I spent this past summer with my hair dark pink. I was bored, needed a change, and it had been ages (literally about 20 years) since my hair had been pink. Seemed like a no-brainer to me. And I enjoyed the summer with my dark pink hair.
Here’s the thing.
I often forgot that my hair was pink.
Like, I would just go along, doing the day-to-day things in my life, and not once think about my hair being pink. It just didn’t occur to me. Or it would occur to me later, like when I went to lunch with my great-uncle and cousins and then after I got home realized that I had pink hair the whole time. Nobody said anything, of course. It might have been a couple of decades, but they’d seen me with pink hair before. But still, I didn’t think about it at the time because there I was on a Sunday afternoon, having lunch with some family I hadn’t seen for a while.
The same phenomenon occurs with my fat ass as well.
I often go through my day-to-day life forgetting that I’m fat. This is my body and I inhabit it and I move it around and do the things and it just doesn’t occur to me that I’m fat. I’m just me. Existing. Doing stuff. Being. This is my reality. I often forget how big I am. I’m just living life.
It’s a strange thing when I can pontificate about how society abhors a fatty and logically know that I am judged by my size, but also, I’m so accustomed to living life in this body that the bulk of it doesn’t occur to me. I know how to work all this girth. Do I go jogging? Absolutely not. But do I do HIIT workouts? Yeah. Do I do yoga? Yeah. Do I still belly dance? Sometimes. Am I still flexible? Yeah, though I have my less-than days. Can I work an eight hour shift on my feet, busting a butt cheek to get all of my work done? Absolutely. And I do it all without thinking too much about my size.
Actually, I think more about my persistent patellar tendonitis than I do my weight. Probably because the pain from that affects how I go through my days more than my size does.
And I do a whole lot of other things too without thinking about my fat ass: grocery shopping, hanging out with friends, talking shit with my coworkers, reading a book, playing with the stray cats we’ve adopted, visiting with family, working on podcasts, eating, drinking, breathing….the list is endless. I do all sorts of things without thinking about my double digit pants size.
You’d be surprised how much fat people DON’T think about being fat, how much they don’t think about food or dieting, how much they don’t spending every waking moment pining for a smaller existence to better fit into a thin-obsessed society. Because they’re busy doing other stuff, regular life stuff, and they forget themselves in that.
Look at it this way: Once you get used to driving a land yacht, you don’t think too much about parallel parking that beast.
You know how to drive it.
Kiki Writes About... 