I spent yesterday sitting around waiting for the chimney guys, sitting around while they decided if the chance of rain was too great for them to do what they needed to do, and then sitting around after they left.
Later, there was a car accident out front. No one was hurt. My poor neighbors’ beautiful truck was destroyed. I called 911 and it felt like it took forever for the police to arrive, but I’m sure it was just ten minutes or so.
So, here’s the thing. It doesn’t have anything to do with those things, I just wanted there to be some words on my screen before I got started. I bought some new clothes. In a perfect world, there’d be some kind of office uniform and I’d just wear the same thing every day and not worry about it. But in this world, it is the individual’s responsibility to try to figure out what the fuck to wear every day.
I was pretty much like “I will wear this t-shirt and this skirt and if anyone at work looks askance at it, I’ll say that it’s summer time.” But then I feel like I only have two outfits that are genuinely work appropriate.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying I bought some grown-up clothes. But I bought some grown-up clothes.
I think they look nice. But since my strategy has previously been to dress like a bland tent, looking in the mirror, I just felt like I was looking at my belly, my enormous, round belly swathed in different, nice clothes.
I feel like there is no moment where my feminism and my trying to accept myself and my desire to be a happy person fails so utterly as when I’m trying on new clothes.
The thing about having been all different kinds of fat is that I know, from personal experience, that there is no size at which I feel happy and confident in my body, no way it looks where I feel aesthetically pleasing and desirable.
Still, I look in the mirror and just feel like, ugh, fuck. And then I feel bad because I don’t feel fine and happy with what I see there. And then I feel bad because I feel so fucked up that the mirror has never shown me something I felt fine and happy with. In other words, I know from experience that being thinner wouldn’t make that moment in front of the mirror any less grueling. The thing that would seem to promise an end to it is just another way to feel bad and failing.
Usually, what I end up asking myself is, “Fine, but what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” In other words, if I’m going to feel more confident or more socially acceptable when I “internalize my self-worth” or if I magically loose a bunch of weight or somehow stumble upon clothes that make me look so awesome that the bad thoughts are kept at bay, that’s great. Bring on that future day. But today I have to leave the house and I have to wear clothes and I have to go by reflective surfaces. So, I have to have something now or I have to do something now or I just have to accept that this is what it is right now.
This is life, right now.
So, anyway, I bought some great new clothes which I love, and I feel bad about it, but admitting it makes it suck less.
Tiny Cat Pants 
I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes I channel my feminist rage. I think “If I was a dude, and I had a belly and even if I was also bald, I would not be considered a monster, just an average-looking dude. I’d be allowed to wear much plainer and more comfortable clothes and I could still think I looked just fine, and deserved love, attention and success. But because I’m a woman I’m supposed to think that any deviation from Disney Princess makes me undeserving of those things. That is some unfair bullshit.”
First off, all the hugs and understanding, cause right now my belly sticks out further than my boobs, and I’m an F cup, so that’s BELLY.
About ten years ago, I had an epiphany one day. There is not a tall slender woman under the weight I want to lose. I know what there is. There’s a broad-shouldered Polish woman. She’s got big boobs and muscular arms, thick thighs on long strong legs with big calves. She’s got hips to set babies on and an ass men will follow to hell. I’m never going to be a size six. Twelve is a little more rational. I would live happily in size sixteen jeans. Currently I’m between an 18 and a 20.
People like roses, and lilies, and violets. No one asks roses to smell like violets, or lilies to look like roses. Why can’t we all accept our own beauty and love ourselves as whatever sort of woman we are? I do elegant and imposing and beautiful and majestic well. But I’m never going to be cute.
I would like to lose weight. I have arthritis in weightbearing joints that is less painful the less I weigh….that’s just physics. And I’d like to not have the belly, cause it makes wearing the sort of clothing that goes with my style to be much more difficult. But both my men like me the way I am, and that works. And it lets me love myself enough to let the weight go. Much to my surprise.