Tired

A few weeks ago I wrote the following in my journal.

I hate my ass. It's big and protruding. It's not curvy, it's just round and ugly and flabby. It was that way even when I'd slimmed down. I hated it then, too. I even hate it more than the pouch of my stomach or my saddlebag thighs.

I remember the first time I became self conscious about my ass. I was maybe 15 or 16 and a bunch of friends and I were at a pool party. My friend Mary and I were in our bathing suits and our friends teased us about how big our asses looked in them. It was all in fun, but I remember thinking "Fuck! A big ass. One more fucking thing to be self conscious about." Cuz being teased about having nappy hair for all of grade school and high school was not enough.

I've tried to make piece with my ass. But it's difficult, because I Still. Fucking. Hate. It.

Like everyone, I have days of body loathing. I also have days when I don't hate my body. But I hate my ass pretty much every day. Did I wake up one day and decide to hate my ass? No. But I got the message early on that my shape is unacceptable in the eyes of society. It's a message about 99.999% of women get and we all spend our lives coping (or not coping) with that reality.

Earlier this year, I decided to stop dieting. Up to that point, I'd been dieting for 7 years straight, which, of course is nothing compared to the lifetime of yo-yo dieting others have dealt with . So, 7 years wasn't a terribly long time to be dieting, but looking back, it was a fucking eternity, because it turns out that dieting fucks you up both mentally and physically. Every day (and I do mean EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.) was spent worrying about what I ate, how much I'd eaten, whether I'd exercised to make up for eating too much. And after 7 years of doing that, I'd started to gain some of that weight back. So, I said fuck it. I was tired - fucking TIRED - of feeling like shit about myself every fucking day. So, I decided to ask my body what it wanted - in terms of food and activity. NOT what I needed to do to make my body smaller, but what my body needs to be strongd and healthy. And no, thinness does not = health. And frankly, I'm tired (there's that word again) of people acting like they want everyone to get thin so they can get healthy. If you're gonna get your fat hate on, at least own it.

Tired. I am tired of being told by everyone under the sun - my peers, society, advertising, product manufacturers - that I am not good enough the way I am. Fuck you. FUCK. YOU.