’t entirely pure and may have been based in more self-disdain than I would have ever admitted at the time but I did it anyway. I knew it was a mistake for me to decide this without getting to the bottom of what I honestly felt thinness, health, beauty, or physical fitness would get me ‘this time around’ but I decided not to question it past what seemed absolutely necessary. Honestly, I knew better. I know dieting is problematic at best and usually ineffective and that over-exercise really fucks up your metabolism — mine especially. But that's the thing about being mentally unwell as it concerns the concept of your body: it's easy to look at everyone else and convince yourself that you have to bulldoze everything you know and adopt an all or nothing mentality to achieve something. That’s why I didn’t like the idea of Fat Diane. Thinking about why it bothered me required more nuance than I felt I could afford.
Now as I sit unemployed and fidgety during quarantine, it seems the universe has decided I can take my fraudulent New Year's resolution and stick it in the toilet. Fair enough. As of now, I am not doing anything except walking. I was struggling to know when I was actually hungry so I started using the intuitive eating scale to gauge hunger before and after meals. It also help me acknowledge my body and be okay with the sensation of being hungry instead of ignoring, finding ways to suppress it or convincing myself it didn’t exist. Surprisingly, just walking every day helps me remember that doing something good in a small way, is still good and still counts. Even if it doesn’t make me thin. And that there is an entire world of good I can do for myself that has nothing to do with losing weight.
I think that Fat Diane bothered me because it made me feel like I had failed by deciding I couldn’t gain weight like I have and be happy. It makes me feel like I’ve failed because I can’t fully convince my brain it doesn’t matter what I look like and that I can’t just be fat and happy like Diane. I feel like I don’t have a good excuse. I’m not on an antidepressant. I don’t have a real job anymore that induces stress. I’ve typically been more active than not throughout my entire life, and I genuinely enjoy being active when it isn’t accompanied by shame. By that logic, I’ve failed. I feel like I’ve been trying to ignore my body for so long in order to focus on the body I wanted and I mistook that approach for not caring about what I looked like or god forbid — being content. Now I know better; that refusing to acknowledge my body in any real way is not the same as being okay with how I look or being okay with my weight gain. I’m learning to accept my physical growth and my physical body bit by bit but I feel like there are so many things I still miss about being smaller.
For now, I’ve settled on taking that feeling and just letting it be, the same I way I miss being a kid. The time has passed and it’s okay. My life is not over and chances are I will change some more before it is all over with. I also think that in contrast to Diane, I got Fat when I got really depressed — not better and that also felt like a failure. I’m learning to not feel shame about that; about what can feel like basically letting a case of “The Grumpies” take over my life so completely and for so long. Albeit I’ve never been on anti-depressants like Diane and I’m almost certain my weight gain is a combination of years of circumstances that I don’t need to justify rather than just one.
I felt cheated because between characters like Fat Diane and social media, people make it look so easy or rather easier. Trying to be fat and happy is like trying to do my own box braids all over again: Foiled by the Internet. (Youtube videos don’t quite capture how long it takes and how difficult it is to part the back of your own head). I’m now painfully aware of the truth that my favorite fat influencer has the money to buy $80 leggings that fit and don’t shred at the thought of two thighs rubbing together, and I simply don’t. I’m just gonna have to deal without until I get the riches that the ‘Rise and Grind’ community has promised me.
I genuinely enjoy being active which I feel like I deprived myself of so long ago while grappling with how my body looked/changed. In my last semester of college, I felt like I was finding my sweet spot between a 1-credit, pass/fail yoga class, going to the gym whenever I felt like it, a steady supply of decent food provided by my meal plan, and the freedom to sleep past 7 am on most mornings since I had already done most of my more demanding coursework. Now I’m in charge of buying and/or cooking all of my meals which is way more expensive than I would have previously imagined, my gym is closed and I am the worst yoga teacher I have ever had. An absolute uphill battle.
Experiencing this, it initially unsettled me how the writers of the show opted out of the rhetoric that Diane’s weight gain was an inherent battle and instead insisted on rhetoric that promoted the freedom of acceptance/neutrality regarding the change. There was little evidence of the internal struggle that I have with myself every day, she did gain weight and everything was relatively fine. She didn’t have to justify her weight and no one who loved her asked her to. And she still did what she loved. I used to work 9-hour days and get paid in crumbs. I’m writing now because if I’m gonna live on crumbs I may as well take another cue from Diane and do what I love. I can’t look back and I can’t make myself into past me, I can only learn from her and try not to take her mistakes for granted. That’s one of the hardest lessons I’m learning over and over again. I feel like I always lose sight of it. It’s so easy to look at the past because we think we know exactly how it was and what it was all for, if it was for anything at all.
Sometimes I really believe I knew what made me happy and how I lost it but in reality, I can barely see the present clearly. And if I’m being honest I was not happy even when I was smaller, I abused my body regularly. We have a vague idea of what five years ago was really like, but we can only remember so much. Now I feel relieved that they made Diane fat in the way that they did because it gave me an example of what to look forward to and what it means to try and find an equilibrium that isn’t based on what I think my happiness or success should be. The show’s ending gave me hope for a future where the past didn’t have to be something that could fit perfectly in my camera roll, Insta-feed, or Memoir. A future not based on a tipping point between pride and shame. Diane had to grow. She had to change. She had to try making different kinds of choices. There was no outrageous ladder of success and happiness to climb. While I feel that there are threads of Diane’s story that didn’t quite meet perfectly at the end (no story ends perfect, does it ?), she still felt like a real person to me, like someone I’d like.
I wanted to find myself in that place on the rooftop, still telling myself I’m quitting cigarettes or whatever my equivalent of cigarettes is, probably giant iced coffees that make me jittery. But seeing Diane on the roof didn’t feel like pressure to change but encouragement, it felt like acceptance. I could see myself expanded rather than folded up like a secret, painting over myself with ideas about who I thought I wanted to be like. About who I thought I should have been. It occurred to me that who I could be was still possible every day. That being the gangly child in pictures and the tired adult in the bathroom mirror had more to do with being honest than any kind of difference between them.
Natalia is a writer aspiring to write professionally, and currently blogging at theproblemwithlemons.wordpress.com. Click Here for more of her work.
