WBB ESSAYS
Body Ambassadors
- by Ashley
We are unaware of the thousands of people that have viewed and judged us based on our bodies during our eating disorders.
Children, adolescents, even adults have looked at our personality and our bodies and made assumptions. Are we a wave of sick people, so good at blinding ourselves and others to our pain, that we convince these others that thin is result only of exercise, diet, and willpower? We berate the media, society, family... everything that pressures people to be small, and controlled, perfect beings. But yet, we live by it. So the answer isnt to make war on the media, or to just sit around and say that the way things are suck and theres nothing we can do to change it.
Existing in a healthy state IS a form of action. I think we miss how simple it is - we cant destroy the culture we live in, we have to become the culture.
Thin is the easy way out in our culture now. Starving, Purging, Pill-popping, Over-exercising, Death...is the easy way out of accepting our responsibility to contribute to our future generations, and our current societal welfare.
Average seems to becoming the road-less-traveled-by. When there is increasing pressure to give in to the eat, eat, eat, or the thin, thin, thin extremities of culture...average is the answer that is often overlooked. We look for some big bang out of our eating disorders, some universal knowledge that we gain...it says, " HERE! HANDFED RECOVERY! TAKE A BITE OF FOOD AND THOU SHALT BE HEALTHY!"
I think its a big piece of recovery to accept that maybe...our bodies can just be. They are so infinitely unique in their shapes and workings that comparison is a honest to god joke. And maybe learning to overcome the extremes is what its really about. Its not some loud shout or cry of, I'M EATING NOW!
Its just the tink of silverware and laughter of children at a family dinner. Its normalcy...
Yes, we are body ambassadors. The ambassadors of equilibrium and peace.
- by Ashley
