I have finally updated my Etsy for the holiday season. Use the coupon code FATWAITRESS until December 1st for 10% off everything. Support me paying my bills and get some awesome gifts. fworiginals.etsy.com
Watercolor Papercut Shadowbox – $18
Noro Multicolored Lace Scarf – $55
Also check out,
When I was 15 my parents started to get divorced. At 16 my mom and I moved out of the house after a pretty fucked up situation that made me respect her even more than I already did. To some it up, she threw herself to the wolves instead of letting me ruin my relationship with my dad. What also came out of that was she lost my brother. It has been 10 years since my brother stopped talking to my mom. It has been 6 years since he stopped talking to me and while the reasoning for why he stopped talking to her makes sense, even though he only knows half of the story and he wasn’t actually present like I was to see what actually happened. Why he stopped talking to me doesn’t.
The thing that frustrates me about this whole situation is that when he stopped talking to me, he cut himself off from my whole family on both sides. While a few family members on my dad’s side still see him every once and a while the vast majority only know what I do, and that’s nothing. Every holiday I now expect to be asked about him, to be told to keep trying, to tell me that it is up to me to bring him back.
In reality it isn’t.
My brother is an adult. If he wants to not have contact with his family that is his choice. If he doesn’t want to have contact with me that is his choice. It is also my choice whether or not I should put myself through the emotional mess of dealing with the fact that I have someone out there who shares the same DNA as me and wants nothing to do with me. I throw that box on the top shelf of my closet and hide it behind all of my other baggage.
I am often told that I should just contact him, write a letter every once and a while. This again ignores that I am doing all of the emotional output in this relationship. I care about my brother, I care that he is well, I care that he is happy but at what expense should I care about him when he has little regard for my own wellbeing?
If you know someone who is estranged from their sibling stop giving advice and just listen. You probably know very little about what actually happened. Shit I was involved and I still don’t know exactly why he stopped talking to me but I’m sick of sitting around and caring. If he comes back then he comes back, if he doesn’t well then he is missing out.
I have been crazy busy, between Love Your Body Detroit’s Body Positive Scavenger Hunt for Love Your Body Day 2011, class and my 2 jobs. I participated in a photo shoot for a non-profit yoga studio in downtown Detroit called City Yoga. They wanted to show that all people no matter who they are can do yoga. It was a great day. I also have been getting my back tattooed since the middle of August and it is finally finished.
The tattoo itself has a ton of different elements that I put in. The quote is from “A Vindication for the Rights of Women” by Mary Wollenstonecraft. My fat dancing lady is not only to show a fat active body but also because I love Niki de Saint Phalle’s nanas and it is a recreation of her sculptures that can be found at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The tattoo style was for my favorite watercolor painter Stina Persson.
This will be posted on the Ferndale Patch tomorrow.
I was 18 when I found the fat rights movement. Unlike my peers who spent years of weight cycling and trying every diet they could, I have only ever been on one diet. My entry into this movement came from understanding the ways beauty ideals oppress those who cannot conform to them. I spent my whole senior year losing weight believing if I just got down to a size where I would no longer be fat, I would be worthy, I would be beautiful.
My need to be beautiful began at the age of 5 when my parents were told I should participate in beauty pageants. The recommendation came from the mother of Ashley Johnson who at the time was in my brother’s preschool class and moved away the same year to take the part of Chrissy Seaver on the show Growing Pains. After that I was thrown into a life where my outward appearance was made to be more important than the characteristics that made me who I am today. While I only spent a year actually participating in beauty pageants the need to be pretty stayed with me and attached itself to my sense of worth and to my gender. Once I became fat those values I built up around me were ripped away over night.
I was 11 when I was first called fat. I was not always called fat; I had a whole slew of names that came with the change in status when I entered middle school, big bertha, earthquake (this was often screamed while my classmates shook tables), and jolly green giant. When I think back on it now I find it amusing that my classmates somehow thought that my body would create a seismic event when I walked. To be honest I changed that year, emotionally shutting down and trying to build up a wall around myself for fear of being vulnerable to their attacks but it wasn’t until I took a road trip with my dad at the end of the school year to visit my aunt everything came into focus.
When I talk about my past with body shame and fat stigma, it isn’t abnormal for people to tell me how it wasn’t the media, or their peers but parents and family members that brought on their own shame and the resulting consequences. I truly believe it is different when it comes from your family. We are told family is suppose to love us no matter what, but this isn’t true and when they say hurtful or damaging things it should be addressed as such.
The words my aunt said to me were simple and in her own mind were probably coming from a place of misplaced care. When she told me, “You would be so beautiful if you were thin,” it was not only the first time a family member addressed my body, but also the first time it became clear that I lost something tangible by being fat.
That is why I am so passionate about the work I do today. Being taught to hold my personal appearance as a sign of my worth and my femininity, only to have it taken away when I no longer conformed to societies beauty ideals changed how I felt about myself. Because performing beauty is a standard requirement for someone who is gendered female, I spent a long time disassociating with my body and my gender. When I was finally able to understand that my pain was from the way I was socialized in my early childhood and teens I was able to disconnect myself from the equation. In other words, the way I was treated was not my fault or because of my body but due to the fat stigma in our society.
The changes were drastic, I stopped speaking negatively about myself, my body and/or otherwise. I also stopped speaking negatively about other people’s appearance instead judging them on their own interactions with me personally. This alone made learning to love my body and feel more connected with it, after hating it for so long, easier. Once I change the ways I thought and talked about bodies I started to address why I learned to feel that way, taking my life and tearing it apart to give myself a deeper understanding of where all of my shame came from.
Stopping my own body shaming was not an overnight process, it is still something that comes up at unexpected times, but when it does I’m not scared anymore. The only thing I fear now is going back to where I was before.
If you suffer from body shame, seek help. Surround yourself with people who will support you no matter what body you live in. Address why you feel the way you do about your body, and know that those feelings are not because of you. The Center for Eating Disorders in Ann Arbor and is an amazing resource to take back your body.
October 19th is Love Your Body Day.
The National Organization for Women’s Oakland County chapter will be holding an event titled “Love Your Body: Media and Body Image” I will be speaking about the language we use to talk about our bodies. For more information visit their event page, linked above.
AND! Don’t forget about Love Your Body Detroit’s Body Positive Scavenger Hunt.
Finding positive body image in our media-driven society is a hard task, but hunting down body positive pigs doesn’t have to be!
In celebration of Love Your Body Day 2011, Love Your Body Detroit is throwing a weeklong event that not only will make way for people to have a better relationship with their body but also bring awareness to a number of female-owned businesses in the area.
Participating businesses include,
Have Hips – Clawson
Rouge Makeup and Nails – Ferndale
Naka – Ferndale
Thicke Madam Boutique – Ferndale
Painting with a Twist – Ferndale
City Bird – Midtown Detroit
Pauline’s Closet – Midtown Detroit
Each business will be hosting a piggy bank that has been decorated by artists and activists from around the country. To participate in the scavenger hunt each participant must take a photo of themselves with as many pigs as they can find. After their “hunt” they can send their photos to LYBDetroit@gmail.com and each photo will count as an entry into a raffle with prizes from each participating business. If a person visits every pig their entry into the raffle doubles. All photos and winners will be announced on Love Your Body Detroit’s Facebook page.
The event begins on Love Your Body Day, October 19th and runs though Sunday October 23rd.
Let us know you are participating by going to our event page.
Have you found a Diet Riot Pig? Are you looking for information on what you are suppose to do with your pig? Well worry no more. Here is a list of things to do with your pig.
This post was written for the Ferndale Patch, click here to see original.
When I talk about fat rights, the main argument is it isn’t healthy. This is also where most conversations stop, because we have so deeply engrained into our psyche that fat bodies are inherently unhealthy. We are taught fat bodies are a sign of disease, no matter how many healthy behaviors we choose to do, if we still live in a fat body in the end it is often believed that we just haven’t tried hard enough.
To define health you must first define what health looks like, this is often a thin, young, able-bodied individual. This denies old people, fat people, mentally ill people, people with chronic illness or disease and people with disabilities their health status due to situations they often have no control over.
The main reason that I believe this really boils down to how we frame health in our society, specifically what we believe a healthy body looks like and why it has so much social value. We value health in a way that is far deeper then just believing that it should be important to people, we believe that people are better if they are health conscious. Studies even show if we believe fat people are trying to lose weight they will have far better reactions from their peers than if they are not. We demonize unhealthy behaviors and certain foods, and expect people who do not have health status to conform to those healthy behaviors so that we consider them socially acceptable.
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When we frame health in this fashion we also ignore the fact that health is not accessible to all people, particularly people who have a lower socioeconomic status. Because health is not as dependent on body size as we are lead to believe and fat people can be healthy (see http://alturl.com/ngedg), to actually have overall health in our society we must address the social and structural inequalities that limit people’s ability to be healthy.
This means we must invest in the fresh foods movement while make healthy foods more available and affordable to all people. We much make access to preventative healthcare a huge priority as communities with low income clinic show better health than those where healthcare is not affordable, available, or accessible to its people. We must also support the creation of not only safe and clean places for people to be physically active but have access to indoor swimming pools, rooms and halls where all bodies able bodied or not can take part. The city of Ferndale is an amazing example of what a community with these features should look like, but it still can be improved.
These measures must be addressed alongside wage disparities between all classes for bodies fat or thin to find health, even though healthy it will never look the way we believe it should and should never be used as a measure of someone’s worth.
For further reading:
danceswithfat.wordpress.com
fatheffalump.wordpress.com/
www.definatalie.com
createwithspirit.squarespace.com/
