Absolute honesty

I am copying something from my journal from December:

As much as I do want to be healthy, and know that I need to be okay with who I am inside, and even for having made a fair amount of peace with being bigger, and knowing also that I am old and possibly will not get married until the Millennium, and technically knowing that people who do not fit standard beauty requirements fall in love and get married, I want to be slim and beautiful and have people like how I look.

I remember it fairly well because I spent some time deconstructing all of the different parts of it. Actually, it started with a question of whether weighing myself was beneficial, or with what frequency to weigh myself. The simple question had too much baggage to be simple.

Ideally the next few posts will deal with how I feel about my body size, and my attempts to see things honestly and accurately and make good decisions based on that. There are elements that are personal, and societal, and I am still unpacking them. Even if I write several cogent posts, there will still be things that I only realize after I am done writing.

The thing that seems important to get out of the way before going there is that no matter how much I am learning to like myself and value myself as I am, I still want to be thin. I want to be beautiful. There is still a part of me that believes that beauty requires thinness and that believes that both are required for being loved.

That is not surprising. There is a lot of social conditioning that goes into it. There are constant messages that this is how it works through film and television. And, because of that, I probably really don't know how it works.

I think that I would like to have people see me and consider me attractive and want to get to know me, but there are probably several false ideas there. I do not get a lot of street harassment. Some of that is white privilege and some of it is the invisibility that comes with fatness. (Also, some of it is that I don't get out much.)

If I were thin, I might get more attention that way, but it could also be frightening and unpleasant.

I can think it would be nice to have lots of men wanting to date me, but the truth is I don't really want to go out that often, and I hate hurting people's feelings. I don't know that the ego boost of multiple people desiring me would make up for the discomfort of having to reject people.

Really, I just want one, but a good one with whom I am a good match and it is reciprocal. There is still a feeling that greater conventional attractiveness would facilitate that more, but also greater social skills or confidence or coming out of my shell more might do that too.

Right now all of this is abstract, because I don't have anywhere in my life to put that kind of a relationship right now. About five years ago I wrote that my ideal relationship would be that he comes over around 9 PM, we talk for five minutes and neck for ten and then it's "See you tomorrow night!" It looks like that's still where I am.

All of which isn't really so much about the weight, except that there are a lot of things that feel tied in with the weight, even if they really aren't. And I say this not because I am being particularly insightful, but because I want to be clear.

No matter how liberated or wise or accepting anything that I write over the next few posts sounds, I have still been totally subject to the same conditioning that everyone else has, and it is still in me.