It's official!

I'm no longer a Fat Acceptance blogger! Nor should I really be part of any Fat Acceptance movement!

Phew, I feel so much better getting that off my chest.

It all started this morning. As I'm wont to do, I woke up from crazy dreams to sit bolt upright and have a major revelation about life. I've been struggling for awhile about a few "things", trying to make sense of them and come to a resolution sooner rather than later. Resolve can't be forced, though, at least not in my life, in the way I process information and issues. Well, BAM. Revelation. It always happens eventually.

I'm having an identity crisis. Of course. And on multiple fronts. In fact, all those "things" I'm dealing with... each is a piece of the identity I've constructed for myself over the past 10-20 years, all of which no longer really fit into the grand puzzle that is me. Fat Acceptance activism is one of those things, for sure. I started to realize and come to grips with that about a month ago when I posted about the formation of this blog. I just didn't quite realize how deeply I would end up feeling about it: deeply conflicted, deeply shameful and deeply lost.

I can't tell you how many times Yoga Trainer and I went around and around about my losing weight. Me saying that I felt conflicted since I consider myself part of the Fat Acceptance movement, and him replying that that shouldn't matter. When I made the decision to start calorie-tracking a month ago, I still felt very conflicted. Deeply conflicted, to be precise. However, unlike times previous, I didn't let it stop me from going forth.

Flash forward to today's lunch hour. I have a file of all the websites and blogs I like to peruse daily, one of which is Two Whole Cakes. (I've mentioned this blog in a few earlier posts as well.) I was bowled over by TWC when I first found the blog, because Lesley Kinsel writes about fat politics in the exact manner I always wanted to on this very blog. I found her funny and personal and super smart. I still do, sometimes, agree with her, like in this post about the latest fat girl on Glee. Mostly, though, her blog has started the slow, painful decent from my Lunchtime bookmarks list into the Recycle Bin. The post that killed me today was this one, specifically the section entitled "The confounding". As what I'm doing currently could be called "dieting", I'm apparently not allowed to bring it up in Fat Acceptance circles. Alrighty then, lesson learned! This blog can apparently no longer be about Fat Acceptance because the fact that I'm trying to change the shape of my own personal body, for my own deeply personal reasons, negates the fact that I still believe that there ought to be, in Lesley's own words, "noisy inquiry into what our culture tells us about bodies, ours and other people’s." The cruel irony here, of course, is that I just quoted Lesley in another previous posting, as part of the reason I decided to go ahead with losing some weight. In retrospect, I think I misunderstood what she was trying to say.

Sure, it's just one person's opinion but it's a loud one, one that I previously respected and one that likely speaks for many in the movement. This is honestly why I tend to eschew "movements" in general. (Except for bowel, hee.) In the end, though, please rest assured this isn't really about Lesley and what she says. Lesley's words were just the straw that broke this camel's back.

While I do feel the slightest bit bitter about all this, it's actually more of a relief than anything. Fat Acceptance, at least for the forseeable future, is greatly important to me. Not holding myself to a standard that was more of a moving target than anything else is the part that's the relief.

The previously mentioned deeply shamed and deeply lost parts of me are vastly more concerning. Expressing myself through words and pictures has always been part of my life, since the moment I could put crayon to paper and pencil to newsprint. This is not my only current blog and there have been many attempts at many blogs over the years, but this is the one that always had the finest point, has held the most weight and interest for me, and is the one that's stood the test of time. Nothing lasts forever, though, and I've been wondering if it's time to close up shop. But... it makes me feel like a failure to do so. When I started, I had pretty good readership from people I both knew and had never met. Just recently I looked on my Site Meter statistics and realized that no one really reads this anymore. I get maybe one hit a day, and the days where the hits spike are the days where I'm going back to edit previous posts. Not that readership should necessarily drive the blog, but why would I choose to keep blogging about something I'm no longer passionate about on a blog that no one reads? I might as well keep a journal. OR, just move it all over to my other blog. We'll see how it shakes out.