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I won’t say that hating our bodies is a universal experience, because I know that it’s not, but it is a pretty common one. The problem with a lot of the rhetoric around the whole “love and accept yourself unconditionally” ideology — popular and awesome-feeling though the words may sound — is that it doesn’t leave much space for individual realities, complicated as they are. There are many reasons why loving your body may occasionally be impossible. It happens.
Allowing yourself to then feel like crap about your apparent lack of perfect loving joyfulness in your every molecule is self-defeating. I prefer to advocate for acceptance, because acceptance doesn’t place a value — positive or negative — on our bodies, or our bodily parts. Love can be fickle, but acceptance is not. Your body, and all its little idiosyncrasies and annoyances, exists. You cannot blink the frustrating parts away, and you cannot wish them into oblivion. If you are able to change them, it will probably take time. So you may as well accept them, as they are, right now.
"Lesley Kinzel, SURPRISE! I Don’t Love My Body All the Time (And That’s OK) -
"The reality is that fat people are often supported in hating their bodies, in starving themselves, in engaging in unsafe exercise, and in seeking out weight loss by any means necessary. A thin person who does these things is considered mentally ill. A fat person who does these things is redeemed by them. This is why our culture has no concept of a fat person who also has an eating disorder. If you’re fat, it’s not an eating disorder — it’s a lifestyle change."Lesley Kinzel (via simmerdown)
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"I’ve observed before that many of us kick into self-loathing mode super easily because it is, at least, a familiar sort of misery. Self-loathing is a sensation that tends to block out all other feelings; it is literally overwhelming and as such it can be useful for those times when we don’t want to feel angry or sad or some other outward-facing negative emotion. Self-loathing works great for this purpose because it enables us to redirect our bad feelings inward, at ourselves, where they can’t hurt others, thereby eliminating the need for us to deal with anyone else — in the short term, at least."
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» An Open Letter To The Fat Girl - By Winona Dimeo-Ediger
Dear Fat Girl,
Last week, I saw an overweight news anchor respond to a bully with such power and confidence that it made me cry. It also made me want to write about my own experience of being a fat girl. I almost wrote this letter to my younger self: a deeply sad, chubby fourth grader who endured horrific taunts from classmates at recess, and even worse abuse in her own head when she’d go home and look in the mirror. But then I realized that there is something about these two little words, “fat” and “girl,” that denotes a shared life experience. If you’ve ever been a fat girl, you know what it’s like to have a body that feels like an enemy, to suppress your own voice because you think it doesn’t count, to be informed with a sigh that you have “such a pretty face,” as if it’s a bit of a tragedy. Here are some things I wish someone would have told me, back when I felt so hopeless.
You don’t have to be funny. You can be funny, and you might find that cracking jokes helps ease and express the pain you keep inside, but don’t feel that your role in the world is limited to the goofy sidekick. The media will show you that this is the only way a fat girl is allowed to be, but trust me: your personality and your relationships are much deeper and more complex than that.
You don’t have to cover up your body. No clothing should be off limits to you simply because your body is a different shape than the women who wear them in the magazines. Fashion can be a fun and powerful way to express yourself, so experiment with colors and fabrics and styles and find out what makes you feel beautiful. Wear whatever you want. Don’t apologize.
On the other side of the equation, you don’t have to strip down to make a statement. I felt guilty for years because I was too shy to wear a bikini.Showing off my round belly at the beach would be so brave, I thought. I could really start a body revolution if I did that! Then one day I realized that I’m naturally a pretty modest person. Forget the stretch marks on my stomach — I’m not sure I would ever feel comfortable in a bikini. And you know what? That’s OK. Fat or thin, your body is yours, and you get to do exactly what you want with it.
Remember that the word “fat” is not, by definition, synonymous with worthlessness, laziness, weakness or lack of intelligence. As an adjective it simply means “having excess flesh.” If you can get to a place where the word doesn’t feel so loaded, that’s good. It will make you less afraid of it, and help you realize that you can simultaneously be fat and smart, driven, beautiful, energetic, confident and unique.
If you can’t unload the word “fat,” that’s OK too. I’m 27, and if someone called me fat today, I would probably cry. But then I’d think about the kind of small-minded person who is threatened by a woman taking up a few extra inches of space in the world, and another one-syllable adjective would come to mind: sad.
Resist the temptation to separate your head from your body. Not literally, but in the way you conceptualize the two. It’s surprisingly easy to start viewing your body as a separate entity from yourself, a distant enemy you are always scheming to diminish or destroy. People will help you by saying things like “You have such a pretty face.” Celebrities will help you by losing weight and telling magazines “I got my body back!” as if their slightly larger body was actually possessed by an alien they valiantly defeated. The reality is your body and your mind and your spirit are so interconnected that you can’t really ever separate them, and in the process of trying, you risk losing yourself.
Don’t demonize or idolize the skinny girls. For years I literally thought my life would be completely perfect if I could take a pair of scissors and trim 20 pounds off my midsection, like a butcher cuts the fat off a roast. Then one night at a party in high school I found a skinny friend of mine crying because a boy had called her a cinnamon stick. My heart broke for her, and I realized that our society’s toxic relationship with weight hurts all women. The only way we can deal with it — and ultimately change it — is by sticking together.
Don’t think that being fat means you deserve less of anything. For years, I believed that carrying around a few extra pounds meant I wasn’t entitled to fulfilling friendships, romantic love, emotional complexities, or even my own opinion. As a fat girl, I thought I had to settle. I kept my cruelest tormentor as one of my closest friends. I didn’t speak up when I knew the answer in class. I didn’t ask for what I wanted in any area of my life. What a waste.
Don’t wait to start your life until you get skinny. Someday you’ll look back on those excuses, whether you’re skinny or not, and realize it wasn’t your weight that held you back, it was cowardice. It makes just as much sense to say, “I’ll apply for my dream job when I lose 10 pounds” as it does to say, “I’ll apply for my dream job when I grow three inches taller.” Stop hiding behind your body. Figure out what you want, and go get it.
Think about the fact that one of the worst things you can be in our society is a fat girl. Think about why people are so insistent that women only take up a very small amount of space. Think about who is making these rules. Think about why we try so hard to follow them. Think about how different the world would be if we took all the energy we expend hating our bodies and trying to shrink ourselves down to an arbitrary size, and just lived the life we wanted to live. Just think about it.
Love,
Winona
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» It's Been A Tough Week for Fat Kids in the Media - By S.E. Smith
This has been a real banner week for hassling fat kids in the media. The Obesityepidemiczorz scaremongering has been spilling over onto kids for a while, but Tuesday dealt a real triple-whammy (with cheese on top).
First, we had military officials informing us that fat children are a national security problem.
Then, we had the BBC speculating about why it is that parents “let” their children get fat.
And out of Minnesota, a campaign telling fat kids they’re an epidemic.
WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE FAT CHILDREN?!
Here’s the thing, though: shame-based campaigns really, really don’t work. This has been pretty well established by this point, and it includes kids as well as adults. In fact, lecturing kids about how their gross fatness is RUINING EVERYTHING is directly harmful. As Marilyn Wann pointed out last year, the rise in rhetoric about “childhood obesity” has contributed to bullying on not just an individual but institutional level, and it’s led to a rise in suicide attempts among children and teens, some of which have been successful.
Funny thing. When much of the feedback you hear about yourself and your body is that you are a completely disgusting waste of space, you tend to internalize that. And you start to wonder if maybe the best solution to that would be to remove yourself from the equation. Can’t be an epidemic if you’re not around, you know.
The military has been making obesity a cause for quite some time, complaining that it contributes to a decline in force readiness and has forced it to lower enlistment standards to accept fatties. It’s even started holding pre-boot-camp fat camps to get people within the specifications for enlistment. Furthermore, it claims, it spends substantial sums annually on treating soldiers and family members with “obesity-related health conditions.”
And the military points the finger at high-calorie foods in schools like candy bars and chips with a rather colorful analogy:
The amount of junk food purchased and consumed within schools in the U.S. in a single year is the equivalent to 90,000 tons of candy bars, or more than the weight of an aircraft carrier.
Now you’re not just fat and gross: You’re destroying the fabric of American society as we know it, leaving us vulnerable to invasion or terrorist takeover or who knows what. When the empire falls, you have only yourself to blame, fat kids!
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» I Have Thousands of Transactional Friends, But I Don't Know If I Have Any Real Friends - By Mandy Stadt
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” That’s one of my favorite quotes from Annie Dillard. I think about it all the time.
And now I would like to tell you a little bit about how I spend my days.
But first, here’s years and years of psychotherapy boiled down into a nutshell. Essentially, if you grow up in a dysfunctional home where some of the love is conditional (meaning: mommy and daddy have a lot of issues and, as a child, you are scared to assert your own feelings and boundaries because it’s pretty clear that you need to mostly take care of mommy and daddy) you develop something called “attachment wounding.” You also develop something known as the “looking glass theory of self-esteem.” I’m fascinated by the Looking Glass Theory. Because it nails me, and then it nails me some more.
At its core (and I’m not a shrink, but I do hope one day to interview Dina Lohan over virgin cocktails as Dr. Phil nuzzles in between us), the theory boils down to a few basic points, starting with problems stemming from child rearing.
1. The healthy version of childhood looks like this: You communicate to a child that he or she can express himself and fail and be “bad” or whatever, and that he or she will still be loved unconditionally.
2. If the love is meted out more conditionally (you communicate to the child that he or she must perform, he or she must take care of mommy and daddy, he or she must make sure mommy and daddy aren’t mad), then the child often suffers from attachment wounding and, as an adult, develops a somewhat warped greediness for love and affection. (Read: Comedians. Strippers. Screenwriters.)
Grown-ups seeking to subconsciously heal unresolved childhood issues through their adult relationships are grubby for that unconditional love they didn’t feel as a child because they were too busy worrying about mommy and daddy. They are needy. Starved. And, often, don’t have an inherent sense of trust in their own value and lovability — and thereby look to others to define their “goodness” or “badness.”
That’s me.
I’ve lived most of my life with the Looking Glass Theory of Self-Esteem. When my therapist explained it to me, it blew my whole world open. It was like someone saying I had food stuck inside my teeth — except the food was a completely fucked way of thinking and my teeth was my entire fucking life.
The Looking Glass Theory of Self-Esteem: You are constantly guessing what someone else thinks of you, and then you determine your own self-esteem accordingly.
Think about that. You don’t even know what someone else is actually “feeling.” Because that’s fucking impossible. Someone could have just gotten robbed and beaten up and then they are rude to you, but then you take a “guess” of what that person thinks of you (he’s being mean to me, so I guess he doesn’t like me), and then you determine your own self-worth according to that skewed sick pendulum (“I am not a good person”).
Conversely, if you get some praise — if you have this malady — you can become very greedy for that. Makes sense, right? Because if you are using other people to constantly determine how you feel about yourself, then you are constantly desperate for that praise, validation and affection. And hello, for me: workaholism.
When people point things out to me, if it hits home and I am ready to hear it (versus that therapist in 2006 who kept trying to get me to see that it was not “normal” to blackout multiple times from drinking and so I, boom, stopped seeing her), my life will change. Patterns get disrupted — in a wonderful way. Because I can then be aware of some of the sickness within myself that is driving poor choices that lead to more abuse and more pain and more repeated patterns that are not so much what I want.
Which might just be the world’s longest prelude to why I have no friends. I mean, sure. I have friends. I have like 5,000 Facebook friends. So popular, right? It’s just that many of them are all hyper-ambitious workaholics just like me. Some of them are even probably out there seeking addictive validation to prove their worth and lovability via their careers the same way I am.
And the choices that I make every day to spend so much time on my work — from morning to night and during dreams, sometimes, too — precludes me from having a lot of real on-the-fly see-you-at-the-club-whatever-the-fuck-people-are-saying-nowadays hangout time. The kind of time where you develop new friendships and cultivate organic relationships where you might talk on the phone and see each other frequently. A woman I know in comedy once told me, “Spend your time trying to get famous or fucked.” And I know what she means. I did that for many years. And then it all became so miserable and empty and bleak that I needed some kind of a spiritual connection to remind me of why I wanted to exist in the first place. I wanted to give love, and I wanted to receive love.
All of this is written because on Friday, I decided to reach out to an old friend to see if she would hang out, because I wanted to be around someone who has known me for many, many years. I asked her to see a movie after my first therapy appointment back in New York. But she is really busy and tired and works a lot, too. The time was too late. And I can’t handle rejection, or I can, but not very well. My first impulse is for the Pride Monster within to just blacklist her forever and be, like, “I don’t need your fucking affection.”
So instead of telling her that this hurt my feelings and opening up that can of worms, I just went to a movie by myself. On Friday night. And it was all right. It was OK, I guess. Small windows of time. It can be really hard to Lifebook your friendships with the people who’ve known you the longest and most intimately — and sometimes you’re so spent by the end of the week that you don’t have the mental capacity to let someone new or somewhat new in. So there you are.
The other thing is that I would rather spend time by myself than spend time with people where it’s not quite right. I can only handle so much inauthenticity in one day or one week. It just psychically drains me. So that’s why I am selective and protective about whom I let in to the precious inner circle of truly knowing me. Where it’s not just Song-and-Dance Mandy. I don’t want to fight to make things work in my personal life. I’m kind of done trying to sell myself to people. If I’m important, your actions will show it. Not when you want something. Just because I exist. (Unconditionally? Attachment wounding, oh shit.)
Many people who want to hang out with me are people who want to be written about. Or they want to fuck me. They too are trying to get famous or get fucked.
I don’t judge that or anything. Both are very worthy goals. But I suppose, maybe like the recognition of some of the battles I fight with that Looking Glass Theory of Self-Esteem, it’s helpful for me to see this food in my teeth. That I really do not have as many true friends as I would like. I do think a lot of people like me, and I think a lot of people love me, too, but I think that living in New York can be very hard. It is one person trying to jumpstart their career as a deejay after another. It is one friend who is a regular talking head on TV after another. It is a procession of transactions. An embarrassment of riches of achievement. Little stabs at attempting to achieve immortality in work and in professional status and in branding.
And good for all those hustlers. Hey, man. I wrote the book on it. I’m a complete contradiction in terms. I once had an editor at The Washington Post, a brilliant guy named Joel Garreau, say, “I never thought of Mandy Stadtmiller without the words ‘cognitive dissonance’.” OK. I’ll take that.
And then I’ll write an article about it. Instead of making time to hang out.
Because. How I spent today is — of course — how I am spending my life.
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[TW: SELF HARM]
People don’t wanna be compared to the teenage girl; the teenage girl is hated, teenage girls hate themselves. If you listen to a certain kind of music, or if you express your emotions in a certain kind of way, if you self harm, you write diaries, all those kind of activities are sort of laughed at and ridiculed because they’re associated with being a teenage girl. Even just things like being cripplingly self conscious or overly concerned with our appearance, that’s considered like a teenage girl thing and therefore its ridiculous, it’s stupid, it’s not relevant or legitimate, and you know, what we needed at that age was legitimisation and respect and support but all we got was dismissal and “oh you’re such a teenage girl.”
"Feminism, Education, and the plight of the teenage girl (via grrrlfever)
All this shit goes on, and yet we wonder why young women constantly undervalue themselves and their happiness, struggle with self esteem and body image, and deal with eating disorders or self harm. We can’t ask for it all, people. We can’t ask for a group that is an easy target to make fun of, easy to degrade, easy to laud as something to avoid, and simultaneously act like we’re concerned when more and more of that group begins to show the effects of being constantly hated and devalued. This shit’s gotta end.
(via darlingfauna)
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"But while I don’t hate my body anymore, I can’t say I’m actively loving it all the time either. That wouldn’t be accurate. Not-hating one’s body and loving one’s body are two very different concepts. My relationship with my body is rooted in the most basic idea of acceptance."
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We must shift from a politic of desirability and beauty to a politic of ugly and magnificence. That moves us closer to bodies and movements that disrupt, dismantle, disturb. Bodies and movements ready to throw down and create a different way for all of us, not just some of us.
The magnificence of a body that shakes, spills out, takes up space, needs help, moseys, slinks, limps, drools, rocks, curls over on itself. The magnificence of a body that doesn’t get to choose when to go to the bathroom, let alone which bathroom to use. A body that doesn’t get to choose what to wear in the morning, what hairstyle to sport, how they’re going to move or stand, or what time they’re going to bed. The magnificence of bodies that have been coded, not just undesirable and ugly, but un-human. The magnificence of bodies that are understanding gender in far more complex ways than I could explain in an hour. Moving beyond a politic of desirability to loving the ugly. Respecting Ugly for how it has shaped us and been exiled. Seeing its power and magic, seeing the reasons it has been feared. Seeing it for what it is: some of our greatest strength.
"Mia Mingus Femmes of Color Symposium: Keynote Speech (via thegang)
About me
I exist. You'll find out more about me by reading my blog. Or not, I don't care.
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Small Quill Hoop Earrings by Lonna Jackson (Chippewa/Dakota). Click here to shop.
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After she breaks all cups on the table, Lana settles down for a nap.
