More thoughts tonight: Personal myths

Ok, I seem to be full of thoughts tonight.

Of course my mind keeps wandering back to the Boy from Oz...despite his extended holiday (meaning I haven't seen him for a week and he's not coming back for another two weeks), I find myself more and more smitten with this boy.

I figure him being away for three weeks allows me sometime to reflect on the personal myths I hold about myself and how I might undo these myths.

The thing is, I've just begun to realize how much these myths have been ruling my life without my really knowing. And these myths certainly can hold a lot of power. For instance, these myths have prevented me from dating or having a real relationship for pretty much all of my life.

(yes, I've never had a romantic relationship or any real experience in romance at all)

So I'm going to risk being overly self-indulgent (I guess this blog is a bit of that anyways) and just take a moment to list the myths that I have been holding as truths in my life. These are all myths that still hold a certain amount of power for me, but I hope that by naming them, perhaps I can start to wrench myself from their control.

So here goes:

PERSONAL MYTHS

• My weight makes me not attractive enough to date or be in a relationship
• Being overweight means that there is no way I could possibly be pretty
  
• I would never be considered sexy by another guy because of the shape of my body
• Being a nice or interesting person is not enough if I am overweight
• When other people see me, it is my weight that they see first
• Being overweight diminishes my value as a person
• A potential partner would be much better off with someone who is more fit than I
• I clearly am living my life wrong if I am shaped like this

Alright, I named them. Though I suspect that there could be more lurking deeper beneath the surface.

These are the things that stand in my way at the moment. These are the things that have prevented me so many times from taking an opportunity to find love or affection. These are what I'm grappling with right now as I find myself in my current situation of REALLY liking someone and REALLY wanting to pursue something with him.

Geez...now I wonder if I'm ready or not.....

Some thoughts on performativity and body image

One of the concepts we've been studying in this theater course is the idea of performativity. Performativity was a theory applied by Judith Butler in gender development. In it's most basic form, it states that we learn to act out our gender roles based upon what input tells us. So that we're not actually the gender that we are...we're more "doing" the gender that we are.

A more practical example showed itself to me here in London: Black pointy-toed heeled boots. They're everywhere...so many women wear them it's crazy. And when my friend from New Mexico who has more hippie style than anything else started wearing them, it became clear. The constant signal is that to be a woman in London, it calls for the black pointy-toed heeled boots. So she was performative with that aspect of "doing" a woman in London.

So I was wondering, what performative aspects do we deal with in body image? What roles am I "doing" as a larger sized woman? Here are some performative qualities I think I may be reflecting from the input of society:

• Relying more on my personality than my looks
• Automatically discounting myself as a sexual creature
• Deflecting attention from myself as far as appearance is concerned
• Choosing clothes that hide the shape of my body or cover parts of my body that I don't want seen
• Not being a dancer

This is just off of the top of my head.

I'm still really trying to wrap my head around this whole concept of performativity. But I do think there are some truths to how we fill perceived roles rather than exists just as ourselves.

Just some food for thought....

Ballet class (or being the biggest girl in the room- again)

This morning, I took a ballet class given by a friend of mine on my current course. Now I love dancing, but dance classes in general have been my biggest struggle with this course over all. I did train in dance when I was younger, but then I got "too heavy" to really look at any advancement at the ballet school I was at. And if I don't get the feeling of moving up or onwards with anything I do, I tend to lose interest. So I stopped dancing.

In this course, I am the heaviest person. I see this and am reminded of this every day.

The toughest part of dance classes for me now is looking at myself in the mirror. When I see how much bigger I am than everyone else in the row, it causes a little inner cringe every time.

But something strange happened to me in this class. When the class started, I saw my big self in the mirror and did my inner cringe, bit my lip, and moved on.

But somehow between the beginning and end of the class, I shrank. I don't really know how to describe it other than that. I just didn't look as big to myself by the end of the class.

It's so strange how changeable the experiences of our bodies can be. We go through more feelings of sizes than actual sizes. Those days we feel big, those days we feel thinner.

I want to find that thing that shrank me during that ballet class and keep it all the time.

DATING!!!!

Dating is always interesting. I've been making a point of just going out on dates whenever the opportunity presents itself in this city. I don't really know a lot of people, so of course I turn to online dating.

Now there's always this nagging voice in the back of my head that questions whether or not I even have the right to date if I am not thin and beautiful.

(I should note here that for some reason, I have been equating the two. Obviously this isn't always the case, yet this still seems to be the default setting on my brain. All one has to do is look at the converse reasoning- if thin=beautiful, therefore fat=ugly)

Anyways, I have been going on dates, and met some really nice guys, but none who thrill me. I haven't gotten that flitter-flutter feeling you get when you meet someone you really like.

Well, at least not until I met the boy from Oz.

GAH! I actually really really like him. Everytime I think of this guy, I get a stupid grin on my face. We've gone on three dates, and have only gotten to the point of hugging. I would love to make a move, yet I feel that because I am not thin, I don't have the right to do so.

Basically, I have to assess first if he's alright with my size and that sucks. Now I remember why I haven't been bothering too much with dating these last five or six years.

Anyways, the whole question is tabled until he gets back from his extended holiday.

That gives me some time to figure out how much of an obstacle my body image has really set up between me and finding love.....

Let's try this again

Well, changing countries and e-mails and all seemed to lock away this blog for a bit. But now here's the fancy new e-blogger and it's time to bring this back for soooo many reasons which you will hear about in subsequent posts.

It's time to go more anonymous now too. I need to delve into stuff that I'm not sure I want everyone in my life knowing about. I'm not worried about those of you who already know who I am, and if I've referred you to this blog, then you can bet that I trust you.

Resurrection

Ok, so I have let this little project fall by the wayside.

Mainly because life got so ridiculously busy that I had no time to pay attention to this. And of course, not having time to pay attention to this meant also not having time to pay attention to my body. Which in turn means that I haven't made much progress. Ah well.

So here's where I'm at now. I'm about to move to another country and go to grad school there. I actually HAVE to do conditioning before I go because part of the program contains a dance intensive, and I am in *no* shape for that. So tomorrow, I waltz on down to the local health club and join up for two months. We'll see how it goes.

I really admire those women who seem to be able to be brilliant AND thin all at the same time. It seems like I have to try for one at the expense of the other. But the thing is, if you're thin, you don't really have to be so brilliant anyways. Is it merely a compensation system for me?

Either way it will be duly observed here.

I do have lots more to write about and it will happen. Please keep reading.

"woman's" sizes

I won't deny that fashions in larger sizes have made improvements these past few years. But the fact is that most of those fashions just don't do it for me. I'm a simple girl. I don't like flowery, frilly, polyestery things. It seems that's all there is out there for women of my size.

Or maybe it's just that fashion trends seem to be going in the exact opposite direction from what is reasonable for different body shapes. Fashion doesn't favor curves so much these days.

What I don't get is what forces seem to be pushing and pulling at these fashion trends. Fashion seems to be less and less forgiving of body shapes at the same time that body shapes are changing and requiring more flexibility. The result? I think more and more people feel left behind by fashion. Like fashion just can't offer much to a person of my shape and size.

I don't think I'm the only woman who feels this way. Let's face it, makeover reality shows wouldn't be so prevalent if we didn't feel so powerless in the face of fashion.

When did trying to look good get so complicated?

Why is trying to look good taking up so much space and energy in my mind? Should it really take up that much space?

I do think that fashion trends are not a healthy thing for society at this point. I know that they aren't healthy for me.

Day 4- Coming out as a fat girl

So just like many other red-blooded young men and women in our society, I chat with many people on the internet. Sometimes I'll chat up a nice fellow and exchange some of my brilliant witty banter with them. Sometimes guys want to meet me. That's when I bluntly throw out the disclaimer: "Please understand, I'm not thin. In general, I'm way more attractive over the internet than in person."

I feel the need to say this because I've heard way too many times about guys who feel that they have been lied to when they finally meet a person, and that person turns out not to be a stick. I started this practice as a social experiment. It acts partially as a litmus test of truth to see what men can and can't handle, but it's also just my way of trying to air out the idea of attractiveness. Just putting it out there takes the pressure off of me (well, not all of it, but some of it).

Yesterday on the radio, I heard an article about an intersting club in Germany called the Ugly Club. Members have various features that could be considered flawed, whether it be weight or the nose, or height, etc. By getting together and calling out these features, they somehow manage to diminish the "ugliness" of the object.

The fact is that it's all perception. Perception is a powerful thing, and it seems that it is a more and more difficult thing to keep a handle on. The growth of electronic communications has allowed us to build people up more and more inside our heads and memories, and less and less in the reality of their being.

So when I "come out" as a fat girl to these guys I chat with, it's my little way of letting some of the air out of the over-inflated perceptions we have of ourselves and others.

Day 3- Measurments!

Well, today I had to get some additional measurments from the fabulous costume designer in our show.

I think as one sliding down the slope of fat, you don't really see where you're ending up until you get there. Then you look at the number that pops up, whether it's a scale or a measurement and you think "WHOAH! How the HELL did it get this bad??"

Maybe jolts like that help inspire people to do better and actually start losing weight, but I find that jolts like that can be very dis-empowering. They are reminders of exactly how much things have spiraled out of control. I think jolts like this happen all over our lives...in bank accounts, in credit card bills, in schedules, in jobs, who knows where else?

What makes jolts like these so disempowering is the thought: I could have prevented this. The very fact that I could have but didn't feels like failure. When I feel failure, there's a part of me that wants to retreat, give up, go home.

So what does this mean? The thing that is disempowering me is me.

There's got to be a way to take the concept of failure out of this process. Hell, there's got to be a way to take the concept of failure out of how we see our own and each others' appearances.

Day 2

Fat Girl Logic I

Cute, intelligent, witty, interesting, and kind [is less than] cute intelligent, witty, interesting, kind, and thin.

It's interesting that many times I go through my day feeling like less of a person because I don't have that last attribute. (ironic that taking up more space can make you feel like less of a person) This is a major obstacle for many of us less than perfect women. Why bother going to meet that guy you've been chatting up on the internet? He's only going to be disappointed when he meets you in person. For that matter, why bother spending time trying to make yourself look good.? No clothes are going to look good on you, and no amount of making your face and hair pretty will cover up the huge and glaring flaw you have. Why bother at all? Nobody's going to want you like this.

These are the extremes of negative thinking that can dog at my head from time to time. They don't attack all the time, but there is a direct relationship between how much these thoughts attack me and how high my stress is.

On the other hand, there are times when I feel good. I feel in my body and I can forgive the shape more easily. These are usually the times I'll actually enjoy eating a grapefruit over that cheesy burrito with extra sour cream.


So in all honesty, I haven't even been thinking about what I eat these past few days. I'm in tech for a play that opens next week, which means I go long stretches without food, and when it comes time to eat, I'm so hungry, I'll shovel whatever is availble and convenient into my mouth. Also, when you're working so close to the edge all the time, it's amazing how much a bar of chocolate can take the edge off. So it's pretty clear: if I want to get healthier, I'll have to get away from the edge first.

Day 1

So this is it.

My world has been revolving way too much around my weight and the ever-changing shape of my body. Of course, I'm trying to embark upon a plan to lose weight. Of course I want to look good naked. Of course, I want my body to be able to do the same things it did 60 pounds ago.

But I've got a bigger agenda.

It's time to find out why. Oh, the what of it is clear as day. It's so clear, it seems to run to the front of my attention just about every 5 minutes. The what of it is as easy to recognize as the rising number on the scale.

But why?

This isn't a big psycho-analytical endeavor in order to intellectually masturbate myself into some self-pity party. I want to find out what it is about this world that makes it so easy for us to disconnect from our bodies. I want to take apart all of the forces of nature and society that have been pushing me into larger and larger pants sizes.

I want to know why women feel ugly, no matter how they look. I want to know why so much of our self worth is summed up in a number that pops up on a scale. I want to know why we don't get along with our bodies anymore.

This will partially be a log of my weight loss plans. But I'm hoping it'll be something a little more interesting than that. I want this to be a conversation about our bodies.


(note- I'm coming at this issue from my own perspective- the perspective of a white, fairly able-bodied female. I will do my best to keep true to my perspective, but I would love to hear others)