Low Self-Esteem

There are two routes to low self esteem. One via the disillusionment of high expectations- of self or life. The other is straight on attacking and undermining it, directly.

The former has shaped the discourse on LSE as it's not so much a low estimation of yourself. It therefore tends to defend itself; return fire, self advocate, object, protest. It makes a noise discussing its situation instructing everyone as to how sympathetic everyone should be too its desperate travails and such. 

This isn't the kind fat people have.

Fat people have latter kind proper of LSE, the which is full on attacking degrading and undermining your own self regard with an indifference and carelessness that skates the amoral, sociopathic even. It takes no account of costs to you, everything is focused on the goal.

It matches what's coming at you.

I keep  trying to say this is what fat acceptance is about for me, not fatness so much seeing through societal and authority's approval to finally smell its rotten stench and recoil from it.

Self esteem in fat people is maintained by the other aspects of our humanness, in the main, fatness is a drain on that.

Hence the decision to learn to accept oneself not only as fat but as fully sentient and able to comment on one's own experience is a step before the usual self advocacy. I don't think many people seem to get that. They presume because fat people are protesting we must have the self aware kind of battered esteem.

Based on the usual bottom feeding standard assigned to us, where anything more is magnified and reverberates overwhelming the senses. 

I have always found this intensely annoying. A reflection of the much beloved assertion that fat people are so grotesquely biased in our own favour, that we can be dismissed outright.

And for goodness sake, why can't people tell what self esteem is when fat people come into view? That's all it takes to reverse perception?

Pish and piffle.

My irritation is not helped by the fact that there is often this concerted impulse amongst many slimz instinctive no doubt, to rigidly set in stone this ultimately intolerable fat standard beside the normal human i.e. slim one as if they're the same. 

It feels suffocating, like we're being locked into this like beetles set in amber, it treats us as if we don't know what the human standard is. As if we aren't even here and that's the key to this type of LSE. It erases and takes you out of the game, even though you are still there, you fade.

This error turns up in assumptions about winning round allies. That they are draw to how hurt you are. So show them that and your away. I've always been shocked by that but found it difficult to say why.

They everyone, including social justice devotees are draw by what tends to be missing from fat people as a collective; self possession. A line drawn in the sand that this is as far as we are going with this.

The absence of embodiment people seek is what seems to prod a lot of hatred and loathing of fat people. Or any people frankly, it brings out the bully in virtually all of us.

If you abandon and flee from part of your own self in disgust, others are likely to take their cue from that. Even nice compassionate people will tend to turn away. I guess we all have limits on when LSE just becomes too off putting and we passed that point.  

That is why fat people's talk of body acceptance and self love is so important, especially those who come from a milieu where being fat is unspeakably coarse and low class. It has to happen in some form or fat people are not fit to even get to the point where we can demand anything.

In the why oh why talk, some say fat activists were too radical before, or not enough. My feeling is the former conclusion is not right. Due  to the extreme  nature of the 'obese' construct, a mix of iatrogenic quackery, a neurosis inducing personality disorder posing as diagnosis. Its leaves nothing for anyone aware of their own self possession to compromise on.

It forces you to be "radical" unless other things supporting your sense of self obscure the extent to which fatness as been occupied by everyone else.

How can you be moderately non-sentient? Halfway an outer controlled puppet? Half disease half person?

The thing that discombobulates is the hopeless normalization of this grotesque fiction. To some people, that makes it reasonable by definition, the mainstream is always moderate. And those correcting it, radical.

The setting of fat people always wrong, because we always are if you notice, equals fat people must be doing activism in a bad way. We must not be sufficiently amenable which is obviously nonsense; but we are talking ingrained emotion.

It's a mistake we need to stop making.

I used to think self esteem was the real issue, now I think its the ability to believe in ourselves, I don't mean credulity I mean the ability to believe that we can contribute to defining the human experience as fat people.