Isolated kinship

It's often said that fat people feel no kinship or identification with each other but that isn't so. Fat people often spontaneously commiserate with one another.

I remember this starting as a child. In more recent years way before fat acceptance, it was in confusion and puzzlement. There must be more to this, something just isn't right, it just can't be like just they're saying. What are they missing from the picture?

Fat people's situation seems to show that a kinship based solely around the kind of negative tropes wrought on us all, doesn't make for feelings of deep connection.

Although they say, misery loves company, it often seems more to imbue people with a sense of being isolated in their own private hell. When you feel in the wrong it's as if you're the only or worst one in the world.

That must be in the nature of intense negativity, it repels. Only when there is some positive spark does any real sense of connection or togetherness occur. Feeling in sympathy and in sync with others makes you feel blended in, you are no longer just one but part of a greater whole which has it's own dynamic and that can become an entity in itself. More than the sum of its parts.

When you are artificially lessened and reduced.You shrink inward and away from others. That process of a connected extra dimension doesn't occur. You do share that sense of disconnection though.

I was a bit surprised by those who say they don't know how to raise fat acceptance with fat people, now they've seen the light. I was raising it and others were raising it to me as a matter of course. At some point if anyone said something like "Oh, my diet's hard" I'd respond, "More than usual?"

That's usually all it takes for it all to come pouring out, the things so often unsaid. People say what they feel they're expected to say and if they know they don't have to, they can make it a choice for once. I don't know if I ever met anyone who hasn't chosen to discuss the facts, even some who've lost a lot of weight and are still in the "honeymoon phase".
  
With any aim or ambition you have to work for doubts are inevitable, despite those who succeed against the odds with their "I never doubted it for a minute". I rarely have no doubts. You set them aside in order to pursue your designated course. It's an act of will(power).

It's only after time when you see how things pan out and aren't working the way you assumed, that those questions creep back in. I say questions rather than doubts, because it's true. An extreme suspension of disbelief is required. It is therefore seen as a meter of good faith, so that was one of the last things to go. Doubt is the enemy.

Extreme negativity finds fellow feeling mostly in an individuated loneliness rather than connection beyond the self to a larger corp or group. Even when you get together that is carried with you until you rid yourselves of that extent of negativity.