your power

the floor was wet so i rolled up my pants while doing laundry. they went up mid-thigh and i was body-conscious. only appreciatively. i have white and pink SI scars on my left thigh; i look a little mauled. i haven't shaved my legs in weeks because i am lazy. i have stretch marks and spider veins. i don't mind these things because this is my body, and i cannot live without my body. i have hair because i am a mammal. i have stretch marks because my skin is an elastic organ that will adapt to my weight, even if i'm five hundred pounds. i don't know what the fuck spider veins are for, but they're kind of neat looking.

i used to hate my body to the extent that i believed i was subhuman. the gerd really escalated it. i had been fat for a long time, but this embarrassing health problem made it worse. the burping, bloating, gurgling, constipation- i fucking loathed myself. i hated my body for not working right. i hated my body for being what it is, for being so disgusting, for its farting and fat. somehow other people's bodies were okay- as if their farts smelled like flowers and they were incapable of being gross- but mine wasn't. mine was worse. and the fat really drove it home, because that was the grossest part. i fantasized about taking a scalpel and slicing off my stomach rolls. i thought i did not deserve a significant other because my body was too ugly for sex and for other people's eyes.

i had a kind of body shame that was stifling (but is there any other kind?) and i thought i could silence it by starving it all away. i punished myself ruthlessly for having normal bodily functions that drove me to intense self-hatred.

so i reflected on all this while walking around in my hairy, scarred, normal weight legs and felt really amazed by how much i have changed.

what made me hate myself? my eating disordered mother? the media? my genes?

in my class on power, we talked about how there is a status quo in our culture, and you are punished if you deviate from it. back in college, my professor said she was really into feminism and decided to stop shaving her legs. people came up to her and said the nastiest things, they called her gross and disgusting. she finally threw up her hands and said she couldn't take it anymore; the hatred coming at her was too much.

and that is just for legs. a lot of us feel attacked for our whole bodies.

we are learning about a lot of power theories, and one that keeps coming up is that power is something that is given to you. power is fluid; it doesn't belong to anyone. you can give power to the media, to politicians, to your parents through your actions and beliefs. you can take away their power at any given moment. power means something different to everyone- and that's what is so great about it. you can define your power.

you are the most important person in your life. you are held hostage in your body. you could be there for another 80 years. you are held hostage in your brain. you are not like anyone else who ever has or who ever will live; your DNA is a one-time thing on this earth. no one else will ever have your total life experience, knowledge, emotions, and dreams. and because you are going to be living this life for a while, why not make the best of it? why not enjoy it? reincarnation could be a farce; this may be your one shot.

we watched "the matrix" in class and applied foucault's theories. he says that truth and knowledge set you free. he says that the world is run by biopower, which means that your power is in your body, and the state wants to utilize your body for its labor so it can sustain itself. he says that we are all brainwashed by our culture. the matrix is biopower; neo refuses to let his body be leeched upon. he refuses to be brainwashed. we all remain brainwashed to some extent because we are confined to our subjective experiences and cultures, but you can think outside the box some.

for example, the media says that thin women are beautiful. this is a man-made construct. you could have just as easily been born into a world that thinks 150 pound women under 5' are ideal. what if short people were racist against tall people? what if women were the dominant sex? someone could make up the belief system that blondes are children of the devil. you can really run wild with this, and it goes to show how hilarious and stupid some of our cultural beliefs are. laughter is the best form of rejection.

i'm beginning to really see that a good sense of humor is crucial to surviving life, and that this world can be so retarded that it deserves to be laughed at very hard. i think everyone can define their own versions of power, but many people choose not to. they choose to disempower themselves, which is a shame. hating yourself is easy. hating yourself is a form of self-denial that is unproductive. it will not remove the assholes in your life. at best, it will make them feel guilty. at worst, they will not care. if you do any work within, it has to be from self-love or it will fail. you have to go outside yourself to fix yourself, or you'll only have yourself to rail at. and i don't know about you, but i am so over that shit. i don't hate myself anymore for being human because that wasn't the problem to begin with. the problem was that i had a painful life and needed someone to blame, so i blamed myself, and i needed to punish something, so i punished my body. it's a story that is repeated all the time, but it is such a sad waste and not many people seem to want to do anything about it.