Without love, we lose the ability to possess a proper identity. Within love there is a constant confirmation of ourselves. ~Alain de Botton
When I was a girl, I made a profound error. Between my earnest little soul and whoever knows what, I'd got it into my head that people are so selfish, self centered and self absorbed, naturally, and that I'd better not bother with my ego or I'd become horrible.
I should concentrate my attentions elsewhere, on being good as it would be needed there. I was wrong! It seems the ego needs a surprising amount of maintenance, cultivation and above all protection.
Live and learn.
Alain de Botton's quote speaks to how absorbing fatness from the outside in, has robbed us of identity then love and vice versa. That curtailed and suppressed our own true responses, to the extent that they were not able to develop or even, appear.
FA is a reaction to that surpression, our induced passivity and where that and the hostile defining have led us. It has not restored a self defined fatness, beyond this, yet.
That is not a putdown of fat acceptance, but a recognition of the extent to which the view has interrupted a distinct view of our own.
The demands of answering to others meant our own connection to our feelings has faded and a fat identity is in a state of arrested development.
That lost (self) love has created an emptiness at the heart of our thinking and means we have circled around a shallow opposing of what has come at us.
Which is also, inside us. It is not so much internalized fat hate as we are part of the collective consciousness of default fat phobia.
That was where we truly "let [part of] ourselves go".
Use self or lose self.
Even those who have a relatively positive view of themselves as fat people, are part of the same, there is no escape. It's not enough to not hate yourself or your fatness, you actually have to think without quarter and I've yet to come across anyone who really does.
Self hatred is on top of that and is more in the fighting of weight and the yearning not to be what you are, not an admiration of thinness/ desire to be thin.
A lot of people will probably disagree with that, but I don't see why admiring other body types and and envying them means you have to count yourself any less.
It's the striving without respect of pain or cost that both creates and demonstrates the extent of your hate. In time, if we go about it the right way, we will rediscover and change that, restoring creating, getting in touch with our own sensibilities.
Before any expression or response to outside orders had to be 100% affirmative, anything less than that was labelled as the cause of our fatness. I'm not talking about mere objection on our part, I mean any thoughts that were not what they should be. Gung ho, proving we were committed to becoming something else.
We had to view ourselves as temporary, always ready to "move on" at any point.
We are the disease so we effectively had to fight an invention of our inner degeneracy, which turned out to be us.
There could be no middle ground, no righteous, balanced, fat view. No conversation or communication, only complete obedience any thinking which does not totally agree is non-compliance.
Full stop.
Either pepole believe in method, or in (the biology of ) people and no-one, including ourselves chose to really believe in us.
In modern society's framework of self definition and expression, this is unusual, I cannot think of anyone who matches it, although if they did, would I notice from the outside?
This unprecedented hegemony, between inner and outer worlds made one whole unbroken consciousness was conveyed using the influence of science.
Science finds truth and brings about answers with that. As we have all gotten used to it doing this, it has started a dynamic which can be reversed in our minds to our answers or wishes can create science, or truth.
Trust in its truth finding has made it powerful; "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely".
Our challenge is demanding, what we have to be freed from is a view that is as much inside as outside us. We need to relearn how to feel about ourselves as fat people as we do about ourselves as individuals, as a continuous flow.
No split or switch.
We have not so much internalized as replaced what would be a naturally occurring view with something else, which wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't the view of those who are not fat and are hostile rather than objective or curious. It is not only their view, it is all their phobias and hang ups. Irrational fearful, illogical unreality, distorting any real observation or meaning to lies.
Removing one that is equally inside us as out. But it isn't fully realised yet and that is the real difficulty, even more than the resistance of others.
Of course they are resisting, that is the extremeness and narrowness of their chosen position, they have nowhere to go, there is no give in their stance. If they were going to do anything else but resist, they would not have erased our view in the first place.
The way things are now is more or less the only way that can serve the crusade. The decisions cannot be others because of that, crusaders will just have to reconcile themselves to our efforts, we cannot appeal to them.
What we have to decide is whether we really want that, or not.
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