chiding eyes that look away, tell you how you don't belong; scowling, sneering, smirking their silent cues nonverbal; you are wrong!
snarl the narrow turnstiles, booths and halls -- the seats that bruise you, rip your tender flesh; you are outcast, cursed and boundless --
fat that cannot be accomodated within the normal span of chair, or sizes in the normal styles of clothes; but helpful experts will appear
with their troops prepared and waiting, they will snip you, carve you, tuck you, band your organs, bind you mentally and starve you;
they will cost you sums of money you cannot begin to know; they will cost you much, much more in terms of suffering and sorrow;
then, when all your bills are tallied and you reach the journey's end, you will find that more than likely you're still fat -- and so you must begin again.
but now you have the blessing of some of those you'd feared, since, as a repeat patient/ customer you've gained respect from those endeared --
not to you but to the money -- behind the pockets you have lined; just perhaps you'll be like others who have spent their lives and health to find
that the real problem isn't that your body size is wrong; instead it's with a culture that cannot abide its women being either big or strong;
it's with a culture where corporations can demand compliance, and taking space gets perceived as -- and named -- pure defiance;
it's where self-absorption, thin-obsession, is demanded from the masses, to allow the rule, unfettered, of the distant upper class ...
there are many ways, of course, to name the problem, and though we maybe won't agree on its form, exactly, we can still begin to see
that bodies are more real than all the chairs or booths that people make, and sizing them too small is certainly the true mistake.
self-hatred isn't necessary, it's coerced beneath our skin by the powers seeking profit, naming fatness (in the guise of "gluttony") as "sin."
every body has its beauty, its unique and graceful form; everyone deserves to know this, to distrust the money-manufactured norm;
if you can't yet see your beauty, then simply know that others do; if you cannot find your worthiness, please trust that we believe we see that, too.
--diana Mackin
12-something a.m., Sunday February 22, 1998
there is a certain swiftness and agility to a firm, supple, well-muscled body.
there is a wise, sensual softness to a rounded, dimpled, padded body.
each body has its own beauty and each body sings its own song.
this all i have learned from listening to my own body, hearing its songs of agile motion and luscious sensuality.
it has asked me to leave it alone -- to stop modifying it, changing it.
because a body knows what a body needs, and a body can never be wrong.
it can only be, and when i let it be, i became one with my body, and one in the singing.
people still tell me "too..." (too fat, too dark, too light, too big, too small).
but they speak with their minds only, and not with their bodies.
and i in my body know they are disjointed selves deaf to the singing of the song of the body ...
a body cannot be wrong.
--diana Mackin, 1983