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.