OK time to cut the bullshit. To be perfectly honest, until the start of this year I didn’t even really know what a blog was. Well, I knew what a blog was, but I didn’t really understand the purpose or the point.
“So… it’s like an online journal that you put pictures with…?”
YES, Kobi, exactly.
And so. much. more!
I stumbled into this world thanks to an office job so boring that I have been driven to the brink of insanity. And at that brink I found bloglovin, and started following a heinous amount of blogs.
And now: I want to participate!
Unfortunately I’m one of those people that expects the absolutely finest from myself all the time (i’m not that harsh on other people, just myself). In fact, to my own detriment, I have a terrible habit of limiting myself with the thought pattern of “if it’s not going to be the very best I can do, just don’t bother doing it all”.
Eep! I’m working on that.
As such, HERE I AM, BLOGOSPHERE!
I’ve made a “third-month-of-the-new-year-resolution” to just DO IT (don’t sue me, Adidas).
Ok, so I don’t have amazing photography skills, or a wonderful camera. In fact, everything will probably be instagrammed to the shithouse…
I don’t know much (*anything) about CSS or HTML or RSS feeds, or creating adorable pages like lots of the blogs that I’ve become addicted to… but you know what? That’s ok. Everyone has to start somewhere, and I’m going to get amongst it. I won’t learn if I don’t begin.
And why do I want to contribute?
Well, get some popcorn and settle in. Here’s my story…
I’ve always been a “bigger girl”. Even when I wasn’t really fat, I was always bigger… taller, broader, and gingerliciously larger than life. I always felt monstrous, even when I wasn’t.
As a teenager, I had all the usual amount of angst. Or so I thought.
I was eventually diagnosed with an auto-immune disease which had been making my hormones all whacked out on crazy-juice. This took many years to discover, medicate, and manage. During this time I was not only having lady-issues so horrific that NO woman should EVER have to deal with them (let alone a 14/15 year old), but I was gaining weight like nobody’s business (despite being a state champion athlete who trained 6 days a week). I was full of self-loathing and hatred for everyone around me.
After my health issues were assessed and managed, I was finishing up year 12, but the emotional damage was already done. In my own eyes (with the generous assistance of glamour magazines and society in general), I was a disgusting, hideous, foul, beast who would never experience love or anything good in life, ever.
I was living by myself, in a city far from home, and I quickly dropped out of uni to work full time in a movie store, and eat myself into oblivion.
When I look back over my life, I see different stages and periods as colour palettes. That time was completely black, and I tipped the scales at 104kg.
I had never hated myself more.
I see now that one of the biggest reason I was drastically unhappy was because I was denying my true life passions. I have always been a performer and a musician and general creative at heart, but I was under the impression that success = money, and money = happiness. How to get this so-called happiness..? I know, study something “practical”! Duhn duhn duhn. Massive fail. Kobi no happy.
Most fortunately for me, my mum was living in a majorly hippy community at the time, and I went to stay with her for a while, in an hour of my darkest times. I saw an ad in the local newspaper for a 1 year acting course at a small, local conservatorium. I went for an audition, and (later learned that I had) absolutely astounded the tutors on the panel with my genuine passion for (and already relatively vast knowledge of) stagecraft and performance art. I was the weird-looking girl that went into the interview talking about Stanislavski and Sir Laurence Olivier. I wanted to do theatre, and I didn’t list “the first Shrek” as one of my favourite “classic” films (I kid you not – someone actually said this).
So I got in to the course, and it was one of the best years of my life. Something shifted in me. I was living a passion, and I was happy. I lost some weight. I got my first boyfriend (!). I explored.
When that year was over, I switched to the 2 year music course at the same conservatorium, and majored in vocals… something i’d always wanted to do, but had been crippled by debilitating stagefright and performance anxiety. Long story short: I nailed it. Totally ripped that shit up. Fear, what fear?
They say uni is some of the best year’s of a person’s life. Looking back, that is so very, incredibly true for me.
During that time I also came to realise that I might never be able to afford my own private jet, or to swim in a jacuzzi of Moet, but that I could be happy with me if I was doing what I loved.
Just as importantly, in that time, I also came to realise that I didn’t have to despise my body. It started out as a day here and there that I didn’thate myself. Then it was most days, with a few days I actually felt good about myself. But even still, I was very much an emotional eater, and in the not-so-back-of-my-mind I always had a lot of feelings of guilt associated with food and overeating.
To be perfectly honest, It’s only really been in the last year or so that i’ve come to truly accept my body. I mean, I still have bad days, but they are few and far between, and I console myself with the thought that surely even skinny people have days when they don’t feel great about themselves. For example, it’s always such a shock to me whenever I hear my best friend mention that she hasn’t been feeling that great about her body lately. Because to me, her body is so beautiful. I’m not even saying that because she might one day be reading this blog. In fact, a year or so ago, I probably would’ve used the phrase “I would KILL for her body”. But not anymore, because I appreciate my body for what it is, and what it represents about me.
Some things that have helped me so far in my quest notfor the perfect chassis, but for perfect acceptance:
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I’ve started cooking a lot more. I have a bunch of recipe books that inspire me everytime I flip them open. And as cliché as it sounds, the satisfaction I get from cooking for myself means that I don’t often feel the need to binge eat anymore, or to stop for a “pre-dinner dinner” at some takeaway joint (yes, I more than occasionally used to do that).
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Another thing that’s helped with the whole ‘cooking thing’ is having my own vegetable garden. It is the most rewarding experience, to go out to the garden and pick things fresh to be eaten right away. And also the act of nurturing something from start to finish, that is going into your body… there’s nothing else like it! Plus, coming home from work every day and watering the garden is actually a lovely, de-stresser!
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In the last year, i’ve gotten 3 tattoos and 3 more facial piercings. I love body mods. I know they’re very popular these days, and usually that tends to mean I steer clear, but in this case, I love the self-expression. I understand where people are coming from when they warn “you’re going to regret that when you’re older”. And maybe I will. But I’ll worry about it then. Having pieces of art permanently etched onto my body is something I enjoy for me, and I also get off on it because it is a commitment to a form of self-expression. Which is really important to me. I may not have any say over what shape of body I’ve been given, but I sure as shit can control how I decorate it! And that’s empowering.
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Hand in hand with that is fashion. Or as I have now come around to calling it: fatshion. I don’t mean I want to wear pieces that were just seen on the latest D&G runway, but now made for fatties. I mean I want to wear unique clothes that express my style and who I am, and I don’t want to be bogged down with ideas of “flattering”, or “dressing to slim”. This has been my latest hurdle, because the tips handed down from females in my family have always been along the lines of “don’t wear horizontal stripes”, and “our shoulders are too broad for strapless”. I don’t want to pander to these perceptions of ‘optical illusions’. I am FAT. There ain’t no hiding it. Let me eat cake, and let me wear what I want!
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Which brings me to my next point of empowerment: recaliming the word fat. It is such a horrid, dirty word in our society. I’ve been working on it for a year solid now, but I have completely disassociated that word with bad conotations. In fact, i’m proud to use it in relation to myself. I can’t wait for the day I can refer to myself as ‘fat’ in front of slender person, and not have them look awkwardly sideways.
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This is the perfect lead in for the culmination of it all… The person who I believe is pioneering the weigh (see what I did there?) for a more fat-tastic future. And not just fat loving, but general body acceptance amongst people of all shapes, sizes, ethnicities, races…