Human Behaviour

I got a bit emotional the other day. In response to someone telling their story of being fat then became slim/mer and the difference it made in the way others treated them. It might have been that the person abruptly stated that they'd been depressed by that difference in reaction.

It's an undersold part of fat people's experience. The unnerving nature of the way people can totally switch reactions to you. Not on the basis of how you're behaving, but of the size of you.

We hear a lot about encouraging nature of peer pressure, the way it incentivizes fat people to forgo the pleasure of meeting their needs, for a higher goal of relieving the discourtesy others choose to direct at them.

That's really what its about in essence. To make the switch the built in imperative of nourishing ones body, to preventing the threat of some kind of assault on your mind. You can see why even if you exclude the ineffectiveness of weight loss dieting on metabolic function, you still have a pretty uphill climb to replace necessity, with what is unnecessary.

It is imperative to remain sane, but will how often will that supplant the desire to continue one's existence?

Anyway, this switching leaves an element of fakery and in authenticity about others that's hard to shake. More than anything, for me anyway, is watching people jumping to orders without questions. Of internalizing them as if they're their own, when they most clearly aren't.

You can start to really question how we actually function in terms of our beliefs, do we really have any? Now, this isn't new. I worked out a while ago that we work on the elders of the tribe pass on knowledge to the rest of us, their subordinates-as above-and we then go about as if no right thinking person could possibly have thought anything else.

These 'elders' can vary, bullies, the charismatically sociopathic, can substitute, I'm thinking of poorer communities where the criminal code of silence reigns despite their outrages. I say criminals though I can't forget a brief and abortive game I thought up when I got a bit harumphy, how the professional classes are just like street gangs.

I'd probably just heard another story about how when some professional is mind numbingly incompetent, to the detriment of those who reliant on them, and is just given a nickname by the rest of their fellows because well, goodness forbid anyone would be struck off for being useless.

Think of what it took to get there!

Usually, we all strive to appear interesting, together, in charge, confident, funny. We put our best foot forward, trying to make out like we are about something. We're in charge of ourselves, we're independent.........thinkers. We may be like ducks, peddling furiously underneath. But we must try to present a calm exterior.

With weight people show you the joins, because they've lost sight of them, themselves. They've lost the capacity for self observation. The elders said they could. Everyone else is doing it, so it becomes less visible.

If could see what you're seeing, they'd be angry with you, to be revealing themselves to you in such a light. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't know this at some level and that is part of the fury they aim at fat people.

Either way, I rather resent having to see them like this. I prefer their good foot and would very much like to see that again.