https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvxHPtEsmFc&index=3&list=TLpeq8S1i6LwNK1D2FmPLMg93sSTLV0wpv
This video is one of my favorites. I believe that most people fall in love more than once in their lifetime. Some are just the “ideas” of what being in love really is… we yearn to feel accepted and crave that feeling of Love by different people. Continue reading
“The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people’s minds.”
― Edward De Bono
How do we really succeed full confidence in our bodies with society’s specific vision? This is a question I have recently been asking myself. It is more recent because before I had never thought that I had a choice of the way my body should look. This is because growing up I had always been told what it is to be a lady and how my body should look in order to be accepted. I have always been super self conscience when it comes to my weight because in my household weight seemed to be a revisited topic. For me because I was always an “overweight” child. I usually got compared to my fit and muscular brother. He passionately played football so I was also expected to passionately play a sport. I was always strongly pushed to play a sport because of my thicker figure, with hopes I would loose weight or not gain any. I was constantly compared to my brother and what my parents and society told me was the ideal shape.
Having society’s ideal and “normal” weight always shown and told to me, it is the hardest thing to really except being different from that expectation. I have many days where I love and embrace my thick and curvier shape. Other days I constantly dwell on how I look compared to those of the more ideal weight. Even when someone is thicker, there always is an appearance expectation. The fashion always is supposed to be kept up rather than the expectations from someone who is already at ideal shape. It is a struggle in which I still look to accept how I feel about my body rather then persuaded by society’s perception. Is there really a full and complete way to accept our personal own body type? Even when we are up against what a body should be and look like concerning doctors, health,and society. I always wonder will there be a body type acceptance for all.
Throughout my twenty two years on this planet, weight and food has been a majority fixture and topic of social life. There are so many diet ads that promise the key to a happy and healthy life. They insinuate that when you lose weight, you will become a totally different person.
During my eighth grade year of middle school, I lost a lot of my baby fat and experienced just how true this insinuation was. I find it sad and shallow, that it’s true. The majority of societies really do treat you differently once you look different, in their opinion, “a good way”. As soon as I went through this transformation, everyone at my school suddenly wanted to be my friend. I do not exaggerate that over the duration of two days, half my school started adding me on xanga and tagged ( social media sites that were popular in 2005 , especially for young people). It seemed as if I had become a different person or something, because I was not only accepted into the “cool crowd”, but wanted! And I could never feel very comfortable with myself, because I could not forget the fact that my personality had not changed, only my body. Each new “friendship” that was beginning always had a sense of fakeness; the pressure to be a certain way and act a certain way. Which just made it harder to find and create genuine connections.
I don’t feel that having a desirable body is the key to happiness, but I do believe society’s shallow behavior and actions do support and shore up the social and class roles regarding fat and beauty/happiness. Unfortunately I am quite aware that with the career path I have chosen, I will be forced to come across these ideas and views constantly. As an actor, you are required to be fit (not just for scenes, but also for the strenuous exercises and movement involved).
I want to start off with a trigger warning: I am going to be discussing self-harm in this.
Not long after I turned 18, I came home from class one day to find that my mom was home early from work.
I walked in the door to find that she had several bags packed in the kitchen. I asked her what was going on and I got this response:
“Honey, I got fired today. I knew there was a risk of this for a while now, but I didn’t want to worry you. I’m just going to stay at Sean’s house for a week to clear my head. I’ll be back in a week with a plan okay?”
Sean was her boyfriend that lived on the water somewhere near the Eastern Shore. He had cheated on her and broken her heart before, so I wasn’t a fan of him at all, but after watching several boyfriends leave or break her heart, and after watching her struggle constantly with online dating, who was I to stop her from being with him?
Growing up, my mom was constantly dating, and she was very open about it. My whole life had been taking care of her, because it was never in her head that she was supposed to live alone. Sure, she was incredibly strong, but she was also incredibly confused and depressed. She grew up wanting a husband and kids, and while she got the kids, she never got her perfect husband, and my sister and I had to constantly live with her disappointment. My mom went to stay with Sean, and never came back. I got a text message from her that she got married, and she made a life for herself. Since I was 18 I was technically an adult, so technically she did nothing wrong, but you don’t realize just how young you still are when you’re 18 years old.
I didn’t no how to cope with such an enormous empty feeling, so I replaced it with what I learned to do: have a lot of sex.
I went from sleeping with one person, my first love, to several people, in a span of months. It was awful. I had some really great guy friends, and when they showed interest in me, I automatically assumed I needed to sleep with them in order to receive love from them. I’d wake up in the morning feeling filthy, wrong, and quite frankly very unfamiliar with myself. Who was this person that suddenly slept with every man that moved? This wasn’t me! I put these guys before everything, including school and work, and it all came back to haunt me soon enough.
One I ruined my GPA, had no job, and lost nearly all of my guyfriends fro obtaining quite a reputation and getting heartbroken from nearly all of them, I hit rock bottom, and felt the emptiness all over again. None of this was solving any of my problems, but actually just severely avoiding them. I had to find out who I was and what I wanted to do with my life.
I’ve spent this past few years really finding myself, and who I want to be. Sex is faaaarrr in the back of my mind (unless I’m watching a scene of Lord of the Rings with Aragorn), and I’ve dedicated my time to a fresh start. I transferred to UMBC, turned to therapy and acupuncture, started playing the banjo, and have been working as a barista for nearly two years.
I didn’t tell you my story to get sympathy, or to show off who I am today. I just wanted to share the difficult lesson I learned. Sex does not promote your self-esteem, and it doesn’t solve problems. Also, it’s really, really, really okay to hit rock bottom sometimes. As Kurt Vonnegut said: “I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center”
Last week on Wednesday, there was talk that the English department puts on to showcase a professor from that department. The department choose Professor Rudacille, my English 383 (Science Writing), to present her different projects she is taking on and how they all relate to one another. So far she is writing a play that is loosely based off of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, she is writing a piece on the mountaintop removal issue in West Virginia, and she is finishing up doing interviews of individuals of the Catholic Faith in regards more radical ideas outside of the church. It was interesting to see how all these vastly different things relate to the idea of healing.
I chose Nicki Minaj’s music video “ Anaconda” to portrayed racial stereotypes of black women’s bodies that are shown very commonly in hip-hop music industry in today’s media. In this music video Nicki is shown as a hyper sexualized black woman. Continue reading
Am I fat?
I ask that question to myself everyday and no one has the right to tell me that I am fat. I was born as a very skinny child and doctors were afraid I might die, but my mom took great care of me and I survived and now I am a healthy person or you can call a “FAT” one. Continue reading
I saw this video by Special K and I absolutely loved it. It caught my eye because it questions what we use to measure our self worth. In the video, various women go into a denim store looking for jeans. The video opens to a voiceover of women explaining their disdain for shopping for jeans. As it continues the women notice that none of the jeans have a size on it, which then allows the associates to ask to measure the women. In the measurements, the associates don’t mention size 6 or size 12, but radiant, strong, charismatic, stunning or fabulous. The idea is to show that we are not defined by our weight but by our own personalities and personal idea of worth. I especially enjoyed this commercial because it strayed away from the idea that you’ll feel better or be a better person if you lose weight with a product. The commercial emphasizes that you can be great in any body. It was an interesting take on weight and advertising and to me, it gave me the feeling of acceptance and non-judgment which is what all people should feel about themselves regardless of weight. One woman even states “Not seeing the number is so freeing” and I completely agree with this statement. This is not to say that everyone should wear the same size, but that everyone deserves the same level of quality and comfort regardless of a person’s size or weight. It shouldn’t be a difficult process for certain people because they are bigger than others.
Pronouns. Pronouns are things that we learned about in grade school and for most people, something they haven’t thought about since (unless we get into learning other languages but that brings up something else entirely). Pronouns are almost always read off the body, which is funny because they actually have nothing to do with bodies. Pronouns are related to gender, so within the gender binary, it makes sense that he/him/his or she/her/hers are the only pronouns people know, and are almost always the pronouns that people read off of others’ bodies. I’m gonna let you in on a little thing called “there are more than two genders” (it’s shocking, I know. I’ll let you think about that for a minute).
Unruly Bodies 