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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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Passing
So, I have this problem, this problem of not knowing what size I am now. On Sunday, Max and I went with my fab walking partner Judi and her fab husband Paul to a studio art tour in a nearby community and I asked Max to take some pictures of me near other people, so that I might start to get some idea of what I look like in relation to other people. There weren't a lot of people around, but Max did his best and here are a couple of the photos.
I don't know whether or not it's strange not to know what size I am. And I still have some habits that are related to being fat. For example, I still give people a wide berth when I am nearby. It probably makes me seem a bit stand-offish now that I'm thinner, but it's a habit left over from when I was much fatter. I knew that people hate to touch fat people, think that fat is something that you can catch from touching them, so I used to try to put people at ease by not touching them. The first time someone passed Thin Sublingua (over a year ago, in a hallway at school) and brushed against me, I got angry. I was, like, hey, don't you know the fucking deal? You're not supposed to touch fat people, you moron. I was angry because I was trying to keep my end of the deal and this guy didn't. (It took me a while to hit upon the thought that he didn't know I was fat because I didn't, at about 180 pounds, look fat to him.) Now, at 150, I still have the vestiges of this idea, this behavior in me, and part of it is that I have little idea that I'm not fat anymore. No one tells you when you set out to lose weight, that one of the biggest challenges is going to be conquering your own ideas. I have had to change everything, not just my eating and exercising habits, but my ideas about who and what I am in relation to the rest of the world. Francis Kuffel calls it "passing for thin" and that is what I am doing now. I'm finding that I'm a visitor to the thin world and I don't know the rules. I mean, having gone through life fat, I really, honestly didn't know that thin people don't have these hyper-sensitive proximity alarms that go off. Thin people take seats next to other thin people, even strangers. Thin people touch other thin people when they pass them in hallways. Thin people don't do that thing that they do in stores, that thing where they awkwardly slide their carts sideways out of the way of fat people. Thin people acknowledge each others' existences. They see each other. They don't have that automatic cloak of invisibility that fat people necessarily don to avoid all the fat prejudice that is out there. It's strange to suddenly be aware of these interactions that were previously forbidden to me because I was fat. Some of them (like the proximity thing) I knew. Some of them (like the seat thing) I didn't know. But I'm learning. Fast. More updates as they happen.
More lies:
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