trigger warning: weight, body image, self-hate, suicide mention
Recently, actress Sharon Rooney who plays Rae Earl on the UK TV show My Mad Fat Diary announced that the show is returning for a third season. MMFD is allll about bodies. Rae Earl is the protagonist of the show, a fat sixteen-year-old girl dealing with not only her weight and low self-esteem but also with mental illness. She has a tough push-and-pull relationship with her mother, and a father that is out of the picture.
Last night, I took a loooot of selfies. I got home, undressed, freed myself of my bra and my jeans and threw on a tank top. I walked up to the bathroom mirror, examining myself as I usually do, making faces and posing and all that good stuff.
I think because of how closely I follow plus-sized fatshionistas who seem to perform femininity perfectly I often feel like I’m not feminine enough because I don’t dress impeccably or wear makeup very often. And to be really honest, that has left me feeling not at all attractive or sexy.
Trigger warning: cancer, illness, hospice mention, food mention, weight mention
When you lose a parent as a young kid, you have a lot of questions. “Did daddy like ___?” “Would he like this band or that band or this food or this ____?” I often wonder now if it was hard for my mom to constantly get these questions from me that I only asked because I was insatiably curious and I knew remarkably little about who my dad was personally. A lot of what I remember about my dad (and about my childhood in general) comes in images and in imagined scenarios of how I believe things would have gone. I don’t have many truly genuine memories of my father, but the ones I do have I treasure and actively make sure I never forget. One thing I know for sure about my dad was that he was stick thin. I remember him crossing his bony legs in the morning in his bathrobe as he read the newspaper and drank his coffee. My mom told me that his legs were so bony that he had to sleep with a pillow between them; my aunt even bought him a catfish body pillow (my dad loved to fish, so it was a perfect gift) to put between his legs. It looked like a catfish. Seriously.
I’ve always been fat. And until a couple of years ago, I was completely unaware that I had permission to love my body exactly the way it was. And so does everyone else. Everything changed when I discovered body positive bloggers on Tumblr who wrote about fatness. When I first read these posts, it was as if a wave of recognition washed over me – I felt validated and like I was no longer alone.
Unruly Bodies 