On Sunday I caught myself, once again, like so often lately, bending down awkwardly, aware of the way my chin was coming closer to my neck, heightening the chances that anyone who might be seeing this would also view me with a double chin, or at least quite an unwieldy face and neck area.
I don’t know when this line of thought questioning began, much less how, but something intervened that time. What do you think you’re doing? You lift weights. You can’t really walk right now because of that time a few weeks ago when you walked way too far and long in entirely unsuited footwear, so you’re giving your feet much-needed rest, but when that is not the case, you walk everywhere. You don’t eat candy, like, ever. You eat well, you do your best, not too little, and you do not snack, much less gorge.
What the fuck do you think you’re doing, acting like all you do, ever, is sit on the couch shoveling candy corn?
It wouldn’t surprise me if the non-existent observer in the room, at that moment, watched me get visibly startled — nay, schooled — by my own thoughts. Nothing at all external had happened. I was cooking. Nobody was around.
The questioner stuck around. The next day, it continued.
Why is it so important that the people around you — and strangers, or people without context about you — see, right there, on the very visible surface of you, exactly what kind of person you are? What is the purpose of making it known that you lift weights, walk a lot, eat no candy, etc — what security does it really give you?
You say it’s about self-respect, and about “feeling like yourself”, but that’s not the entire truth, is it?
It’s understandable that you want your ‘outside’ to make it known that you work hard. That you’re not a lazy slob. It’s the exact same mechanism at work when you go to talk to the welfare people. There’s no money coming in, so it looks like you’re sitting on your ass all day playing games and nothing more. It is understandable that this feels shameful. What’s more, when this does happen once in a while because you don’t have the energy for anything else, you feel even more ashamed. You might be able to push the feeling away and talk yourself into relaxing, but the underlying nerves don’t really disappear. They surface as soon as the acute pain of feeling like an invalid is over.
Considering that your body, your face, the way you move, is how everyone but you clocks ‘who you are’ subconsciously every single they catch sight of you, it is completely understandable that you would want to try and exert control over what exactly they see in whichever way you can. If you cannot change the way your body looks, you can change the way it moves. The irony here that you know that the more you try and control the way your body moves, the less you it is. The tragedy is that on the other hand, the fat you carry does make you less you because it pads the you on the inside, shields her from all that’s outside, makes her less vulnerable, less visible, and as a result less seen, less recognized for who she really, truly is.
Feeling unseen when someone likes a photo of you — or just plain you, in real life — with fat, a version of you encased in something masquerading as you, is the logical consequence of being even somewhat sensitive to these things. You are, after all, not showing them who you really are. How are they to know, then? How are they to love you for you, when all they know is this mask you can’t ever take off?
On the other hand, who you present as on the outside is all you’ve got. Maybe the challenge is to accept that who you present as isn’t and never will be all that you are inside. Maybe the challenge is to love the mask. How would life even be without it? Maybe the mark of great courage is to know oneself inside AND OUT, with extra emphasis on the outside, because pretending that the outside is anything lesser than the inside is, in the end, nothing less than rejecting a vital piece of oneself. The mask exists, it is there, it cannot be removed, and thus it is a piece of the self, the home, the body one exists in the world as. No matter how different one feels inside from the mask the body seems to present to the outside, both are inseparable from the being. rejection of the self’s outside also inevitably brings with it a rejection of other people’s outside.
Then it follows that all strategies to change the outside endeavoring to make it more closely match the perceived inside are bound to ‘fail’, in the words of a self that rejects its outside like a. In reality, what does happen is that these strategies result in situations that require a re-assessment of their origins.
The inside self sees itself — in contrast to its outside — as somehow superior, yet it lacks the interfacing with the material reality of the world that the outside deals with at all times. It is safe and protected, it can bend itself however it pleases, but it cannot truly bend the outside to its liking; if it does so through means that always require the breaking of limitations nature hasn’t provided means to break, this has consequences for the inside. The material world reflects back this attempt to make something of oneself that one is not.
Maybe the challenge is really for the inside to surrender control. The fact is, as is evidenced by the way countless people try to influence their outside without success, the body is the one in control, not the mind. The body has ultimate control. What is there, then but to leave life worth living to it. Making it do things it doesn’t want to do has only ever wreaked havoc.
Revised April 17, 2026.