Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Everyone's got issues

While I don't want to get into the feminism content behind this comic, I think it really encapsulates the helplessness people feel when they are judged.
One thing this blog has really helped me do is to minimize the amount of times I engage in "Fat talk".  These are the conversations that all of us have had in our lives that usually evolve into who hates themselves the most.  It usually starts with someone making some sort of innocent comment like, "man I feel fat today" and soon everyone is falling over themselves to reassure them that they don't look fat and they look WAY worse than she does.  The first part I don't mind at all, its the second part that turns into a nasty monster that eats away at my self confidence.  I have been working very hard not to scream at skinny people when they bemoan how fat they are, when I feel like I'm the whale in the corner trying not to take up space.  Before I used to get really mad at these people, but then I realized, they are just like me.  They have body image issues too, it just isn't as visible to the rest of us like mine might be.  When I think of these prompts that rapidly devolve into self-hate I realize that everyone has some sort of issue that they are dealing with.  The difficult thing about non-obivous issues is that they are just that, not obivous, and so people constantly invalidate them. It is this invalidation of the non-obivous issues that drive us further into our self hate.

For example, I feel like my weight is an obvious issue that I have to deal with, like the battle of the muffin-top or squeezing into tight shirts, but a not so obvious issue that I deal with is almost crippling low self-esteem.  I'm really good at putting on the face of a confident, awesome person, but I have a really hard time of accepting that I really am that person.  Whenever someone tells me, "No, you can't have low self-esteem.  You always seem so confident", I feel like that is telling a skinny person who truly feels they are fat, "Please, bitch.  You are so not skinny, look at this muffin top I'm rocking, now that's fat."  This invalidation pushes the issue and you find yourself entering into the whose fattest competition.

How often do you engage in Fat Talk?

In an effort to work on my self-esteem, I am working on my body image, both the actual presentation and how I view myself.  To help how I veiw myself, I am going to stay out of the Fat Talk scenario.  I just won't engage, because if I do, all the positive work that I have put in will become buried under new comparisons that I hadn't even thought of.  If someone give me the Fat Talk prompt, I will do my best to stay the hell away form the conversation.  If I must engage, I will keep myself out of it, instead tell the person how beautiful he or she is.  Lastly, I will work on focus on finding what I love about myself, rather than focusing on what I hate about myself.  After all, in the words of the fabulous Ru Paul, "If you don't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?"

No comments:

Post a Comment