Today, May the 6th, is International No Diet Day, promoted by The Butterfly Foundation to encourage positive body image (May is also ‘Plate up the Positives’ month). Trends Maps on Twitter will also inform you that @beyondblue and #iamanxiety are trending, as the foundation today has launched its $2 million anxiety and depression awareness campaign. The beyondblue YouTube channel has some profound clips depicting anxiety (click here to watch), and has been publishing articles such as this one to raise awareness of how common the illness is. Hence, today is an important day to me – hopefully to you all.
You are beautiful, that’s the message. Let me tell you about beautiful. It’s the woman who holds her head high and is proud of her body just as it is. It’s the people who buy jeans which fit them, not the ones they hope will fit one day. Beautiful people are those who choose love. Beautiful is you. It is me. It is every moment. Beautiful is struggle and glory. Beautiful is knowing you are enough. Beautiful is being free of Bentham’s panopticon prison. Beauty is ignoring ‘normative’ femininity. Beautiful is not caring who is watching. Beautiful is looking in the mirror and saying, “Gosh, you sexy beast.” (Warning: reflections in the mirror may be distorted by socially constructed ideas of beauty).
I write this body image post in light of an article I read recently about a banned slimming drug which killed a promising young medical student (click here to read it). There are also some pages and videos I’d like to share first, yet due to containing potentially ‘triggering’ content for those with eating disorders, I will simply link you below:
- You may remember the Nutella Man from one of my previous posts. Also known as Furious Pete, his inspirational transformation from anorexic to competitive eater and bodybuilder can be viewed by clicking here. (While you’re there, ‘subscribe’ to his YouTube Channel to view some serious eating!)
- A gorgeous video of women embracing who they are, ‘On Real Beauty’ – click here to watch.
- An article covering an Anti-Anorexia campaign launched by Brazilian modeling agency Star Models is certainly worth a read (warning: triggering images) – click here to read and view the campaign photos.
- This one is amazing. An online game intended to be used in a clinical context as part of a psycho-education package to improve our understanding of people suffering from depression. Click here to play.
- I adore Joe Rogan, for those who didn’t know that, and here’s a clip of him discussing ‘Life and Overcoming Depression’ – click here to watch.
- For more information, the Journal of Eating Disorders is available at BioMed Central. Click here to visit.
Recent polls on the ‘ideal body’ reveal a mentality which is as monumental a lie as Manti Te’o’s girlfriend. Women should look like Barbie, men should fit the Christian-Bale-as-Bruce-Wayne physique. Barbie’s proportions: six foot tall, a 39 inch bust, 18 inch waist, 33 inch hips, a size 3 shoe (oh the hilarity), a BMI fitting the criteria for anorexia, she would not menstruate, and she would have to move on all fours due to her proportions. For the men, I don’t have Batman’s proportions, so let’s use GI Joe instead. He would be 5’10” tall, with a 29 inch waist, a 55 inch chest, and 27 inch biceps (yes, arms the width of his waist). Not healthy, not realistic. Want to know how to get a bikini body? Put a bikini on your body. Want to dress for your shape? You’re human-shaped, wear whatever the hell you want.
Let me tell you something else: the ‘thigh gap’ serving as ‘thinspiration’ on the internet these days is not an indicator of beauty. It will only result in disappointment and demoralisation. We should be complimenting girls on their characters, not their bodies – you are smart, kind, brave, creative funny, talented, strong, fearless; not petite, tiny, small, thin, dainty, fragile. Too many people in society assume they understand eating disorders by sight alone, without acknowledging it is deeper than skin level. How I pity those dismissive, narrow-minded pragmatists who believe they can see it and therefore say it “as it is”; in their blissful ignorance never recognising the chasm separating how they think it is, and how it really is. The weight is simply a by-product of the thoughts, and so the thoughts are just as much present once the weight has been gained, and take far longer to overcome. Anorexics are dictated to by the malicious voice of a genuine illness.
What’s my point? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not size dependent. Your body is a fantastic piece of machinery. It is a self-sustaining miracle. It contains an incredible collection of thoughts, experiences, dreams, loves, talents, fantasies, and visions. Try capturing that on your iPhone or filtering it on Instagram. You don’t want someone else’s body, because this one is yours. It might be doing some crazy things at the moment, and you may crave harmony between biology and psychology, but it’s all you have. And you’re pretty awesome as it is.
I fight for attainment of this self love, like so many of you. But it is not my beautiful body I fight; it is myself, that tricky little gremlin residing in a dark corner of my mind. The depressed mind is a manipulative thing; it loves to commiserate with other sad souls yet simultaneously believes it is completely alone in its profound pain. It is a liar – it will convince you of the most insidious things; it will say that you are worthless and the world is meaningless; it will tell you that sadness is the only truth. Nobody ever sat me down and said, “one day you are going to be hurt on an unfathomable level. One day everything you believe now is going to be shot in the head and you’ll be left with an existential void which you may spend the rest of your life attempting to figure out or forget.” But who would say that? The beauty of life is realising there is a void, then discovering that it can be filled.
“My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known – no wonder, then, that I return the love.” Soren Kierkegaard.
It’s a matter of perspective. Depression is the perfect mechanism through which to gain appreciation for the Universe. It is vast, infinite perhaps, so big that we are insignificant, yet paradoxically we are all of it because we are the experiencers. You are 14 billion years in the making, a child of this Universe. This makes you beautiful; you are the Holy Grail of inner beauty. Look around you, detach from human expectations and hopes; absorb how mysterious and wondrous and infinite this Universe is, and you are. Nietzsche said something about an abyss staring at you, but depression doesn’t just stare – it sucks you in for what seems like infinity. Chuck Palahniuk promised that at Rock Bottom everything is possible – what is this bottom point? It’s invisible and maybe not a point at all; if you look at it, it probably disappears. Forget about it. Focus on the outside, the beauty of the Universe, and one day you’ll suddenly realise you have made it out of the abyss. Sunlight. No anxiety, no depression. Overcome.
“One is never happy once and for all and never unhappy once and for all. As long as one lives, there is no fixity. We know no definitive days. Melancholy has no more than a partial basis in reality, and the same is true of joy.” – Leon Wieseltier.
Even Eve, the only female soul never to have to wait for love, never to be judged on her mind or body, never to have another woman to compare herself to, never to create a monstrous mind for herself based on culture and society… She too is now judged after death, for causing the Fall, for the formation of the faceless mass that is our mortal, human, insatiable society. And through this we suffer. But through this we also grow. Without Eve we would be nobody, nothing – perhaps forever, yet empty. Mortality creates meaning. Culture is change. Change is challenge. If I had wings I would not fly to Eden. There are so many fragile things; people break easily, and so do dreams and hearts – yet we continue to seek throughout life, the greatest happiness possible, not the deepest sorrow. And this gives me hope.
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus.
My writing contains everything I didn’t say. All the things I wish I said, the things I wish I did. L’esprit de l’escalier. The wit of the staircase. I want to say that I know a million ways out of this body, but I have clung to it, tooth and claw, despite people and institutions suggesting I would rather vacate the premises. They would rather see me bleed than accept my methodology in recovery. This body is mine, and I claim it; I claim its bruises and suffering, its beauty and grace. I am not trapped here. I have stared leaving my body in the eye and I’ve said, “hell no!” There is too much to do with this body, too much to love, too many who need one more of us to say “hell no” and help them say the same.
I wish someone would say to me, “I love you, you crazy, beautiful, ruined thing,” and in the depths of my soul I hope some day someone will. This may be a disease of isolation, yet solitude is not the card I have drawn. Once I would have said to a stranger, “if only you knew me before all this. When I was not-yet-shattered, not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet-, not-yet-not.” The eternal sunset of what I am not. I know who I am, not who I was. I know how it feels to walk the footsteps of wonder.
“I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.” – Jack Kerouac.
That we are human and must perceive this world through a mortal mind is both a curse and a blessing. We are cursed if we allow ourselves to be chained down by the limitations of our existence. We are blessed if we recognise and gaze upon, even delve into, the unknown. It is where all the wildest of geese are hiding, and although we cannot catch them, it is through our ambitious pursuit that we can progress. There in that darkness lie Shelley’s secret springs and Conrad’s enigmatic colonel. That the pursuit is interminable is the most sublime part, for no matter what we find there, there will always be more. How divine. How very beautiful.
