Quote:
Originally Posted by Eliana
In your statement "I am creative", it says a lot. It makes you what you are. Your being can be described as "creative'. To say "I am fat" to me sounds like you, your very soul, the essence of who you are...is fat. How sad. I'm just saying that's how many people take those words and it's why our friends and loved ones wince when they hear it.
"I" am not fat and frankly never have been. "I" have always been thin inside all this fat.
Just saying...
My soul and essence have no shape or size, they are infinite (not all large things are terrible, infinity is good kind of large). I've been fat since I was five years old, so it is intertwined with my physical identity to a degree, but I don't find it sad, because I don't think being fat is a crime. I don't even think it's ugly. I've always been beautiful (yes, even physically beautiful). For the most part, it's been a beauty not everyone could appreciate, but I always had more admirers than I needed. I had just the right number of boyfriends, and they all respected and loved me. I wasn't undeserving of that love and respect.
When my husband and I met (at nearly our highest weights), we didn't "see past each others ugliness," we recognized and appreciated the inner and outer
parts of the package we brought to the relationship. We look at each other and see the whole package, we don't imagine some different "inner package." I don't choose to see my husband as Brad Pitt in a David wrapper, or myself as Angelina Jolie in a Colleen wrapper.
I don't think I deserve or need any pity for my size, any more than I need pity for having blue eyes. Or needing pity for being disabled (I am a person with disabilities, and I am also a disabled person. You can choose to feel one is preferable to the other, but I do not. I am a person with blue yes, which makes me a blue-eyed person).
You might as well pity me for being caucasian (or am I a person with whiteness).
It makes me very sad to hear someone call themselves "thin inside all this fat," as if fat were so horrible and evil that goodness cannot coexist with fatness. It's a truth so horrible that it cannot be acknowledge, and must be denied. In order to feel ok, one can't be fat, they must be a thin person in a fat body. Thin is not part of personhood to me (neither is fatness). They are physical characteristics only and no more or less ok than any other physical trait. My husband is not a clear complected person in a freckled body.
If describing oneself as fat speaks to the nature of a person's soul, then if you're "thin inside" you believe that being thin (or feeling thin on the inside) is essential to your soul or essence.
I find it very sad when I hear people say "I am a thin person in a fat body." It seems to me that they're wrapping a lot of their identity in "being not fat."
Thinness must be awfully important to you, if you cannot invision yourself as anything different. Thinness is not important enough to me to be wrapped up in my image of myself. I don't really see myself as fat or thin. Not in any permanent sense.
I am fat, and there's not a damned thing wrong with that. I want to be healthier, and that means weight loss, but fat is such an inconsequential part of who I am that I don't have to talk around it. I can acknowledge it.
My natural hair color is a dark blond or light brown. Saying I am a blonde or a brunette doesn't make either part of my "essence or soul." Although my hair is currently red with blond highlights, being a redhead is not part of my soul either. It's just a factual physical description that applies to me at the moment, and a rather inconsequential one at that. I could wake up tomorrow with blue skin and I'd be a blue-skinned person, I would not be a pink-skinned person in a blue body. I'd still be me, and very little in my life would change (except I might have to reconsider the red hair. I think maybe I'd go white or depending on the shade of blue, maybe teal).
I was employed. I am disabled. Neither define my soul, and neither are necessarily a permanent state. I could enter remission tomorrow and be back in the work force again (that would be lovely, but I don't see myself as an employed person, in an unemployed body). There are a lot of things that I am that I wasn't always. There are a lot of things that I will be, that I am not yet. And none of those define me.
Fat has shaped who I am, and not only in negative ways. I'm not proud that I am fat, but neither am I ashamed of it. I'm not ashamed of my barely blonde hair either. I didn't have to be ashamed of my hair being blondish brown (or brownish blonde) in order to want to change it a different color. I don't have to be ashamed of fatness, in order to lose weight.
Yep I'm fat. Next year maybe I won't be, but neither my fat or my (future) thinness define me.