Monday 10 February 2014

Suing under Trade’s Descriptions

Suing under Trade’s Descriptions
I often have times of self reflection. Unfortunately these occasions are predominantly towards the negative. I always defend the accusations that this self critical view of myself is simply me ‘beating myself up’. This is how see it…
To me it isn’t beating myself up, no; to me it is simply a part of the ‘self improvement’ process. I view myself much the same as a designer views existing products or a scientist evaluates his experiments; practical, dispassionate and unemotional. There is a brief acknowledgement on any of the good, any successes that may have occurred, but this has rather less of a role in the evaluation than the stage of ‘what went wrong?’, ‘what failed?’, ‘what needs to be done better?’. What will make it even better?
Problem is; I don’t think I am ever going to be good enough. I’ll live improving and I’ll die improving. In a morbid way, I wouldn’t be surprised if the very process of improving will be the cause of my death.
I remember how I used to be, in the earlier years of anorexia. I believed was going to turn me into the person I wanted to be. Wonder drug, the fast track pass to perfection. Not only was it going to make me skinny and beautiful, it was also going to make me more popular, more funny, more of a ‘social butterfly’, more talented, more noticed, more respected, more loved…more able to love.
The realisation that this is not reality did not come all at once. It was less of the glass-shattering and more of slow drug come down experience. The mists of fantasy and illusion had thinned until only wispy fragments floated around me. Now I could see clearly and what I saw was the wasteland I had created whilst blinded by my mists of marvels.
Fast forward- sit that alien girl from all those years ago down, and show her the film of her future.
I shall be honest with what I know she will feel when she first sees herself. She will very likely be ecstatic, for I believe I am uncommon in the fact that even in the embryonic stages of my disorder, my mind was kinda screwed. Oh there was certainly a part of me that strove to be the ‘normal’ sort of skinny. The kind of skinny magazines show and everyone desires but seldom experiences. But what’s more important is the other part that already had darker ideals, the part that wanted to ‘shock’. This part is not interested in beauty, instead it strives to the physical extremes of existence, it craves bones, the look of illness and fragility. But back to the film; so far to her it looks pretty damn good. But she’s hardly seen anything yet…
She’s with friends. Sometimes. Yes, she has lots more friends. Only, this girl can’t handle it and she is constantly terrified of losing the friends. To her, having friends is such a god damn exhausting and boring chore. She’s too weak to enjoy them, to dulled down to engage with them, too tired to make the efforts she so wishes to make for them for being such precious people to her. She certainly looks funny; she can make people laugh; crack enormously offensive jokes and sour lemons with her sarcasm, but she rarely experiences whatever feeling makes these people smile, giggle and gasp. Her ‘talents’ are like a rapidly diminishing memory. She’s too tired to have hobbies, to hungry to care and to depressed to have such things as‘skills’. She knows and she feels appalling because to her; all she really sees is the lack of talents or skills, to her the ‘reasons’ are not valid. To her; she is just being lazy, weak; her feelings of rubbishness and lack of skills, hobbies and talents is all a result of her ‘not bothering to put in effort’. So there; she knows she deserves to feel crap. She wouldn’t really know if she was respected now because she’s too busy worrying about what she will eat and when and how, worrying whether the milk in her coffee, the tomato on her salad will make her gain weight…
I think the alien girl spectator would have left by now, don’t you? Would you stay and watch such a depressing, bleak film; especially if it was about you.
The film’s not finished, but for today’s purposes it can be switched off. The point is made. By the time you become what you thought you could be you will want your film to end. 

1 comment:

  1. Katie.. I think we might all change our film if we could see when we were young and made decisions that altered our lives in ways we thought we wanted but then found only depressed us... for me, I just wish I could have learned to love myself before and stopped settling for less than what I deserved... now it might be too late for me ...

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