Fighting the Wrong Villain: Thin Women and the Thin Ideal

It’s the beginning of a new year, so I expect to see a lot of posts and articles about losing weight, working out, eating healthy, etc. I’ve been encouraged by seeing some fighting back against the annual guilt fest and claiming their right to love their bodies and selves as they are.

However, as you can easily guess, the positive body-image posts and resolutions are the minority. Even on sites whose entire mission is to fight the unrealistic expectations of the thin ideal, there is body disparagement, ranging from the typical self-critique to demonizing and criticizing others.

A couple of days ago, Beauty Redefined posted a quote from Zooey Deschanel about refusing to give in to unrealistic beauty standards, and I was dismayed to see how many people dismissed what she had to say because she is thin.

But I probably shouldn’t have been. It’s not really much different from what I have gotten on a regular basis from others.

I’m not a particularly large person, though certainly not as small as Zooey. My mother was very petite, and I inherited her small bone structure. My freshman year of college, I went through a brief period of being slightly heavy, according to the charts, but for the most part, I’ve always been within a “healthy” weight.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t struggled with my body image. Even though I can’t be classified as overweight or obese, I’m still far from meeting the standards of the thin ideal.

I’ve been working hard the last couple of years to learn to accept and love my body for what it is instead of what it isn’t, but it’s been a lonely journey. It’s difficult to express my insecurities to others. More often than not, when I dare to bring up my own struggle with the thin ideal, I’m met with comments such as “You’re thin; you have nothing to worry about” or “If only I were your size. You’re perfect.”

Perhaps comments like that are meant as an encouragement, but they don’t feel encouraging. Failure doesn’t really come in degrees. I fail to meet the thin ideal as much as anyone else who fails. The goal is still as much out of a healthy, realistic reach now as it would be if I gained an extra hundred pounds, and my need to overcome the thin ideal and to accept my body is as great as any other woman’s.

I’ve grown so tired of being dismissed. I’m tired of seeing women like Zooey vilified for being small. The goal of redefining beauty standards shouldn’t be to make thin “bad.” Rather it should be to accept the range of healthy expressions that women’s bodies can take–“fat,” “thin,” and anything in between.

More importantly, it should be to break away from the idea that a woman’s value is based in her appearance. Zooey’s wisdom or my journey aren’t diminished because of our weight—or at least they shouldn’t be. No woman’s should be, no matter what her weight.

So while we’re all talking about our resolutions and health goals for the year, can we also please stop demonizing women, whether heavy or light, for their bodies? I’d love to see every woman reach a place where she can stand up and celebrate her body as a beautiful part of herself, as my beautiful and amazing friend Dani did, but I understand that kind of journey is a long one that some may not ready to make.

At the very least, though, we can refrain from making the journey harder. The next time you feel like dismissing someone’s body concerns because they don’t match yours, take a step back and just try acknowledging that she is allowed to struggle too.

The Freedom of Uncertainty (Step One to Spiritual Freedom)

I’m not a huge fan of new-year resolutions or of the whole farewell, time-to-assess-my-life thing that tends to dominate this week for others, but I have to admit that this year has been a wild one for growth. It’s been three years coming, but this year in particular has been the one where I even blew myself away.

Looking back on who I used to be, I barely recognize myself—in a good way. These have all been changes that I needed and growth that I wanted, even if I didn’t like the means of growing at the time. I’ve been trying to pin down what has been the most important lesson or change this past year, the one that kick-started all the others. I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing this year would have happened without the less-astounding, more internal lessons of the previous year—learning to sit with uncertainty.

When I first began my baby steps out of the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement, I never intended to go very far. I wanted to get away from the abusive environment that dominated those churches and “schools” and find a church that held onto the “truth” of Christianity without all the bullshit.

For a while, I clung to the core of my religion as my anchor while allowing myself to question the things around it. Some fundamentalists warned me that if I started down that path, I would lose my faith. But I told myself that if my faith couldn’t stand up to questioning, it wasn’t worth having. I felt certain that I would eventually find my answers.

But for every answer I found, another question appeared. They got bigger and bigger until even the core seemed unstable. All the books and scholars I found couldn’t fully reconcile the doubts and contradictions I had; the answers only covered the surface, never getting deep enough to reset the foundation.

I was faced with a choice. I could turn away from my questions, push away those who reminded me of my doubts, shut my mind off, find reassurance in the imperfect answers that had reassured me before, and live the rest of my life in a religion I was too scared to leave.

Or I could let it all go.

I’ve never been very good at ignoring cognitive dissonance, so I let go.

I wanted to start studying other religions and belief systems immediately to find a new one that I could rely on, but I knew that if I did that, I wouldn’t be doing it because I actually believed in that religion. I’d be doing it because I’d needed to fill the vacuum left by Christianity. I made some tentative attempts at engaging other religions, visiting a Buddhist Temple and talking with some Mormons, but my own desperation scared me.

Probably the hardest thing I have ever done in my life was choosing to be “agnostic.” I’m not talking about the softer form of atheism that claims agnosticism or even the agnosticism that finds answers and comfort in not having answers. I’m talking about confronting my doubts and embracing the fear that maybe there really were no answers to my questions. It was an agnosticism that denied myself my need to explore spirituality until I no longer felt the need to run from the possibility that this was all there was.

For almost a year I held myself to this agnosticism, refusing to even attempt to come up with answers to my questions. I started collecting books, attempting to fill my bookcase with at least one major book about every major belief system I could. But I didn’t read them. I merely let them sit there, their presence reminding me that each of these religions or non-religions (atheism/agnosticism) claimed to be “the truth.”

It was torture. There were days when I just sat in my apartment, crying and rocking, trying to pray to a god I didn’t believe in anymore, trying not to pray to that god. I felt like my world might crumble and disappear right in front of my eyes.

But the world didn’t end. I didn’t cease to exist. Life around me continued on exactly as it had before.

And I learned the lesson that set me free: even though my worldview might make me feel like it holds the world together, in the end, it doesn’t do anything.

Without the preconceived notion that “I’m right,” any worldview had the potential to be right. Some seemed more believable than others, but there was absolutely nothing that was self-evident. There was always room for questions. Always room for other answers. Always room for new discoveries.

Eventually I did get to a place where the doubt felt almost like an answer—not the answer I was looking for. It didn’t solve anything. But learning that it was okay to simply not know freed my mind in a way that nothing else could have. I began to play with ideas, trying them on like clothes, seeing how they fit. I allowed myself to start exploring and creating my own spirituality, choosing what made sense to me rather than what I was too scared to reject. Suddenly the journey to find what I believed was a wondrous, fascinating, and exhilarating journey, rather than one of terror and pain.

It is because of that year of uncertainty that I have been able to sprint through so much internal work this year. It’s because of the year of unidentity that I’ve been able to make so many strides in creating my identity into who I was always meant to be.

Part of me would have liked to return to Christianity, and I admire the friends I have who took a similar journey and found a place for themselves within Christianity. But I honestly don’t think I was meant to be a Christian. My spiritual life now feels so natural and so fulfilling, an expression of the things that have always been inside of me waiting for permission to come out.

As I head into the new year, I’ll ignore the pressure to make new-year resolutions as usual, except perhaps the resolution to continue to live the full breadth of life, facing down fear, embracing uncertainty, and finding myself through it all. And I encourage others to dare to take that journey themselves.

It’s worth it; I promise.