I've written a lot about being scapegoated, in this case, for having a large body. If you think it's okay to treat people like trash because they're bigger than you feel they should be, that's a you problem. You need to take a long, hard look at yourself. I spent too many years apologizing for my age, appearance, size, social status, trauma, and everything else. I won't do it anymore.
We know about bullies. Let's talk about concern trolls.
A concern troll is someone who bleats, under the guise of "caring about" another person, "but it isn't HEALTHY for you to eat that/weigh so much." As someone who has endured this kind of shit for decades, trust me, it's never about health.
And now, Ornery Owl teaches you the trick to creating a happier world.
By using the right tools to stop being a tool, the world becomes a better place for people of all sizes!
To learn more about why size shaming and concern trolling make you a tool, start with this.
The Kouta 小唄 (little or short song) is a popular Japanese verse form of the Muromachi Period, 14th thru 16th century. The lyrical song was resurrected as a Geisha song in the late 1800s and is still popular today. The form has several variations, though always short in only 4 lines a 5th line is sometimes is added. The theme reflects ordinary life and often uses colloquialisms and onomatopoeia. The most popular are love songs. The elements of Kouta are:
a poem in 4 lines. (an occasional 5th line may appear)
a stand alone poem but often is accompanied by other Koutas with the same theme.
syllabic, variable odd numbered syllable lengths, the most common patterns are written in lines of alternating 7-5-7-5 syllables or 7-7-7-5 syllables.
secular, personal, themes of ordinary life
often includes onomatopoeia.
My brain is too tangled to think of even spelling onomatopoeia let alone trying to write a poem containing such. I also tweaked the rules a bit. Every line has seven syllables.
What's the poem about? In brief, about being a fat person just trying to live life and accept myself as I am in a society rampant with hateful messages about people who look like me, as well as all manner of unsolicited diet advice. I've written many posts about this subject so I will not go into it too deeply here, but diets don't work, in fact, for most people, they do more harm than good.
There's a place where people can put any unwanted diet advice they may have for me. It's called Where The Sun Don't Shine.
I created the Haiga with Pixlr.com and a free-use image by Bianca Van Dijk on Pixabay.
It's amusing in a depressing sort of way to search for images of plus-size women. Many people seem to think that plus size means anything with more girth than a twig.
Anyway, you are welcome to use the Haiga (illustrated poem, whatever) but if you do, please credit Cara Hartley/Ornery Owl and provide a link back to this blog.
~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~
Ornery Owl, learning to respond to hunger cues after decades of Yo-Yo dieting
Free use image from Open Clipart Vectors
Hangry Wyrm's sage wisdom:
"If you're Hangry, eat!"
Do not come between Hangry and her food. She will stab you with her fork.
Hello Poetry People. My piece today went in a feminist direction, and not the sexy fun kind. I'll give you the prompts I used and then explain my inspiration.
I am a very large female thing and it's no secret that large women get shit on by society. However, some of you may find it hard to believe is big women are both reviled and targeted as conquests by creepy men who think we're all desperate and easy marks. In my case, you can add being socially awkward and now physically disabled to the mix.
The end result? Being hit on by the same nasty-ass men who make rude comments about my body because they don't think I have the self-respect to tell them to fuck off entirely.
Being desirable to men is not my life's purpose and it shouldn't be any woman's life's purpose. If that man doesn't like me for me, even if he deigns to accept me despite my being fat and "ugly," what the fuck do I need his useless ass around for? I don't.
Never accept someone's emotional abuse. You deserve better than that. And, if you happen to be large in a society that keeps trying to sell us dumb diet plans that don't work, fuck that emotional abuse too.
Here's a bonus track for today's inspiration. Someone made a cool animation for Helen Reddy's beautifully eerie song Angie Baby. I hope you enjoy it!
This poignant gem was originally published on 17 January 2010 on my now-retired poetry blog.
life It would be far easier to diet if I didn't like food.
This, apparently, was the entire-ass poem.
A year later, I would finally take the long-needed step of ditching diet culture for good.
That is a terrible statement, let alone being a terrible poem.
It isn't even a poem, it's a blurb. A very stupid and brainwashed blurb. It's a tweet that shouldn't have been tweeted. It is a lot of things, none of them good. A poem it is not.
The Chili Bean Tanka is a better poem, and it is not a good poem. In fact, it is close to Vogon poetry in its poetic injustice.
It goes a little bit something like this.
I ate the chili
between the beans and the spice
digestive horror
beneath the cover of night
noxious eruptions take place
As I mentioned previously, I struggled over the holidays. My abusive partner ED (Eating Disorder) reared his ugly head and I relapsed into my old restrictive eating and self-loathing patterns. Which, by the way, never made me thin, they just fucked my metabolism over and made me hate myself even more.
However, reading this micro-poem that should not be, I could see where I'd been myopic in my criticism of a poet whose book I reviewed recently. I gave the book overall high praise, but I stated that her "poem" which read as follows, and I quote:
love ends but calories are forever
was not so much a poem as unfortunate diet culture rhetoric, and I wouldn't want to read it as a tweet, let alone in a book of poetry.
Given the unseemly evidence above, that critique was hypocritical of me.
However, there is a lesson to be learned.
Next time you think publishing a pithy pearl of poignant perspicacity such as this...
Go to the kitchen and grab yourself a snack. Or at least have something to drink. Your blood sugar may be low because if you think that's worth publishing, you obviously haven't been thinking clearly. Step out for a breath of air and clear your head of the Diet Culture nonsense. You've obviously bitten off more of it than you can chew.
That being said, Words Written in the Dark is, overall, a thoughtful and thought-provoking volume of modern poetry, and I recommend it highly.
I refuse to do New Years' resolutions. Those always imply crap like "New You in 52," which, of course, means diet culture. I raised the middle finger to diet culture closing in on ten years ago, and I'm damn well not sorry. I suppose it will be a battle every day of my life till the day I die to be treated as a human being without buying into the same shit that never worked for me in 33 years of yo-yo dieting and trying to hate myself thin, but it's a battle that I will fight.
Here are my big fat goals for 2020.
To format and release my first non-erotic published work in 13 years. Ketil and Yitzy's Adventure in the Xura Dream House is finished. I am currently in the process of editing and formatting it. It will be published in January of 2020.
To start publishing my poetry. I am currently formatting a book called The Poetic Rejects of 2019, which will, as the name implies, contain all my rejected poems from the past year. It may also contain some rejected prose, depending on the length of the piece.
To continue to submit works here and there, now and then, all the while giving no fucks whether or not they are accepted or published.
To continue working on and publishing my own stories, regardless of whether or not anyone else likes or reads them.
Basically, to survive another year.
Oh, I do have one resolution.
I resolve that I will never again do anything like the Battle of the Poems.
That was really stupid of me, and I'm dreadfully sorry.
Best wishes to you, whatever your goals are in 2020.
You are welcome to have resolutions, but if they are diet-y resolutions, I don't want to hear about them any more than I want to hear about your bowel movements.
I guess I have one more resolution.
I resolve to keep bringing the snark in 2020. It is my goal to make the ghost of Ambrose Bierce proud.
other people's lives and conditions and preferences
and bodily autonomy
and who really can just fuck off
and then I got to wondering
if maybe that's the way Death works
is by annoying people to death
by making them fight all day every day
with vicious inner voices
that tell them they're no good
because they have dimpled thighs
or chunky butts
or saggy boobs
or tummy rolls
or they just aren't perky-werky enough
and then I got to thinking
that maybe what happens
is people get tired
of hearing Death's annoying voice
bleating at them to get up and at 'em
because nobody who isn't perfect
deserves to have a life
and so they smash the snooze bar
on their internal clock
one too many times
in an attempt to shut the annoying bitch up
once and for all
~Cie~
Notes:
Today's November PAD Chapbook Challenge asked for a (blank) of (blank) poem. I initially went with "hands of time," which is how I found the image of the perky aerobics instructor looking lady with her watch. I started thinking about all the years and time and money I spent trying to hate myself thin, and it really pissed me off that the message people (especially women) are sent from the moment we draw breath isn't "take care of yourself because you are worthwhile regardless of your size or looks," it's "if you girls aren't thin and pretty in a very specific way, you are garbage and don't deserve happiness."
So, I changed the title of my poem to Tyranny of Perfection and wrote about what it feels like to fight with the hateful internal dialogue that has been crammed down my throat for as long as I can remember. It would be nice to be able to just BE, without having to fight with these horrible messages from the cradle to the grave. Doing so is the biggest fucking waste of time and a waste of a perfectly good life too.
Trigger warning/content warning/warning warning/danger danger: Discussion of suicide ideation. If you don't want to read about that, don't read this post.
Would you like to know the practical problem with being thrown on a downward spiral?
Have you guessed that I'm going to tell you anyway?
"With" is correct in this case, Grammarly. Not "of." Fuck off.
Anyway...
The practical problem with falling down the hole is having to re-establish my productivity patterns after making a break with them in favor of Netflix and Brood While Hoping the Asteroid Obliterates The Earth Soon So I Can Quit Feeling Like This.
Seeing as my brain is (as I have explained before) like one of these fucked-up spiderwebs...
Click to enlarge
"Like" is correct in this case, Grammarly. Not "as." Fuck off again.
Anyway, my brain is a Peyote spiderweb or an LSD spiderweb. Those look normal at first, but on closer examination, they aren't.
I think it's freaky that the Peyote and LSD spiderwebs look more normal than the Caffeine spiderweb. I drink coffee and tea all the time for "mental clarity." Or maybe just because I like them, seeing as apparently in a person with ADD, caffeine really doesn't do jack shit for your mental clarity. This is why I can drink coffee and then go to sleep, no problem, except for the fact that I am perhaps a bit more likely to wake up having to pee two hours later. Which might happen anyways, so it's kind of a crapshoot.
Anyway, enough about my caffeine consumption. The OCD part of my synaptic fuckery (yes, I really do have OCD, I'm not using it as a euphemism for "hyper-organized," which I am not) hates like a motherfucker when my patterns get disrupted. I don't have an exact time of day for getting things done--the bipolar part of my synaptic fuckery hates the fuck out of rigid deadlines--but I do like to have certain things done on certain days at a certain period in the day. For instance, I like to have my Monday morning "share this shit around with these certain blog hops" post done in the morning. Not "at *8:15 sharp" or even "by ten," just "in the morning." Because that is how I roll.
When my shit psyche has decided to take me off the rails into "fuck everything, it all sucks" town, and I have gotten nothing accomplished, my pattern is fucked for the day, possibly for the week, and I am anxious as fuck.
This is why I start wanting to throw shit whenever some clown-ass shrink sells a book claiming that people can be "cured" of mental illness if you just follow their sage wisdom, which is probably the same fucking "sage wisdom" that some other fucker touted in some other book, and it probably involves Stopping that Stinkin' Thinkin' and instead Thinking Positive, Say Halleluja, and Boy Howdy, You are Cured! And if you aren't you're doing it wrong. Kind of like with all the cabbage soup Special K Weight Watchers Jenny Craig Nutrisystem Medifast Slimfast Alli Atkins Detox Tea Shit Your Pants In Public and Be A Fucking Grouch that No-One Can Stand To Be Around Because Your Ass is Fucking Starving And This Shit Only Works Long-Term For About 5% Of People diets out there. If the millionth one of these crap-ass bullshit not enough nutrition to keep a fucking ant alive diets doesn't work long-term for the dieter, it's always the dieter's fault and not the fault of a flawed-ass program designed to keep you paying into a flawed and fucked system forever while you remain filled with self-loathing for your entire miserable life.
But my misanthropic self digresses.
You can't "cure" mental illness any more than you can cure type 2 diabetes with whatever brand of snake oil or mantras or "defining yourself" or whatever the fuck bullshit they're spouting. Type 2 diabetes occasionally goes into remission. Occasionally. It can never be cured. Myself, I ain't going to bank on it going into remission because that's highly unlikely. I'm going to go with Reality Bites on this one, use my insulin, and other than that, try not to obsess about the fact that this fucking disease makes me multiple times more vulnerable than your average 54-year-old for strokes and kidney failure. It wouldn't do me one damn bit of good to obsess about that shit, so I'm not going to. Not the same thing as being in denial, I'm fully aware that I have diabetes. But it's not going to cure me to think about it all day long or to try to pray it away or wave magic wands at it or eat only bran and some sort of overpriced oil for the rest of my life.
With mental illness, you don't cure it, you learn techniques to cope with your fucked and broken brain. Nobody has ever "cured" mental illness. They have taught people to deal with shit. That's all. If you're lucky, you find a sympathetic shrink who will help you learn some coping skills and hopefully teach you how to get along with yourself rather than just teaching you to be an obedient little cog in the machine. If you're not lucky, well, welcome to the club. I've never resonated with mental health professionals. I always feel like they're not listening to what I'm really saying. Some of them are sort of pleasant to shoot the shit with, the rest just piss me off. Most of them have nothing to offer me. So, I'll make do with what I can do. It's cheaper, both in terms of money and time lost.
Because I have rapid-cycling type 2 bipolar disorder, I've had people imply that it's no big deal when I go down the hole, because I'll cycle back up again within a week to ten days. This is true to a degree, although circumstances do impact mood and feeling ignored and ostracized can keep me down for longer. On the other hand, sometimes I just need to be left the fuck alone for a while. An adorable little bundle of contradictions, me.
I read that statistically, people with type 2 bipolar disorder are more likely to commit suicide than people with bipolar 1 or schizophrenia. On the surface, this doesn't make sense. Since bipolar 2 presents with hypomania rather than full mania and people with bipolar 2 don't experience psychosis, wouldn't this mean that they are more capable of reasoning things out?
What it means is that people with bipolar 2 do not experience altered states and therefore tend not to experience the euphoria which sometimes (by no means always) accompanies a full mania. I've only experienced full mania when taking SSRIs and I don't know how anyone handles that state. I was tremendously agitated and nothing made any damn sense at all. I did not experience euphoria. It was like my entire body was electrified and I just wanted to turn it the fuck off, but I couldn't. Bipolar 2 does not come with full mania, although when untreated, I did at times experience giddiness surrounding a given situation. When I realized that I was mistaking giddiness for happiness and that I have only experienced actual happiness a handful of times in my life, that right there kind of made me want to off myself. It was really discouraging.
Similarly, people with bipolar 2 do not experience hallucinations or delusions (except when taking narcotics, at least in my case). The metaphysical part of my belief system thinks that it's possible that for people with schizophrenia, the barrier between worlds is not closed and they see creatures such as elementals and spirits all the time. Whatever the case, for people with Bipolar 2, we are aware of the world as it is. This means we are more likely to aware that reality, in fact, does fucking suck, and sometimes we are not able to Stop That Stinkin' Thinkin'. The more we look at our crap-ass, hopeless situation, the more hopeless we feel. There is no magic fairy dust. There is no Happy Ever After. There is only more of the same fucking shit to look forward to because even if we pull ourselves out of this round of fuckery, we're just back on the same roller coaster. As Sylvia Plath (who had bipolar disorder) said:
"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?"
--Sylvia Plath (27 October 1932 - 11 February 1963)
As I have learned, it does descend, again and again and again.
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