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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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Pretty and Good?
I'm feeling pretty good about myself these days. Of course that means that I'm doing a lot of what bell hooks calls self interrogation to try to find out why I'm feeling pretty good about myself. I mean, I can't really feel good about myself and just let it go at that. I have to know why, have to ask myself all these questions about why I'm feeling good, because you know the analytical side of me has to understand everything from the inside out, as though it had some existence separate from the rest of myself. I am rather divided that way. So why am I feeling good about myself? Well, there is the fact that I'm finally figuring out some things about maintaining the weight loss. I'm getting a decent amount of exercise. My diet is good. Ummm, what else? Oh, yes: And also I'm finding out that guys are interested--even though they're just online guys, they're still interested, they still count. I'm also finding that I enjoy the new body. We're becoming friends, she and I. I like the way we look. I like the way we feel. I like the way she moves. I like the flat stomach and the muscular arms and legs. I like the thin shoulders and long neck, revealed as all the extraneous chins went away. I love the collar and cheek bones. I lay in bed last night and took a whole bunch of pictures of myself, something I haven't done in a while. I really, strangely, have only a little idea of what I look like now. I mean, that was a challenge as I was losing weight, learning to see me as I was and not as I had been. (Some people call it "phantom fat" and have the same problem of not being able to see themselves as the thin people they are becoming.) So I kept thinking of myself as Fat Sublingua, kept looking in all the mirrors around me and seeing Fat Sublingua. I couldn't see Thin Sublingua. The Brain just wouldn't process the new image reflected back at it in mirrors. (I called them "lying mirrors" or "thin mirrors" when they showed me the thin me and just "mirrors" when they showed me the fat me.) Thin Sublingua just wouldn't come into focus. So now she's coming into focus and I'm, like, damn, look at us! I can't believe it, but I still feel pretty good about it. But the guys? They see it. They're kind of like lying mirrors at this point though. And I still have a bit of cynicism about the fact that they wouldn't have looked twice at Fat Sublingua, or would have judged or pitied her. And, too, I was talking with Sophistica last night and realized, as we talked about finding boyfriends ("Boyfriends or therapy," I said, "It's that time of year." She replied, "I'm too fat." I said, "Therapy it is then." She said, "I don't have time!") that I had some kind of cynicism about boys who found me attractive at 368 pounds which I attributed to the weight. (Let me explain that. I mean, of course, that boys who find fat girls attractive sparked that cynicism in me because I didn't feel attractive when I was fat. They may have liked it, but they didn't know me, they only wanted to know the body, which I found a little weird frankly.) And it's not that anything has changed really. They still want to know the body and I'm still a bit cynical. But now that I'm proud of the body, I'm finding that that may, for the moment, be a good thing...This is quite confusing, isn't it? Okay, well. Let me just say, that the online slacker I went to meet for coffee last week said one thing that I took away as the reason I went to meet him. We were talking about online pictures and he said that he posted the least attractive pictures of himself that he could find so as to weed out the women who were only into looks. I found this an oddly appealing idea. He went on to say that he didn't like those girls who hid their bodies, who posted pictures of themselves that only showed their faces and shoulders, trying to hide the fact that they were fat. "I mean," he said, "it doesn't matter what your body type is, there's going to be someone out there who likes it." He told me a story about a guy he knew in the marine corps who was a small, skinny guy, but who was unapologetically into fat chicks. I love this. Love it. I mean, let's face it: The physical attraction has to be there. (I spent 18 years with Max figuring that out.) If it's not there, you can be friends, but a sexual relationship is going to be inherently unsatisfying. So, yeah, what's wrong with the initial attraction being physical, whether you're fat or thin? Hmmmm. There's a lot to think about there. I'll write more about it later.
More lies:
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