Reminder: There are no rules in loving yourself.

I'm going to be kind of vague and I'm not going to name names or throw up links, but in my internetting travels it seems to me that there are a preponderance of stories lately about women who are embracing their bodies and loving those bodies, dammit, which is great...except that the message is quite loud like an air raid siren that the loving of said bodies only became possible after losing 10, 20, 30 pounds or more. Or "eating healthier and exercising".

Let me reiterate (and I'll have to be quick about it because the Bejeweled Blitz is calling and it's looking like the Midwest is about to have its ass kicked by snow and winter and it's really bumming me out having to mentally prepare for it): YOU DO NOT HAVE TO MEET A CERTAIN WEIGHT OR SIZE IN ORDER TO LOVE YOURSELF. Your belly, your thighs, your ass, your arms, every single frickety-fracking inch of you is eligible for embracing and enjoying and rocking and locking and popping RIGHT NOW. The crap magazines and all the other horseshit fiascoes online love to sell body acceptance, but their brand of body acceptance is only applicable to certain kinds of bodies - ergo, they aren't truly advocating for ALL of us though they do so enjoy wearing out their rotator cuffs trying to pat themselves on the back for being so edgy and progressive.

We're about to go headlong into the New Year's Resolution season. All we're going to be seeing, reading, and hearing for the next month or so is a fuckton of body-hating, self-loathing bullshit in the media and most likely from friends and family. I think the most important resolution any of us can make is to continue to be visible, continue to be seen, continue to live lives that so many seem determined to prove to be wrong, defective, ugly, faulty. We must dig in our heels and keep pushing back, keep pushing back not just for ourselves, but for everybody in every body.

Self-acceptance is not a treehouse club that only allows certain members. It is not a limited time offer for gold card holders. It's for all of us. Read more on this article...

This is who I am.

You know, I was all souped up to write a blog today that was full of anger at myself because I went clothes shopping and I was horrified at what I saw in the mirror. I was horrified at the shape my body’s in – the literal shape of it. I’m not the hourglassy big-boobed, big-assed fat girl with curves that go kablam, I’m the deathfat small boobed, big-bellied, backfatted flat-assed fat girl with curves that go in all the wrong ways. I was horrified as the clerk at the Lane folded my new pants and I swear they sounded like a truck stop gigantor American flag that is the size of a football field unfurling. It didn’t help matters that I was shopping with my inbetweenie sister who was able to buy all sorts of cute things and all the while bitching about what a fat hog she was.

Things didn’t improve when I got home and went to a message board and read posts filled with hate and disdain for people like me, people fat like me, people that purport to be my friend or friendly with me spewing this hate and disdain but would be the first to screech, “But I don’t mean youuuuu!” And the hate and disdain was just so fucking casual, so infuriatingly breezy, because me and others like me are subhuman, barely worth the oxygen we inhale, barely worth the space we take up unless we proclaim that we are “trying” and we’re so very sorry for sullying your view and we promise that one day, we’ll be thin, honest. But they don’t mean me, they never mean me, except when they mean me and shake their heads at how unhealthy I must be and how miserable I must be and how I’d be such a better person if I just wasn’t so...you know.



And I bought it all for a while, I was deep inside my head and going through all the familiar rigmarole of what I “needed” to do to “get back on the horse” and “exert some self-control”. Then I took a wander over to Jezebel and read this article and naturally, this paragraph leapt out, grabbed me by the shoulders, and gave me a good shake:

Large women are a lot like killer whales. Desperate for attention, consume massive amounts of raw fish, and need to be taught right from wrong on a pretty regular basis. By sleeping with a chubby gal who thinks that her double D breasts are, in any way, attractive is just fooling herself. If breasts, regardless of size, are propped up by a sumo-sized stomach, it doesn't count as sexy and by looking at them you're just re-enforcing bad behavior. Do you want to be part of the problem? Or part of the solution to try to get fat girls off of the streets and on a one way sewage barge to Australia.

The hate’s kind of breathtaking, isn’t it? And it’s hate that’s acceptable, appropriate, and oh so hiiiilarious because we’re subhuman, remember? Thing is, it’s not having the effect the epic, epic pile of excrement was hoping for. This sort of loathsome nonsense, coupled with the loathsome half-truths vomited out by the ill-informed only fuels my fire, it only makes me work harder, and be more determined that I will not accept that I am only as worthy as my size will allow. I will work as long as I have to so people aren’t consumed with self-hate like I was, like so many of us were, like so many of us still are, burning years of our lives swearing it’ll be better, different, do-able the second we’re thin, pretty/handsome, perfect.

I’m sure I’m repeating myself – I’d wager that I’ve said a variation on this a good...bazillionty times since the inception of this blog. I’ll repeat this message until I fall over dead because it’s a message that needs to be screamed on an endless loop, screamed into a din that is at the volume of jet engines, and maybe I’ll lose my voice before I make any significant dent in the utter insanity that is gripping our society. But I will continue writing what I write and saying what I say and believing what I believe because I don’t think I have a choice in the matter.

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