As queasy as I feel about this blog I have to say when it comes to the meaning of acceptance I feel exactly the same way;
Acceptance means that you perceive reality accurately and consciously acknowledge what you perceive.That's certainly how I feel about acceptance in general and the acceptance bit in "fat acceptance". I must admit I don't know if it sounds wishy washy, but I can't say I care if it does. All the more to lull certain folks into a false sense of security, ha, ha!
I've lived "tough", let's burn fat, let's take charge, let's get in shape. Not only was this IQ sapping, it lead only to the weakness of total obedience with total blame.
Incompatible opposites.
I can't find a way to care about how fat acceptance purportedly sounds. My focus is on what we have not been allowed to or permitted ourselves to perceive and consciously acknowledge.
It never occurred to me that the FA effort was all about changing the minds of others. I assumed for that have a chance of occurring, mine and other fat people's would have to change most of all. I didn't know people think that you have to change the mind of others to change your own.
Since having heard it years ago, I still don't get it.
That might make sense if we were talking about a situation where fat people represented our reality as a matter of course, versus others representing what? Something else to counter that. But even as I set up that premise it collapses, because if we'd done that, we wouldn't be in this position.
What has happened is we've been thoroughly on board with one mind set; other people's. The reasons for that don't actually matter as much as suppressing your own consciousness to replace it with another outside one.
We don't have a complete one of our own and we should have. The real point is nothing worth achieving should have required us to be without it.
The point of FA to me is to uncover, recover, discover that, in a way, for the first time.
I am truly astounded that people think this is what it's like to be on your own side. Slapping the recognition of what a gigantic load of shizz this has been, on top of a mind still in this shape, is supposed to the same as never having had a consciousness of self flattened to virtual invisibility, even to ourselves.
Calling the difference between the peculiarity of being fat and the lack of that peculiarity "thin privilege" is all very well but it simply obscures the fact that fat people have almost split ourselves in two to join others in the same attitude towards us.
Thin people aren't so much privileged, so much as more normal. It isn't normal to want to be something else so badly that you refuse to acknowledge your current form. Their privilege is not having been formed, directed and have lived this way-not because of the celebration of being slim.
Being defined as a thin body with a fat disease on it, listening to people talking about how they "feel fat" and how "mental illness" requires a pathological terror that the person might be fat.
Imagine if you thought you were thin, would you be terrified and respond to that terror by eating yourself senseless? Fat is awful, fat is bad. Shit, even when folks are not supposedly in their right minds still manage to uphold fat hating jazz. It reminds me of one of the eternal protests of Black People.
Why is it other people are never ignorant enough not to hate?
If you are on your own side and you can't get anywhere, yes I can see how you can say society has to change, but that takes for granted that you recognize your own existence. That is having/needing a double consciousness-which is where you recognise the fictionalized version of false universality of how to live would be the death of you; if you aren't in the right class or aren't the right race or gender etc.,
We've never really had a double consciousness. We have the faux universal consciousness, we have the if you just do what slim people do, you'll be slim. We don't have the what are you talking about? The are you telling me my life?
This is our normal that is how we are how we are, doing what slimz do in other words, being. We are just fat whilst doing it, therefore requiring us to be slim requires us to know way more about being human than we know.
About certain aspects of human physiology especially.
This for me epitomizes the state living the 'obese' construct shapes your mind into. That is why I'm here, to reject that, to accept what I know to be and refuse to be persuaded to disavow it as before.
I am as human and need to be as human as anyone. And that even if I could achieve thinness through said route, I wouldn't want it because I'm not prepared to be subhuman for anything. I cannot tolerate it. I'm not prepared to become someone who disgusts myself to do it. Not because I'm boo hooing about my fat thighs, but because I hate bullying and the politics of it-fascism. I detest having to mindlessly obey authority because it's authority, despite what happens.
Just because it won't show, because our 'betters' are saying, its all right to keep deluding yourselves because we're on board with it ourselves.
I'm not here because I give a shit about what slim people might think about fat people, what brought me to this place was finally realizing the value of me, of us and our experience; even if it didn't accord with what was acceptable or permissible to others, no matter who they were. No matter their back up, their kudos, their validation, the colour of their coats, whatever.
None of them were going to dictate reality to me anymore, none of them were going to tell me my life any more because I am living it, not them.
We are living it, not anyone else.
WE
Not other people. They don't have the final say in what we did, what happened when we did it and how it felt, subjectively to us. And if that doesn't match any "objective" assessment, that is a matter for rational investigation, not stigma, denial and erasure.
I don't believe in them over me anymore. I believe in me. I believe in us.
Whatever that's called.
*Apologies for not enough reading before posting.
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