Embodiment Switch

Reblog, with edits!

The 'obesity' construct and the demand to be slim forces a fat person to disassociate and become somewhat detached from your own body-i.e. it's not real, it's temporary. And bond with a [slim] version of it that doesn't exist as the real one. We know this.

Following instructions from outside yourself-because your own thoughts are making you fat or what a men's diet club forum calls "fat logic"- a consequence of this unnatural situation is the internal balance of being grounded in yourself goes off.

The general norm is to set standards of behaviour and reaction rooted in the way you are generally treated and expect to be treated. That helps to set an internal standard by which we judge how others ought to be treated. What they should have to put up with. 'Obesity' alters that. Our internal standard becomes the treatment fat people accept for themselves. We couldn't possibly use that as a standard to judge others by.

Removed from a fat context-it would disturb, become sinister and unhinged, often psychopathic in tone. You get used to it, yet you know it. In abstract, it doesn't necessarily seem bad. It would though to judge slim people that way and would to me if I were to judge slim people by that standard too. So we know it is.

We instinctively get used to applying expectations born of how slim people are treated to judge situations and people. This becomes the automatic human standard, one we apply to ourselves too, and yet not.

I suppose the distinction is a little like the way you treat visitors as opposed to the way you treat your family.  I used to say a lot when I first got into FA that fat people have no double consciousness. WRONG. This is sort of one, though its nothing like as profound as that of a Black person or even a female double consciousness. It's more a mental switch than a consciousness.The fact that I overlooked it though, shows how ingrained and unnoticed it is.

The problem comes when we stop participating in the 'obesity' cult. Stop rejecting our own bodies and selves as somehow temporary or unreal. Not immediately but gradually, nature begins to reassert itself as we become (re-)grounded in ourselves. Our minds start to normalize, judgement grounded in our own experience and the standards we've inevitably adapted to.

This causes immediate problems. Cries of not grasping how slim people can have body issues etc., arise. That's not the case. It's more some of these problems which previously loomed as large to us as to them, begin to need a microscope. Because the place of judging them has shifted from an internalized form of their own, to a further distance away from there

Working out acceptable expectations can get interesting. We carry on using to the human [slim] standard, but some of our necessarily blasé attitudes born of facing the most outrageous nastiness can start to bleed into that.

I have this problem big time.

Going back and forth between the chasm that is how we have to think of slim people and how we have to think of ourselves becomes more and more, meaningless, boring, even irritating. It's a standard no longer nourished inside you as it was. And let's face it society has this divide too, in frustratingly plain sight. Which is causing its own issues. I've always wondered why people think shitting on a large minority of the population isn't a threat to democracy, in the sense that people get used to that treatment undermining the ability to perceive infractions.

I know that I can grasp far more of injustice perpetrated on others, than I could before. That is a big shock and I wonder if it's part of the suspicion the left has about fat people as a group.

This pre-post mental aspect of re-embodiment, has always caused a divide amongst fat people, especially the self hating kind, but also amongst many who do get it. It occurrence, degree and how one incorporates its strands are unpredictable and don't match ones commitment to self-assertion.

To those people as much as slim people, it can seem like fat people are being angry or even vengeful. Alas, it rarely occurs that fat people might have a reason for feeling anything that deviates from the 'obese' script that isn't malevolent. It's as if there's as much of a script for fat people's unexpected actions as there are for what's expected of us, i.e. imperfect eating and exercising.

I think the definition of people as disease pathology creates that. Priming minds to expect wrong doing. So the well is often immediately poisoned with these expectations, in lieu of more just explanations. How to explain these things? It never occurred for one second that this would happen, until it did to me.