Another bright day.
And I need to stretch a bit. XD
So a friend of mine (a very smart, nice, attractive, entirely platonic friend) posted an entry on his blog today about how he really doesn’t like being tagged in photos on Facebook. His reasons were entirely valid and not worth rehashing here, but I found it an interesting reaction.
When I started this blog, three months ago now (a whole quarter of a year, zomg!), I stated my reasons as wanting to become more comfortable in my body and with my overall appearance. And, honestly, this project has helped a lot. Oh, I’m not all the way there, not by a long shot, but I’ve made progress for sure.
One of the things that a lot of activists talk about is “normalizing”. This is sort of a catch all term, as I understand it, for getting out in the world and making people realize you, as a member of X group, exist. There’s been a lot of talk about the show Huge, for example, because it’s making huge leaps in normalizing fat bodies, in making John H. Doe out there watching the show realize that fat people are everywhere, and they’re just like other people, and deserve to be treated as such. This is a goal for just about every marginalized group, to get themselves out there and make people realize they’re not unicorns (although that would be awesome, we should all be unicorns too). And honestly, I always thought about that as being a goal on a national and even global level. It never even occurred to me that it should be a goal on a personal level as well. I didn’t make the connection, until today, between a general “normalizing” of my own body and trying to become more comfortable in it.
These days, seeing a picture of myself is so completely normal to me that I don’t even take a second to peruse it for flaws. I do notice if I take a picture that I think makes me look especially good (there are a couple in the past ten days or so that I’m proud of), but that doesn’t make me think the rest of the photos are crap.
There have been people in the size acceptance movement who are amazing people, who are bright, funny, attractive, hard working and making so many awesome strides as activists, who still admit to disliking pictures of themselves. Sometimes it seems like it’s just a matter of them not wanting to get caught in embarrassing positions, but sometimes it seems like they actually are against seeing their fat bodies caught on film. And that makes me think. Is there some deep-seated body loathing that they haven’t managed to confront yet that pertains specifically to photography? Is it the comparison they often get between themselves and other, non-fat or less-fat people? Far be it for me to judge anyone for how they see themselves, but I still wonder. This project, posting a picture of myself every day regardless of how I feel, or how I look, has helped me so much. I just wonder if it could help other people as well.
I’ve become desensitized to pictures of myself. I can look at them with the same level of detachment I look at pictures of my friends and family. That is, I generally think “oh, they look like they’re having fun” or something similar, and then move on. No value judgments, no thoughts on how they could improve their appearance, no bemoaning how huge they look next to their tiny cousin. I would never presume to judge anyone else for those things, and I’m starting to lose the urge to do it to myself as well. It’s an interesting feeling.
Of course, I still have a long way to go. But I think it’s good to look back and see how far I’ve come. Now let’s see how far I can go. ;D
MirrorMe 