Thursday, January 22, 2004

Fat and Sexy

I’ve been reading “Sizeable Reflections: Big Women Living Full Lives”. It is essays by fat women, often telling their stories and how they came to accept themselves. There are so many ways society tells us we’re “not good enough” and a large one for me has been my size. Like many of the women in this book, I look back at my size 16 teenage body and don’t see that I was all that large, yet I was made to feel enormous by my peers and others around me. Saddled with low self-esteem, a very self-involved condition, I had little awareness that the people around me I thought prettier, more worthy, sexier, most likely were unhappy with themselves as well.

It has been a long journey towards acceptance of my body, and all along the way that acceptance has been tested as I’ve grown larger. I now am happy with the many extra curves, the soft floppy skin, the additional erogenous zones a body wasn’t meant to have. I got to a certain point of acceptance on my own, as I learned to hear my own voice through my spiritual practice. I think there was a certain hump I could not have got over if it hadn’t been for a certain lover who unabashedly savored my flabby flesh. He made my body sexy, tugging and pulling in ways no one else had, igniting sexual feelings through moves only made possible due to larger body parts and extra curves. The ladies in this book don’t talk about this, well maybe a few hint at it, but they quickly draw the curtain.

This lover made me feel sexy. Now I really do feel sexy, and others do approach me. I’ve shared a laugh with my husband…that now that I’m married, I’m dating more than I did when I was single. I’m finding as I know more people in an intimate way, that no matter what size, what shape, or how fit, people are unhappy with some aspect of their body, and that’s so sad. I believe it’s not just in the brain, but this body contains memories of actions done to it, and feelings had about it. The cells in the muscles hold those attitudes. Thanks to the healing sexual energy this lover brought to my life, not only my brain but my body has been able to shed those years of negative feelings, and begun to exude a positive healthy energy.

(feeling ready to write, and sexy again after a miserable month of allergies and colds)

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