QUOTES
FROM THE BODY BURDEN
Fear
is deeper than body fat
it is inside the very core of a person
and that is something that needs to be faced
no matter what the numbers are on the scale
I woke up one day in the midst of a verbally abusive marriage
and layers of fat that numbed my reality.
Fortunately I didn't succumb to such an unworthy fate and
found my true self waiting at the other side of divorce.
I found my own self worth and I am convinced that my marriage
was a blessing in disguise. To truly find ourselves, sometimes
we need to walk through our own self delusions.
Marriage
made me silent. Silence made me eat. One day the silence
exploded and became the loudest noise I'd ever heard.
My marriage was over. I had just begun to live.
A
lot of women feel powerless and afraid to find their own
individual voice. So they end up using food or lack of it
to compensate for the hidden voice that is buried deep within
them.
If Barbie suddenly became a real person, she might very
well have a hidden voice, different from the one society
has given her. However, the fact that she cannot speak leaves
women and young girls with a message that society has continued
to send, through the media and fashion industry. Society
tends to forget about individual people and their feelings.
Barbie
is in fact just a doll, created by one woman and then
endorsed time and time again by a society that has spent
billions and billions of dollars trying to become the
perfection she radiates. Plastic surgery, diets and self
starvation are just a few of the many ways women have
attempted to have that perfect body. More times than not,
it results in failure and leaves women feeling even worse
about their bodies. So while society is trying to shape
up in the gym to become healthier, what we really have
is an unhealthy society, with cruelty and disapproval
of the less fit. We are trying so hard to discard anything
larger than a size ten from our closets, that we are not
really living. We are dying inside.
It's unfortunate that Barbie's message hasn't changed
much over the years, especially when you consider all
of the problems with body image and how they have affected
women everywhere. Her image of perfection has remained
and so has the reality of the real human body and how
unattainable Barbie's figure really is. So although she
is not entirely to blame, she certainly hasn't helped
this downward spiral we find ourselves in as women today.
