September 15th, 2006
LDO: Context
This is the context card in the wonderful reading YL did for me last week. The description of the card is thus:
Loyalty to an idea or a person is standing up for something or someone you believe in, sometimes in spite of great odds or difficulties. In taking a stand you might feel outnumbered or unprotected; this takes faith and courage…This fire card also means division or divided loyalties within a circle. It can also warn against going along with the crowd when you are not wholly in agreement.
That’s the beautiful thing about tarot, the way it helps focus and direct one’s emotions and perceptions. As you might infer from my last post and my next one, I’ve become aware this last month of a chasm between myself and some people I trusted regarding understandings of dieting, sizeism, and fat hatred. It occurs to me that the way I survive in groups that don’t have an overt fat-positive orientation is by assuming that everyone understands the way fat hatred operates and the difficulties I’ve experienced because of it. And it has become glaringly obvious that this is not the case. Honestly, I question my ability to deal with this. No, not my ability, my willingness. It’s a complicated topic and doesn’t fit well into a sound byte or a workshop one-liner smackdown. And like any privileged group, those whose bodies are socially acceptable have no reason to take on understanding the injustice of it all. It does not affect their lives; it’s easy enough to dismiss fat people as weak-willed whiners who just want special privileges instead of buckling down and getting thin like everybody else.
I’ve never been one to back away from confronting injustice but you know what? I’m tired. It takes so much energy just to get through a day filtering out the internet banner ads for diets and anti-cellulite creams, the disbelieving stares and snickers at the Walgreens, the challenge of figuring out how I’m going to get the movement I need here in the city without attracting all kinds of negative attention–maybe I’m just too tired to address this issue where I live, where I want to live, with women who should not need me to explain it to them.
