I sent an email to a psychiatrist last night. She seems right up my alley, ideologically, which is important to me. I hope she has later hours so I can see her after work. That was my plan, but I'd even be willing to drive the hour to Silver Spring on the weekend or whenever. Who knows if she has weekend hours though. I hope this works out. I need help. I need someone to talk to.

Body Image

I was a body-confident person, about a year ago. I had been confident since about 2005, when I was at pretty much the heaviest weight I've ever been. Before that, I was a self-loathing mess. I hated the way my stomach was never flat and the way my thighs chafed when I walked for a long time. The way shorts rode up between my legs and how I could feel them jiggle. My mustache-in-the-making, the fine and numerous blonde hairs on my stomach and lower back. My sensitive, problematic skin, my hairy big toes.

I feel similarly lately. For different reasons, in different ways. From losing a lot of weight quickly in 2005, then gaining it back quickly last year, I have stretch marks all over my breasts, my hips, my thighs, my underarms, my knees. My breasts aren't firm and perky anymore. My stomach will never be flat (now because of the stretch marks rather than genetics), my thighs and arms will always jiggle, but now it's the arms that bug me. I have "saddlebags" - a term I only recently learned. Hooray, a name for a thing that makes me feel awful. My back fat bunches up when I lean.

But it's not as simple as all that.

If it were that simple, I could just tell myself, like I once did, that all of these grievances are based on some impossible, manufactured standard of mainstream North American beauty. That curves and stretch marks and jiggle are gorgeous too. That I am attracted to all of those things, that my own preference toward beauty is inclusive of all of these things, so why would my own body be exempt from that (because standards are internalized, that's why).

But it's not. So I tell myself these things, and they don't help. It makes me feel worse, because then I feel guilty for not feeling better. Like I'm betraying womankind, humankind, by saying that all of these things that I hate about myself, stupidly, are actually ugly, but everyone else with these features is beautiful and never deserves to feel otherwise. A hypocrite. And a fraud on top of that, because I openly advocate self-love and body-acceptance, fat acceptance. Seeing conventionally beautiful women, and women that are beautifully confident, only makes me hate myself more. So what kind of fair-weather friend am I to that cause.

I know I shouldn't feel these things. I know it's stupid, unfounded, hypocritical, irrational. But I feel them anyway. It's out of my control. So I risk falling into endless self-struggle. Sometimes I do, sometimes I'm able to talk about it and I do anyway, sometimes I'm able to talk about it and I don't, sometimes I manage to toss it off on my own. When I fall, I feel like several levels of shit. I hate my body, I hate my hate, I hate my self-pity, knowing full well that it's all so stupid and time-consuming. Life-consuming. But this is Bipolar II, this struggle, which deserves its own posts.

Newness

Sometimes it's good to just start something new. An easy way to do things differently, a motivation. For my previous journal, see Jenna Begins.

In this blog, I want to make a concerted effort to be more thorough about what goes on in my own head. That means making my personal political.

Among the politics I want to explore:

• Gender
  
• Feminism
  
• Sexuality
  
• "Adultness"
  
• Our Bodies

Also among my interests:

• Love
  
• Food
  
• Living with Bipolar II, Panic Disorder, binge-eating disorder, ADD/ADHD, and insomnia
  
• Theory (especially sociological, but also literary)
  
• Learning forever

I will also talk about the quotidian and mundane, as this is my journal.

I've always been a candid person, an open book. This is how I better bare my soul.