My friend Stephanie, at Back In Skinny Jeans has written a deeply moving post inspired by the People Magazine story, “Pressure to be Thin” and the documentary and book, “Thin,” by Lauren Greenfield. Titled, “Thin” the documentary and me, she discusses her history with an eating disorder with revealing passion but a surprising lack of bitterness or blame. Ordinarily I’d put a quote or two here. But what she’s written is too personal, too intimate, for me to drag a quote out of context.
Stephanie has been a blogger-role-model for me from the beginning. While always interesting and funny, she has a commitment to healthy-self-image issues that’s unique (I think) in the diet-blog world. And because of her talent and skill, Skinny Jeans moves almost effortlessly between a funny-hip-glibness and raw-stunning emotion. Today is a day for the raw-stunning emotion. And I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.
If you or someone you love has been affected by any sort of eating disorder, you’ll want to read “Thin” the documentary and me, at Back In Skinny Jeans.
3 Comments
Hey katiebird! What a beautiful post. I am so honored
I’m so thrilled to count you as one of my friends and online mentors as well.
It’s interesting that you mention bitterness because I was bitter for a VERY long time. For me, bitterness was something that was very hard to let go of because of the sense of injustice that pumped through my veins. I followed all the rules, and did everything a “good” girl was supposed to do, and yet I was brutalized and hurt, and worse, I let the people who did these things to me get away with it. It was so unfair. For me, I have found that the hardest person I had to forgive was myself. I had to find a way to let go of the anger and rage because it was not bringing me a place I wanted to be.
One thing that helped me in my healing, and still does, is to look at things simply as choices which will produce results. Strip out the judgment, good-bad etc, and ask yourself what do I want to produce today? When I wrote “Thin” the documentary and me I wanted to produce heartful expression about a subject that is associated with shame and pain. Writing is healing for me, but most importantly, if it can help someone else get better than I have no problem talking about my past in very personal ways. Thank you for sharing the story
And I wonder anew: what the hell are we doing to ourselves, and why?
I know there’s a kind of learning-by-osmosis when it comes to gender roles; the best I was able to do for Daughter Dearest was to confuse the issue — so she would still wear the frilly pink dress, but she’d play football with the boys in it.
But what’s the point of these roles in the first place?
I know the West is a sort of Bizarro World when it comes to age & body sizes — the rest of the world considers it honorable to be old and/or fat — so how did we get to this point?
Too many questions, not enough answers.
Hi Stephanie and FARFetched, bizarro world is a good way to describe it. Going back to that People Magazine article Stephanie mentioned at the top of her post — That thin thing scares me to death. We see these women on talk shows and you could span their upper arms with the fingers of one hand like you can span my wrist. That’s just not healthy.