Mutual disinterest

In the same way that some of us in FA are not interested in the world of dieters, they equally are not interested in us. It is mutual. This isn't easily evident, a lot of people complain about the need for a middle way between FA activists who don't care about what FA sceptics think and vice versa. But there has never really been true engagement.

When a lot of us fatties were in the fat hating weight loss diet camp, we 'knew' we were doing bad, but we didn't feel like we were bad people. We thought the fact that we so readily acknowledged our 'badness' meant that it was clear that we were good people with a sin problem ready to reform. Not the epitome of that sin.

As the noose has tightened around fat people's necks and the experience of diet fail continued, we recognised that we really looked bad, we felt bad too. But I don't think fat people felt that others actually felt that underneath it all, we weren't good people.

By the time I got involved with FA, I was fully aware of the disengagement. My motivation for getting involved could be summed up two-fold. I wanted to evict everyone from our psychic space, that is, I wanted to be part of personifying fat people in the real rather than as the caricature of obesiness.

I recognised that we had been squeezed out of commenting on our own condition. I used to say, fatness is about fat people, if it's not about us it is nothing to do with us, it is to do with the creators of the myth.

So how am I supposed to 'care' about something that has nothing to do with me? How do we engage with that? I ask you about your life and you answer and I dismiss all your answers. How can you 'converse' with someone who refuses to accept your sentience? Yet keeps asking you about yourself. If you don't wish to know, don't ask, don't keep asking then claim you don't believe a person.

That's your problem isn't it?

Are you alive and in this body or are they? Those who wish to control your reality are the ones who've disengaged with you, they do that when they want their version of your experience to replace your actual ones.

What's worse though is why when shoring up their construct it is insisted you must go along, you must parrot and speak the lines they give you?

In other words, without the complete erasure of fat people from their own selves, they cannot construct their fantasy. How do you communicate with that?