my personal experience with body size
How do we feel about getting a little vulnerable on main?
I hope good, because here we go. When we talk about wellness and how it looks different for everyone, we gotta talk about body size.
I have been fat my entire life, by one medical or social designation or another.
It was not until my 20s before a piece of romantic pop culture showed a girl who was shaped like me who wasn’t a joke. I am so grateful that since then we’ve had so many more. In general, however, when someone looks like me, they’re a punch line or a best friend – or both.
My body is a plot point in my life. It’s not a bad one, or a good one, but it is one. It’s taken me a long time and a lot of therapy to get to that neutrality. A lot. And there are still days where I slide head first back into negativity, to the ways the culture reinforces all the time that your weight is a moral judgment on a person and completely within your control.
my body and burnout culture
And that’s where this intersects with burnout culture. Because for every message that says we have to work hard until we die, there’s an adjoining one that says we have to do it while being *skinny*. The Wellness Industrial Complex is built on this principle; that if you work really hard, and do it all alone, you’ll be skinny and desirable and *well*.
Wellness is a personal journey, and for you, it may involve the numbers on a scale. But the numbers on my scale are not the business of the general population. Despite the well meaning strangers on planes who ask if I’m getting enough exercise because then I wouldn’t take up so much room, or the folks who have moo’d at me from passing cars, or the boys who told me I was a secret girlfriend and not a public one because they had a reputation to uphold – despite what all those people believe, my wellness is my business.
And honestly, taking back that control feels a lot like standing up to burnout culture and staking my claim in creating a balanced culture.
Learn more about how we talk about burnout HERE.
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