Being Fat Forced Me to Learn to Be Beautiful
Another extremely sick day, when I have to write something.
I was thinking about what I learned from being fat. There will be debate over how fat I am, but let’s just say that I’d been at least technically speaking obese.
As some of the fat melts away in the throes of sickness, though I am finally getting better, it is making me reflect.
One of the things about being fatter is that you learn how to make yourself pretty. Clothes that looked bad on you but nobody said anything because you still looked fine — when you’re fat you actually have to look at how it’s landing on your body, if it’s doing anything for you. Is it actually making your hair look better, or your skin glow, or anything like this. Is it augmenting any of your assets.
When you’re skinny you can just not think about any of this.
When you’re fatter you might be more conscious of your posture, or how your legs feel. You might think about how your feet feel in your shoes, and your legs. You might start thinking about what shoes might make you feel better, or make you look better.
The body consciousness…well…makes one body conscious.
It makes me think about things I can control (vitamins, waxing) and things I cannot control (the inevitable deterioration of the flesh into nothingness).
Moving is harder, but because moving is harder you get stronger, movements become more elegant. Being even a little too heavy means you can’t be as fast, and that means you pay more attention to the movements and the movements work a bit as weight training. Your smaller muscles become stronger.
You pay attention to things you can’t change about yourself. Your skin color. Your eye color. And then parts of yourself that you can construct. Any jewelry you wear, and its symbolism.
I would not encourage somebody to become fat to get some of these interesting benefits of self-awareness. But these are just some interesting benefits.
When you lose weight, you get to think about what kind of skinny you want to be. You realize there are not that many kinds of skinny you want to be, or that when you were skinny before, you weren’t actually happy, just that being fat is harder. But maybe in becoming skinny again, you can find a way of being skinny that makes you feel healthy, happy, and beautiful.
If you’re fat, you have to find ways to feel healthy, happy, and beautiful. Some people like that you’re fat. Some people don’t notice. But those two categories generally don’t offset that amount of comments about your weight that you get, from seemingly neutral and objective to really cruel comments about how you completely fucked up your life and your life will not get better until you get some self-discipline and become thinner.
This latter category you have to offset yourself, internally, and that means learning and finding ways to have internal happiness and not hate yourself.
And then when you’re skinny again, you do want the kinds of nice comments people made when you were fat by people who were really into that — you want the real beauty that resonates with specific people and the connection with people over it, rather than meeting some kind of “Default beauty standard” again.