i found an amazing resource today. it spoke to me in a way that nothing has for a long time.
you see, when i started bellydancing earlier this year, i don’t think until i began that process, that i understood the depth of my own self-loathing. i generally liked myself, i loved the intelligent, beautiful, and spiritual woman that i know myself to be. but that stuff is largely (no pun intended ha!) on the inside. my entire life, i have avoided mirrors. because of what i saw as the variance in the way that i saw myself, and what the mirror projected back at me when i looked in it, i avoided them. because i knew i was that beautiful person on the inside. the problem is that society told me that what i had on the outside wasn’t good enough. society only honored me if i looked like twiggy. emaciated. skeletal.
my first bellydancing class was a joke. me and two other friends. they began before me because i thought to myself when someone posted on a local list "let’s do bellydancing" "who am i kidding? no one wants to see MY belly." shame. always the shame. for just being who i am. for being a fat lady. once they went to a class, they called me and said "this is SUCH a kick in the ASS, you HAVE to do this with us." and i did because it sounded fun. my first class though, i showed up in a pair of baggy shorts and a large, oversized t-shirt. it was summer. hot, but not overly so at this point. i couldn’t see any of the moves i was learning how to do, but that was okay. i had to make a decision almost immediately if i wanted the other ladies in the class to see me, or if i wanted to continue to suck at this because i couldn’t see what i was doing. i decided to bite the bullet and scare everyone else in the class and wear former fitting clothes. more shame to overcome as i contemplated exhibiting my shameful and disgusting body in front of other people. this had been ingrained in me as long as i could remember. i wasn’t good enough, wasn’t acceptable because i didn’t conform to the body type everyone said was beautiful. but i did it because damnit, it WAS fun, and i liked it a lot. it made even someone fat, like me, feel sexy. bellydancing makes a person feel sexy. so very sexy to move your body in curvy and sensual ways. i can’t even emphasize to you how much it helped me to have a teacher that was not rail thin. i think that might have been the end for me if i had walked in and had a stick for a teacher. my teacher had a belly and she showed it with not exactly pride, but with resignation as she’d had a baby nine months before. she has a lot of shame too, still. i see it in her because she isn’t as thin yet as she has been in the past.
so, this huge digression had to do with this website i found today. it’s http://www.honoringyourbelly.com/index.html the woman who wrote this book and does the website wrote an article for sagewoman back in 1996. that article can be found here, if you want to read the whole thing:
http://www.honoringyourbelly.com/inspiration/articles/goddess_ungirdled.html
in part, it reads:
Your comfort doesn’t matter, whether you can breathe doesn’t matter,
whether you can live fully and freely doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you look good. If your belly is too big, if it doesn’t fit in, you have to hide it, crush it. Your belly shouldn’t be seen, it’s embarrassing, shameful, wrong. You’re a misfit by nature, there’s just too much of you. You have to hold yourself in, you don’t deserve room to breathe. Don’t take up too much space. What’s important is that you fit into the very narrow definition of what’s acceptable. Left to be yourself, unconstricted, unrestrained, you’ll stick out, bulge out, be totally inappropriate.
wow. that’s playing a tape i have heard my entire life.
i don’t like that tape. at all. it makes me feel bad. i want to love the outside of me as much as i love the inside of me.
that’s what i am feeling resolute about now. not just for this year, but forever.
on one of my tribes, someone posted a picture of a button that says:
Fuck Your Facist Standards of Beauty
yeah.
so there.
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