Me at 35, once I started to own my body :)
Happy Tuesday once again folks.
I have decided to give some focused time to Substack. This means I will be taking deliberate action to increase my subscriber base & prune my list.
Which makes me want to ask you.
Now that I’ve asked you the question I’ve been meaning to ask, I would like you to read the headline once again. I know it is politically incorrect. Still, I take this chance to say it as it was in my past.
Thirteen-year-old girls see the world in black & white.
I was shamed for being thin & short. You may dismiss me at this point, saying thin is what the world loves. But understand that I faced terrible misery. So much so that I envied healthy girls, the ones with curves. I envied the ‘fat’ girls in my 13-year-old mind that was being groomed unwittingly to hate.
School is the place where girls learn to turn against each other rather than stand up for each other.
Anyone who has made it a point to study hate culture would know that it made people like me turn on those who had little to do with what was happening to them rather than stand up to those who did the bullying.
Maybe genetics, want & emotional turbulence combined to stunt my growth. I don’t know, I was too young to know. All I know is I internalized it. I blamed myself for looking malnourished & blamed other girls for looking healthy.
I grew up in the 90s, an era that was not woke.
And where kids were relatively powerless. So skinny shaming started in school. I was excluded from competitive sports & puny me was not welcome on any team. Well-meaning relatives would tell me I had to eat better. My doctor shamed me at fifteen for not looking pretty like other girls.
When I didn’t know skinny shaming meant hate how could I expect the privileged kids with their fancy cars & connections to know?
Teenage boys as individuals are ridden with angst & varying degrees of self-doubt. Put them together & you have a hunting pack that can tear you apart. They ripped into me, snickering at my stick-thin figure, bad clothes & five-foot frame. They added mean jokes for effect.
And because we are taught very young that we need to indulge the male species, I laughed with the boys when they laughed at me. But I felt the discomfort even while I was gulping down the shame & laughing. In today’s times, you would call it abuse.
Girlfriends added their own insults. Shopping was a nightmare when they would (again) band together to giggle at me & direct me to the kids section to find my size.
Of course, I used to hate my body!
What do you think? I refused to look in mirrors because they made me feel worse about myself.
Culture & the fashion czars reinforce that thin is good so we skinny ones have nowhere to hide when we are shamed.
Skinny shaming or short shaming is still not as politically incorrect as fat shaming. When I started to talk about some of the abuse, I was told it was not a big deal. Those who have been fat-shamed don’t get it. Every time I bring it up, I hear statistics to prove that more people are fat-shamed than skinny-shamed.
How does any of this make my trauma less real? I was stigmatized, degraded, shamed & diminished for years. I have a story to tell.
Eating habits have little to do with it
It could be genetics. Hormonal imbalance. Or like in my case early-age trauma that prevents kids from growing to their potential. When victims of troubled households are shamed for being what they cannot help it does big damage. In addition to the burdens I was carrying, I was forced to carry the “burden” of being thin.
Skinny shaming springs from the same hate & sexism as fat shaming.
The two are not at all different. I know it now. In both cases, bodies, mostly women’s bodies are judged & graded as unattractive. We are reduced to objects.
Our existence is deemed unimportant because looking at our bodies does not make men happy. The assumption is that women exist to be used by men. We either give them pleasure by looking perfect or we become their objects of mockery.
Us skinny ones are told to occupy less space.
You would think “fat” people are shamed for occupying more space. That may be so. But we skinny ones cannot safely occupy spaces without being told we can fit into much less. We make ourselves smaller. We make ourselves invisible so as not to offend those who hate how we look.
I look at women who are fat-shamed as sisters in arms.
But some of them don’t. At a recent party a stranger thought it fit to mock me for looking too young. Maybe she was hoping to get some laughs. I do own my body now so I thanked her for the compliment & felt good for standing up to her.
Now I know fat shaming & skinny shaming are both hate that spring from human insecurities.
We feel indignant when someone with a body that does not fit into a socially acceptable norm wants more from life. Our insecurities play up & we shame them to keep them in place. This way we can continue to rule the world & make its rules.
As always thank you for being here with me on the journey.
I love toast