Posted by Sophie Westrope on March 19, 2013 · Leave a Comment
I don’t care who you are or whether you’re some god/goddess, you cannot truthfully say you’ve never worried about your body. About what it looks like. How wide it is. Or how wobbly it is or how goddamn pale it is.
I wish I could tell you that I’m perfectly content with my jiggly thunder thighs or my newly formed pot belly or that chunky layer we’ve learned to call ‘love handles’ that I poke and pull at when I’m getting dressed. But in reality I’m not. I don’t know if I ever will be. And this is nothing new unfortunately.
One of our many faults as a race is our concern in the aesthetics of things rather than their utility. When did bodies become something more than tools to create lives and build things? Who decided ‘thin is in’? When did the words ‘curvy’ or ‘shapely’ begin to define us? Why are our appearances so important to us? Why do we care so fucking much?!
If I had it my way the world wouldn’t be filled with advertisements for diet pills or low-fat yoghurt. And magazines’ pages would feature articles on things of note rather than real-life stories of ‘how I dropped ten stone and miraculously became a happier and superior person’. We wouldn’t all sit around talking about our gym memberships or how we need to get our bodies ‘bikini-ready’. We’d have no need to discuss our thunder thighs or lie about what size clothes we’re wearing because nobody would care. We’d ideally all have so little time to worry about it because we’d be too busy learning about things that matter more to our existence.
I’m 21-years-old at this moment in time. And before I know it I’ll be 30. And then 40 and 50 and, well, you get where I’m going here. Essentially I’ll have spent the majority of my existence on this planet constantly worrying about what I look like; how heavy or light I am, whether my hair looks nice or if I’m wearing the right outfit. And that thought disgusts me. And merely thinking about spending the rest of my lifetime anxious about the way I look exhausts me too.
It seems ridiculous when in the grand scheme of things we won’t ever be remembered for our weight. Our gravestones won’t read ‘here lies Sophie, she weighed 10 stone’ and I’ve never seen an obituary in loving memory of that wobbly old lady with the meaty thighs. Alright, granted, it might end up with a coroner’s report of obesity induced heart attack if I’m still putting cupcakes and Twirl bars away at the same rate in thirty years time but why are we so intent on continuously changing our form? Why must we trim some inches of fat here and tuck this and suck that? It makes little sense to me when we all end up decaying in the end.
Regrettably though, while I wish I could honestly say that after writing this I will march to my bathroom and throw the scales that sit in front of my towel rail straight out of the window, rip out every size tag from every item of clothing I own and dispose of mirrors in my house, I can’t. I can’t escape the knowing that I care about it all a little too much. But I do wish that it were possible to erase all awareness of appearance so we could all just live life without any stress or hang-ups about weight, shape, size, etc.
If only, aye?
