mirrors in the house

I work with words, so the hardest thing, before I can even begin to work with these words, was a title. In the end, I found a poem by Esther Kamkar, part of "Three Poems on Being:

1.
On Being Real

My mind-eye’s image of my body
Is not real, but my body is real.

Like the mirrors in the house
The love between us is real.

But the truth is, the love between my mind and my body is not real - not yet. That's the point of this blog. I am learning to love my body.

It's only recently I accepted even the notion of fact acceptance, thanks to a friend or two, and Shapely Prose. And then I had an enormous epiphany, and a week or two of walking on air, because suddenly I knew for the first time in my life that it was okay to be fat. It was really okay. It didn't make me less than anyone else, or more unattractive. It didn't change who I fundamentally was, and who I was wouldn't change even if I lost half my current body weight. My body didn't say bad things about me, even if others read it that way. It hadn't betrayed me.

Unfortunately, the feeling didn't last, and the struggle between the desire to lose weight and some part of me the absolutely refuses to bow to that desire has taken hold again, with even more force than before, with added strength to the resistant part because now it has a logical reason to battle.

So here I am, a raging battle between wanting to be thin and wanting to love myself fat.