Hold the pity

It's time to start the pity wagon for us fatties, natch.

Fat people require everyone to commit to a supreme effort of will to invoke some faux pity to join the faux concern; moralising, advice, sternness, or any other of garden variety ham reactions we have to snooze through. Do not deny us the pain of this, because we may not surrender. Don't bother with quaint notions such as courtesy given should be returned.

The general consensus to withdraw common pleasantries from fat people in order to make us feel toot bad about being fat and 'motivate' us to mend our ways with the 'incentive' of being re-assimilating into Club Normal were we will enjoy again all the fringe benefits of pretending the sun shines out of our behinds at the expense of some other designated scapegoats no doubt.

Rather than just stopping all this the thing to do is to superimpose feelings of forbearance on top.

Sounds divine.

Our vehicle for escape from the sin bin is broken and therefore cannot deliver us to the required destination. Luckily right thinking folk claim not to believe this, thereby seeing off any need to stop subjecting us to what a lot of them can hardly tolerate themselves. How fortunate for them!

You may wonder, how is sympathy giving to others what they give to you? Answer; apply lower standards to yourself than you do to them. That way you can behave worse and still act all noble dispensing pity upon the benighted. And whenever you feel like raising your standard a tad, you can claim a great moral victory.

Cue mucho gratitude from smiling yet tearful fatties, oh the pathos!

Oh you shouldn't [seriously; you should not].

Don't think anything of the courtesy shown toward you, no really, don't.

How to make a decision

From the comments to this;

While there are certainly folks who may not be interested in losing weight, a decision wholly theirs to make and certainly not one I'd question, many of those who do wish to lose weight have a belief that it'll be impossible for them to do so in part because of their genes.

It doesn’t matter how much you feel you have heard one side of an argument its personification in the mind of another gives it a reality that can still throw a curve. It’s not that I haven’t heard what’s in the above quote before, it’s just it sounds a bit strange, like mishearing something.

First off, I’ve spent most of my life interested in weight loss. For 16 years solid from the age 11, I pursued a daily course of healthist eating and lifestyle goodness, in order to become the healthiest I could be. At that point I believed this was in its ultimate, indivisible with slimness.

I have been left with a fascination with how human metabolism actually functions. I suppose I have become thoroughly sick at heart with the theory that I would like to know the truth.

I was truly bad at trying to losing weight this way or to be fair; my body is gifted and ferociously brilliant at seeing off what it clearly saw as an outrageous and intolerable imposition on it. In the end the effort of it had helped to exhaust my mind first-I just hadn’t noticed-and finally my body. I actually wanted to continue my body could not, it was complete burn out.

I had to stop; I really had no choice about that. I intended to resume when my nervous system would allow it, it does recover after a while. Other things got in the way though, for me the crux was that mental exhaustion I hadn’t realised was linked to this dietary restriction had repeatedly prevented me from sorting other things out, so I decided to work on my mind more intensely during this hiatus.

The moment I started to do this, the mere thought of going on another diet was rejected by my mind out of hand. An overwhelming revulsion rose up from the core of me that I realised had always done so, but blinkered by a single mindedness to succeed and so separated from the feelings that arose –I just put anything I could sense down to ‘inner resistance’-that I just hadn’t noticed it before.

Before barely making a jot of progress, I was sickened to realise that without this high level of self contempt, loathing and distance, I simply couldn’t begin to support any kind of diet effort full stop. I’d always assumed ‘failure’, feeling negatively; about being fat were the reasons for my sense of loathing. But it was more this is what it took to hold my mind into submission enough to allow an attempt at restricting my diet.

I was appalled; I couldn’t believe it was that way around. I remembered two years in I was ready to face this, I thought how can I be making so much effort, literally on a moment to moment basis and fall so far short that it didn’t look like I was doing anything at all.

It’s difficult to describe the laser like sensation of powerlessness fused with aloneness, I was 13 years old. I carried on.

I don’t want to speak for others, because everyone has their story and in general we have so little grounding about just how bad dieting really is overall, because all the attention is focused on whatever they call success, the majority experience that stops short of that is ignored. Drug companies would be censured for this kind of cheating.

I assumed I was an outlier; the reason why I was a daily re-starter was because I was a daily failure. The longest I ever managed to sustain any diet effort was about 3-4 months and the kinds of things I had to do to manage that sometimes beggar belief. I don’t mean eating cotton wool or anything like that, I mean things like one time when I had to go into complete slow motion when I ate, literally like someone slowed the tape to a crawl. I walked for hours every day. I still remember one day feeling so surreal, almost trippy doing it, I actually was in a semi mesmerized state, laughing at myself thinking that I might not be quite sane, because I could tell how stupid this was, yet I felt too spaced out to care!

Overall I’d say this was one of the worst and most pointless beatings I’ve ever taken and frankly, I’ve been well and truly humbled by it. I just don’t understand how people can feel the incredible power of this resistance in full flow combined with its complex extraordinary subtlety and emerge with anything less than profound respect for it.

It’s hard to believe that I used to think I could just order it to do my will and succumb to a dietary plan, now I don’t even want to beat it. There is so much to it; we should consider ourselves profoundly fortunate to have something with so much capacity and variety. The potential outcomes of working with it and harnessing these abilities could be immense. There are undoubtedly ways to tweak its course, but we should work with it, not against it as dieting does. The approach has to be subtle, because the differences we think at our end are large are actually minute in its overall calculations.

I don’t feel scared or cowered by it I just admire it and the more I think about it, the more brilliant and inspiring a creation it seems along with the rest of the body and it’s a gift for us. All we have to do is respect it and notice its functioning and work with it. How the hell have we managed to make it this hard to so little desired effect? It is embarrassing, when we could be inspired to be a bit more ingenious and clever about it. The crude stupidity of dieting et al is repellent when it isn’t laughable, in comparison.

It’s not about being interested or not interested in weight loss; it’s about finally letting go of irrationality and superstition. I was perfectly prepared to believe I was a minority in being unable to force my body to submit, even the only one to this extent. But all the while it was clear that not many others were succeeding in staying thin because regardless of how far they got, almost inevitably they ended up back at the start.

This is not about personal failure; this is about dysfunction inherent in the method. There is nobody great enough living or dead to tell me that diets work it is abundantly clear beyond any reasonable doubt that they do not. Anyone who doubts that is only experiencing the tenacity of belief and has departed rationality.

They can never be clear beyond any unreasonable doubt and that is their choice, they should no longer be allowed to impose their irrationality on those of us who have paid the price of it and are ready to leave them to it. Anyone still believing they can make people slim or that it’s even a desirable way to treat the human body is in my view worse than a lot of people who believe in alt med, at least most of them try use the placebo effect positively, rather than to brutalize the body with a loathing and hatred that is almost unheard of as part of any healing process.

That is the monumental contribution of calorie restriction to our consciousness, healing through hate.

This collective denial is a big problem for those who wish to lose weight. This means people have a circle they cannot square-they are told by those they respect and trust, which combines with their own yearning desire, to believe in the efficacy of something that is almost wholly self defeating.

Being encouraged not to come to terms with this, by a lot of people who do not know what they are asking is a cruel trick. And pursuing this direction is cutting off the possibility of more viable ways. It is the refusal to let go of calorie restriction as viable that is actually permitting and supporting this abuse, numerous eating disorders, gastric butchery and all sorts of prejudice and hatreds.

Hence, genes, glands, willpower, something has to explain why the expected and longed for success has not manifested itself. People want to lose weight, I'm personally over it, along with the ability to shape the void with a surround of bad feeling has gone a lot of the false negation of being fat and the equally false elevation of being thin. It’s actually hard at times to remember how it felt to want it so badly to be thin. In itself it actually seems an absurd and empty quest.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t think viable options should not be pursued vigorously. Seeing what people prepared to do, seeing them fall over themselves to sell out deeply held beliefs merely to be able to maintain their belief in weight loss is not something I care see perpetuated. Not least those who could find relief in losing whatever amount of weight they feel they need or want to. That is not a moral issue for me that is for them, my issue is with this way of failing at it.

Just what has to happen to for enough to be enough?

The long or the short of it

TRIGGER ALERT: This features a blog that deals with maintaining a weight loss diet and I would advise caution if you feel shaky about this.

Debra Sapp-Yarwood who's a member of BFB has just started a new blog about her maintenance of weight loss. She wishes it to detail her everyday realities.

I must admit it's not likely to be my kind of thing, I find it hard to know where to file dieting nowadays and so find it virtually impossible to become engaged. But I do respect the way she represents the all too rare strain of dieters who have the self respect and rigour of mind not to golly gosh WLD.

Her first post is interesting, her take is that dieting's problem is in part the rigour of maintenance. It never ceases to amaze why many cannot get it in their heads, including many ardent FA supporters, dieting doesn't fail because its 'hard', it fails because it cannot be tolerated.

Time and time again people support dieting saying that they can lose weight, cut down and it all falls off, yet invariably they are at the weight they diet from why? Because the defects of dieting are not the pain, it is the dysfunctions of dieting that cause the pain, when the pain is not there, the dysfunction still remains. The defences still operate very efficiently regardless.

Only 3% of people who intentionally lose radical weight will maintain their losses for five years, according to evidence-based, empirical research. Why?

The statement answers its own question, weight loss dieting/calorie restriction doesn't work or to put it another way, the body's defences will not allow it to unfold without molesting and derailing it all the way. It could not because that would be in the main, anorexia. The human body doesn't give a fig how counterintuitive that sounds to our conscious rationale, it just goes about its business thwarting your efforts, winning with ease.

I don't doubt for a second, never have, that there is a way of changing weight, up or down; calorie manipulation just isn't it. How can something with such a low ascribed efficacy be said to even function much at all beyond mere chance? I must say I can't see what that is because if dieting became effective, it wouldn't be dieting.

The list reads as a why dieting is bunk, its unnatural and really is an eating disorder, something she bravely alludes to;

Weight-loss maintenance, if analyzed fairly, might qualify as a disordered mindset,

That in itself hints at one reason (of many) why it's just a bad idea full stop, an eating disorder is something you tend to get mostly from it, rather than something that can become a lifestyle.

It's a little like trying to develop a phobia for some object or an anxiety disorder, although you'd probably have more success with its harder for them to kill than the withdrawal of sustenance. If you had a balanced mind, it would fight it quite hard and it would be a question of succumbing to it, rather than achieving a lifestyle. Although we are only talking about the threat of hunger, that is enough to provoke the body due to the centrality of eating to life.

There's a spectrum for everything and some people would be more susceptible than others, that's effectively what you are seeking in your attempt at WLD success, inefficiency in your defences and/or susceptibility to disordered eating.

Whether its a case of capacity of personality or inherently being closer on the scale, physically, to be that way inclined, it's not a majority solution.

All the weight loss registry shows is that there is always a percentage of outliers when it comes to anything. The only thing we can learn from dieting is why and how it fails because that can help tell us about how we actually function, and maybe Debra's blog will reveal some things. I just don't know if I have the mind for it.

Shove your blame

Apologies if this post showed up before it was finished

Blame has no business in medicine, that is a moral hang up. Medicinal or other treatment deals in cause, which is why the appearance of blame in matters of weight gives a clue as to how much it has to do with science as opposed to a hangover from religious style moralizing. There blame is extremely important because you must answer to a higher supernatural power.


In medicine it only matters so far is it may impinge on the condition or state itself, which may influence the kind or form of treatment, personally accountability only goes as far as taking the treatment the doctor prescribes or following their directs. Hopefully, they have been proven to work and have positive effects, although not necessarily, as some of us have discovered at great cost.


If there are any problems with treatment, the answer is to deal with that not to have a moral reckoning, so blame is a pointless irrelevancy. It is the no answers bit that is where it can all go pear shaped, then "blame" may come up depending on things like the ethics of the professionals involved and how much they believe they are or can do something about finding a remedy. Fatness is immoral starts with the scientific/ medical establishment failure to defeat it in the way that fits their preferred models, magic bullet or treating symptoms.


This cannot possibly be, so a culprit must be found.

The idea of actually reversing or curing things is a little old fashioned nowadays, it seems to have an air of unprofitability about it. If you cure that's the end of that, if you palliate, it could be lifelong pay day. Yoni Freedhoff a Canadian doctor and with an interest in bariatrics, plays with the delicate notion of the genetics of fatness. Assuming as usual that we are all desperate to find fatness genetically determined rather than the only alternative on offer, our own culinary incontinence etc.,

I've never been on board with fat genetics myself, it seems too sure and direct a way to define fatness. I'm not dismissing it out of hand, but I'd have to make a distinction between fat genes-genes specifically and for genes that influence weight. For instance, let's say you are genetically predisposed to gain a load of weight, when you are depressed. If you are predisposed to depression, which is the gene most relevant to your fatness? The one(s) which make you susceptible to depression or those that respond to that with weight gain or fatness?

There are different ways bodies can respond in this kind of scenario, there's early warning fatness, where long before you experience any noticeable lowering of mood, weight gain kicks in to see it off, sort of early warning fatness. Then there's when mood imbalance has got a noticeable although not necessarily dominant grip on you to stop progression. Then there is the weigh gain/fatness of when you are pretty far gone in terms of mood imbalance, to try and stop you from getting to a point of no return.

There are other instances of this kind of link between certain mood disorders, things like PSTD etc., and gaining weight and becoming fat. I suspect that given those living in societies that can feed most people above the barest of subsistence level, that's probably all it takes for these effects to manifest clearly. And this the way most fatness is more than genes specifically for fatness.

I know there is the 'thrifty gene' hypothesis-that fatness is genetically useful adaptation for surviving times of famine. But I don't see any reason to just be fat, for it's own sake, it's either some kind of eccentricity in your genes, or a side effect of something else. Maybe some would see this as offensive, possibly it would be seen to go down the path of fatness as a pathology, but I just think it's a realistic idea of how our bodies tend to work.

We tend not to consider things the body must guard against, over and above say the immune system. We overlook that there are other things that can sink us and in fact end our lives that are not as tangible as germs or pathogens. And that we must have as many defences as is practicable when it comes to things that are vitally important to our survival. As the will to live can be destroyed by depression and as a species we are vulnerable to it, you can see that leaving it up to chance as to how depressed we might get at any given time, would be way too risky.

There's probably a similar thing going on with eating and anorexia. In a way the latter is like a kind of depression affecting the eating processes which can lead directly to compromising life itself, so all our 'difficulties' with calorie restriction are just ways of preventing us from moving from long periods of self induced hunger to anorexia where it is no longer directly under the control of the will. Without this, it's hard to see what would get in the way of this development.

Dr Freedhoff has helpfully reminded me that us fattiez are desperate to be exonerated and absolved from our crimes and to evade the wages of sin, which is starvation, comensurate with our purported gluttony. I suppose it's similar to the medical prinicple that if you have had a fever, you must be locked in the freezer for a similar period, to atone so that the earth will continue on it's correct course. As ever, he does what every other person on planet earth does with fatness, namely makes a general statement.

People like to blame genes.

Then pretty quickly people becomes, fat people, only. Do you notice the way we are always isolated in this way, always, fatness is compared to itself. We cannot be compared to others, because our 'sins' would not show up. This trick is played with our reactions and thinking patterns that are just as much a product of the societies we live in as any other groups of people.


Fatness has been found by quite a few researchers to have a high degree of genetic bias, you'd guess that a hell of a lot of other things ascribed as the product of genes are probably somewhat exaggerated, in comparison to this. What are they? Alas, as usual they spoil the fun by not bothering to mention any, except everyone's incubator for unabashed judgment.

So what becomes everyone's issues, quickly narrows to becomes purely a problem for fat people. Such is the service we have been pressganged into.

The honesty of fatness

There's more than one reason why trying to use the addiction model to describe fatness is a bad idea. I was reminded of one the most important ones by this quote;

My relationship with food has been on the rocks for years, but I can’t file for divorce. I’ve got to fight a good fight and get it back on track.

Well said Nick.

It illustrates an evasion that has helped to cheat so many addicts of a return to health, their lives even. the refusal to take on reversing addiction, as opposed to abstaining from the addictive substance. Like many of us fat people have discovered, guilt lies heavy on people and can pressure them into accepting lesser treatment than they deserve because they need to hurt to show how sorry they are. To be able to bear intolerable guilt, pain acts as a ‘paid my debt to society’ impulse.

This has helped a bogus moral element to enter drug rehabilitation that IMHO simply doesn’t belong there. It would if it worked fine; it doesn’t, so I judge it on that. If ideally a pain free as possible way of removing the addiction could be found, that is best. If guilt persisted I’m sure that could be better directed than the hurt of withdrawal.

Those involved in the ‘abstinence’ industry would be wise to keep out of involving themselves in fatness, even including eating disorders more readily associated with it. They may think buoyed up by the respectability and acceptance of the whole rehab boondoggle, that they can expand into fatness bringing a cachet to PBF (poor benighted fatties). But I warn them, even they may struggle to come out intact from this due to the fact that fatness is way too honest not to expose this nonsense.

Not only is any cause or trigger for fatness not directly that of the conscious will, mostly. Any attempt to deal with it has to tackle the one loophole allowed by the nature of those substances, they are not necessary to human existence.

The necessity of food makes a nonsense of abstinence. A fact that has not stopped those bereft of ideas and common sense from trying regardless. Thinking as they do that the perceived ‘cachet’ of the addict persona will uplift fatties who are not taken seriously. They fail to take account that abstinence hardly has any better result than trying to make fat people thin, especially considering the great advantage that non-necessity would theoretically give. In reality, no-one expects to be cured of conditions or diseases merely by pretending to be what they are not, in this case an addict.

If you can abstain, you are hardly an addict. If you have trouble with that, then that’s your problem. Not that you can’t imagine how to method act your way out of the situation.

If weight is seen as imbalanced, it must be rebalanced somehow at source (even if the process is not started from there), ditto eating and appetite. You can wing this effect better with drugs and alcohol but not so well with food. You have to re balance. You have to deal with things as they are, no matter how dysfunctional they are, or seem. There is no get out clause of “giving up eating forever”.

Abstinence wallahs although confronted about this in the past have seen this challenge off. Fat could revive that question by its very nature, even in spite of the current lowly status of fat subjectivity.

Which is one of the reasons why some fat people think the addict definition will recover their subjectivity. They must realise that the greater ‘recognition’ given to drug addicts self representation (at least what seems the appearance of it) is down to the greater promise of effectiveness, not because addicts are respected more than fat people.

It would be far better if the honesty of fatness acted as a spur to revive interest in re-balancing addicts and alcoholic’s bodies as a way of ending their dependence.

I'm pro FA, I apologize

Brilliant must read post by Shannon. It points out that placing any conditions on self acceptance leaves loose strands that can unravel the rest. Usefully offering a way forward, some extra focus on working through and discharging these conditions may be the key to progress in self acceptance. This is great advice for newbie’s, something that is felt to be neglected and give those further on something to think about too.

Though this is not easy to match, it still falls short. I'm grateful to Amber Rhea for explaining why clarity. I've heard similar of quite a lot recently but couldn't respond because they spoke of how alienating FA was with their "Rah rah FA is so easy" mentality. This left me with a total blank. I knew that this was a difference in perception and understanding; I just didn't know what.

The idea that women's self loathing is authentic and to merely put it up for scrutiny is silencing true feelings, which are sacred and pure expressions left me stunned. Only a confidence so protected and sure could say this with such obvious sense of assumed righteousness. As a feminist (who doesn't identify with it is right now), the idea that misogyny from anyone has some kind of deep integrity made my head swim.

I shouldn't be shocked but was, by the clear inference that fat people's gift of self rescue is not only false and shallow in comparison, but possibly self deluding. We speak a lot about our feelings of lack of credibility. Feelings of falseness often come up when you change long held truths. Part of it is your mind wanting to be sure that you really want to stop what you've invested a lot into. If you can get past that, then you really want to.

If anyone was paying attention, they might have noted this was a sore spot with us, but then our feelings are not real they are PC. It's the old, negativity is real, positivity unreal, even though when acting on them brings them low, people still go for happy pills, what's the point? Negative sucks up a huge amount of energy in comparison with posivity which itself tends to unlock energy, that's a lot of the 'more real' feeling of it.

It is also our job to serve others without any regard for ourselves, one of the things that is the source of contempt for us. I think this is the real meaning of the taunt "You have no self respect".

We're told that FA/SA is about all of us getting over damaging fat/body hating, which I assumed. Yet there's this constant switch to "your movement" and what we must do to get others on side, even though it is claimed "I hurtz because of the fat hate too you know, not just you (selfish) fattiez. Which I'd expect to provide most of the momentum.

Selfish here means what this kind of mentality does; puts itself first as a dominant principle. As usual, its negative aspect only becomes real when it's translated into fat. Well, it's nice to know that people know themselves deep down. Of course fat acceptance must carry the can for this 'separation', reasons must be found to rationalize rejection, no matter how unconvincing there's a spirit of, "let's front it".

I'm also amazed at the accusation of lying and being false since if you are not fat and you point to your body parts and say "My legs are so fat" when they clearly aren't and say "I'm so fat" when you aren't even plump, well......

I don't know why, but I assumed it had been realised that saying the above if you are not fat is different from saying it you are. If you are fat, you either stop hating yourself or you do not. Whereas the choice for non fat is stop demeaning fatness so that you can use it to demean yourself. It's a case of direct and indirect consequence, You can see where they meet, but they are not the same.

This has clarified some other things that were just blurry and out of view. We were mostly all united in the absolute certainty that fatness is deeply wrong and bad. From the moment that begins even minimally to go into reverse a gap opens and keeps going. This is about mentality more than weight. By rights those who were hating-whoever they are-should close that gap by ceasing to hate, a neutral stance will do. When we thought we were wrong, we were prepared to do what we thought was right, even though it hurt us directly. I expect at least for that to be borne in mind when others consider what is right here.

Body issues only makes sense if you have a valid body in the first place, if you don't you are supposed to be at odds with it, that's seen as the "truth" and that's how you feel. A lot of fat women especially realised as girls they had to drop out of "I hate my fat thighs etc.,"(says prodding slim thighs) because our thighs were fat. We also tended not to make too much impression with "No your thighs are fine they look great"(compared to ours, anyhow). So that was remiss of me too, I should have expected the same resistance/conflict of interests now as then.

As for feelings of body loathing, no matter how bad any feeling that may come up about body, there simply is nothing to the comprehensive 24/7 abject loathing that I felt for my own body, not someone else's that I almost laugh at the contrast and swat it away. If it lingers it lingers, it doesn't bother me in comparison. Also, I've got too many other powerful hangovers from this; I have to try and step on it and push myself a bit. This is partly why I’m out of tune. I don't have much patience for this kind of shit, to tell the truth.

I don't know how you flee and remain in the place you're fleeing at the same time to keep in touch with those who want to stay or have never been there. See if you stay, then that is clearly, no fat acceptance at all which is I suspect the underlying motivation for this campaign of FA scepticism. Meet people where they are applies here too and that is overlooked.

Nor do I accept the idea that we have to learn self respect; if we did we wouldn't need it. We are born with it and that's what is hurting when what we are told compromises it. The pain and confusion is our mind, sometimes our whole system realising that doesn't match what is inside.

You cannot lose yourself respect totally, it's unthinkable, the fact that we think that compromised self esteem is that, shows it's power and importance to us.

Underneath this entire surface crap, it's still going. Let's aim to allow it to be uninterrupted again and see what happens.

Let's be intrepid.

I've read a book....

.....And I feel about as sheepish as New Zealand, seriously, it's one of those "How to write for twits" type books.

As I was reading through it and its list of no, no's I was going, oh no, I do that, and that and that until I wanted to hide from myself.

Cripes.

Some flouting of the conventions of good writing has been deliberate some sheer molten incompetence. At times I thought I was being funny and then there was "I'm just having a go!" and "It's the message". It has to stop. I have to make more of an effort. I don't claim to be a writer, hell no, I just write stuff down.

As I insist on doing that, I might as well make an effort to do it as well as I can. You get into noticeable patterns and certain tics surface that are major league irritants, in my case deranged syntax.

Most of it is emotional and mental as much as technical. If one is a problem, it derails fluency.

Since the start of FA, I have felt off centre, off balance and off key, virtually all the time. Part of the excitement of FA is that it is quite an unspoken and unformed perspective. Slight and yet a nexus of where so many societal and cultural fault lines lie, it at times makes me feel like I'm trying to watch five TVs at once.

In nature when the surface has to give way the power is lies in what has been contained, underneath. The fear of fatness is barely about hating fat bodies, if at all that is a surface association. Think of how you used to hate seeing pictures of yourself, how unbearable it could be. Then at some point you realise you are just looking at yourself. Seeing no longer through hate, changes the way you see.

That change is mental, your photo's haven't changed, your mind has. If fat bodies were intrinsically hateable, that change would not be possible. We see and it is converted into a whole picture by our brains. Hate was a distortion and without it our vision returns to the original truth of how we would have seen ourselves, had we not learned this lie.

We are all upset about the potential for upheaval for different reasons and that makes for surprising conclusions from all sides. I can tell that the need to hide one's true feelings and motives makes it hard for anyone to say what they feel directly, even when they can write well.

It's hard to think clearly or at times to think at all.

There's another one, I start thinking I'm talking about one thing, then it turns into a psychological/philosophical audit.

And is it possible to write because more?

I mean really is the universe waiting for me to explain it? If I know so much, why am I not a multi millionairess? Or at least, world dominatrix?

Actually, I'd never fancy the latter. What for? Everyone bends to your will, it would be like everyone was a version of you, never would there be a surprise, how tedious would that be? It's the surprise of others both good and bad that is part of the joy of life, even when it hurts before it's nice.

I've picked up some bad habits since I started blogging, the feeling of having to tip toe around the sensibilities of others is the biggest one-the main reason I'm not on any fat feeds. Trying to stay in contact when the disconnect is difficult to breach, I never used to consider this at all. There have been times when logically I've worked out our views are incompatible, but emotionally, I've felt the need to try and maintain some kind of communication. I speak not in regret but in reaching one's limits. It is better to have tried, if you can.

The wariness of other people's resistance has been a bad influence on liberating some inner flummery that should not have seen the light of day. That's alright, I think if you blog you've got to be prepared to make an arse of yourself (I'm not going to say it, you can think it though).