Caught up in being myself

Instant reaction to a this comment from someone not enamoured of the fat female form, check it out if you feel up to it;

Diets, counting calories, jealousies and insecurities. Thin is better. Much better. And those jabs she occasionally gets about being “too thin”? Silent deflection, resting assured the critic fervently wishes she could crawl inside her skin.

Urrggh, can you imagine desiring someone would write that about you? Unless she has other needs that he's satisfying I'd re-consider.

The most obvious thing that comes to mind when I read things like this specifically "Thin is better", is the rather sad conflation of what the cultural hegemony declares best and what is by an objective consideration, best.

My heart sinks a little when I'm reminded of this aspect of our pride trying to reassert itself, idiotically. If we can fool ourselves with the pretence that those who influence us are righteous, we don't feel quite so done over by them. We can pretend we have not been outmanoeuvred, but have converged on the essence of what is right.

I cannot pretend I've always surmounted it myself, any capacity to delude myself on that one has been shattered by unpicking my torrid fat hating odyssey. Oh come on! I'm allowed to laugh, I was it's punchline after all.

Apart from what Arwyn identified as the creepy way his 'admiration' for his girlfriend is strangely erasing of her-think of those who cry because they think they are too ugly, for this ugliness. What is arresting is I get absolutely no sense of her as a person, even though I know the type of person he's referring too. They come in all creeds colours and races, genders too. Those who are profoundly at ease with themselves and achieve in all directions.

Rarely have I met any of them who would be so ungenerous and petty as he described. Although it more likely as she is with such an arse.

Maybe that's another reason why there's no sense of her as an individual, whatsoever. If she exists at all, she is on a pedestal, the kind that is genuinely off putting and makes some people I know get a bit wicked with being put in that position.

Representing any type for good or ill can amount to the same trap in the end, although obviously being the bad is worse, it's not without it's compensations and a lot of the unhappiness is starting from the assumption that what's supposed to be better is, his tone is an indicator of what this can do to the human spirit, it is truly ugly. What's funny is, he's fully aware of it himself;

But if not for her size 2 size all the rest of her attributes wouldn’t open the doors and get her the treatment she recieves [sic].

It's essentially the same route to freedom for both those representing ascribed goodness and badness. The refusal to go along with ascribing your merit/demerit to characteristics privileged by TPTB.

I've not spent too much time worrying about being beautiful, I think size has probably deflected that a lot. Although I've wished to have a body that looks like my version of x's, I've also wish more to recover the ability and courage to think for myself, rather than receive thought. I'd always favour intelligence over beauty and even that doesn't seem like the big deal it was. A side effect of self acceptance to some degree.

Even when younger, I always realised that if I was going to enjoy the pleasures of life, I couldn't see why beauty would make any difference. Sex is all very well, but how is an orgasm going to be stronger or sweeter because you could make the cover of Vogue? Not matter how many people insisted, I couldn't see a connection.

And yeah, I've felt 'beautiful' myself and celebrated that being just as good. I've thought about what that means and it means, just being, without quarter.

I genuinely sympathize when someone feels their life has been blighted irrevocably because they are not attractive, but that's more because they've been caught up with expectations, rather than wear their looks with an air of refusal. Perfection is not needed, even if their is pain under the defiance, the resistance after a while can supplant it. When you see someone have a genuine go at resistance with a style and grace they may not see, you know they're probably going to be alright.

And that's the tragedy of that missed train, missing the beauty you can/do have for the beauty you cannot and do not. That formula tends to be a fail.

I've always managed, even though it has been sometimes obscured, to retain a sense of my body as an operational unit, and when it gets too much, I get back inside and shut the door on aesthetics.

It's not that I cannot see I just suspend judgement and look, like in meditation when you observe your thoughts and don't comment on them.

Without wishing to protesting too much, I have to say I've no more interest in being her, than I have in finding people too thin.

I really hope that she and others like her are capable of allowing for the fact that she is not the template of all we wish to be, I'd hate to think she wasn't. There's a part of me that pities anyone who thinks that everyone wants to be them because they are acceptable and are status quo approved.

Yes, there may be a lot of people she encounters who feel there or there abouts, there are a lot of people who accept that deal of worth defined by 'authority'. Who collude with happiness through that kind of validation until they can no longer see past it. That is their resentment jettisoned their own, for that which has come and you've got it. That this seems like 'everyone' speaks to how widespread is our insecurity and learned mistrust of ourselves.

So desperately do we cling, the mere hope of fulfilment becomes fetishized and we cling to that sometimes more ferociously than if we actually got closer to the 'ideal'. So pathetic do we become when we lose faith in our innate capacities and sell ourselves short.

Even when I was trapped in a pit of self loathing, I never wished to exchange places with anyone else, believe me I've tested this. This body, this soul if you wish to call it that is my route for good or ill, I wish to see it through. Being someone else would just give me a different set of problems. If I wanted to be less aware of the feelings of others like fatphobe sockpuppet, I could cultivate that in any body or soul.

I want to restore myself to a place of allowing myself to be the best I can be and I'm OK with whatever that is. It's hard enough wanting to be a version of yourself that feels true and empowered, let alone wanting to be an actual other person.

Call it an instinctive article of faith with the creation that I am. What's the point in being a unique individual if you wish to be some other one? No matter how we reject this one, there's a no exchange policy on each of us.

I sincerely hope he has misread her though, my suspicions were aroused her saving up so fervently, to flee? If so, go Blondie! Go and shine with someone who sees you, not a jumble of what you represent.

By the way, here's how to boast properly with wit and style.