The Emperor’s New Clothes Are Hanging Loose
You haven’t been eating, have you?
I felt like a child who’d just been caught doing the naughty. Quick as a whip in my faux-adult voice, I brushed it off. Of course I have. And I had. Sort of. Almost. I’ve written before about my at-best fragile relationship with weight, and how I’ve come to understand that certain body frames hold certain distorted connotations in my mind.
I felt myself triggered. My skin began its crawl, even as I knew the speaker had no intention to hurt or insult me whatsoever. I even started thinking up a little post about how we shouldn’t say things like that, until the real question popped into my head. The ugly one. The one I’d been doing everything to bypass.
Why did those words bother me so much?
Because a sick part of my brain chose to see them as a compliment. Typically the part that thinks we (it and I) should eat less. Very quietly, at the back, I could hear that part going see, it’s working. The outside world sees us as frail, worth protecting. We’re safe. And I have enough common sense to recognize the incipient danger in that voice.
That was what was bothering me. Not the words this woman had said to me, but the potential chain of reaction they would trigger inside my brain. So quick in our torch-wielding 21st century culture, I jumped up the rafters, proclaiming we should ban such phrases. How dare she comment on my weight?
And were I somebody else, that logic might’ve worked a treat, but I’m not. I’m someone for whom ownership and personal accountability mean a lot, so I started analysing the problem in more depth.
Yes, I have a difficult, easy-to-trigger relationship with weight.
No, I do not trust myself enough to make the healthy choice over the trauma-induced attachment-craving knee-jerk reaction of starving myself. I know how I work. I know I’m likely to take such words for confirmation that indeed, it works, and that maybe I shouldn’t eat, so people would continue thinking of me as fragile, and deserving care.
Yes, I am introspective and analytical enough to be aware of all this, which pisses me off. Naturally.
No, tempting though it may be, silencing that well-intentioned, motherly woman wouldn’t solve anything. Because not hearing such triggering phrases wouldn’t actually “cure” the unhealthy patterns in my brain. It would just allow me to avoid them better. Yet, to truly speak of healing, one must be willing to at least face the demon, and with a little luck, understand it.
And you need to sometimes hear unpleasant things to understand yourself better. It’s how it works.
So I set aside my word-banning article, and took off my Emperor’s crown. Because I realized,
There’s this demon inside me that makes me think like this. By moderating how others talk, I wouldn’t actually be slaying the demon. In a perverse fashion, I’m asking everyone around me to pretend the demon doesn’t exist.
Except terrors unspoken only grow more powerful. Refusing to meet my unhealthy concepts of weight and fragility head-on, I was shielding my inner demon. Asking everyone around me to walk on tiptoe and hush so that it wouldn’t be woken, when the better ask would’ve been,
Wanna come with me slay this motherf@c!er?
Never turn your back on fear. It should be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.
-Hunter S. Thompson
Why I don’t think banning words helps
The desire to protect someone’s sensibilities is a noble one. I think there’s tremendous grace in walking with caution, particularly around new people in your life, not knowing what inner battles might be broiling.
That being said, I’m not a fan of censorship for censorship’s sake. Nor do I think a lot of these censorship trends come from that genuine grace. They might’ve, initially, but honestly, I think a lot of the people around just enjoy telling others to shut up.
Researching this topic, I came across quite a few articles debating the “goodness” or potential evil of the word “skinny”. In my position, I can see how I’d be triggered by someone calling me skinny. Would look quite similar to the thought process outlined above.
Okay, so say we ban “skinny”. It’s now finable to use it, and for a day or so, I’m happy. I now have the safety of knowing no one will use that word.
Then what? The bad juju in my head’s still there, ’cause they haven’t found a way to ban that yet. And guess what, so are the offensive assholes we’re supposed to be deterring. Because in this farcical attack on words, that’s what we profess to be doing — stopping assholes from being assholes.
Except that’s not how you stop assholes. In fact, I don’t know that there is a way. Maybe if said assholes started going to therapy and unravelling the oft-complex history that made them assholes to begin with.
It’s certainly not by banning a word. Or ten. Or a million.
I’m sure if someone is setting out to hurt me, they will find other ways. They may hurt me with looks, or in the old human tradition, through actions. If they look at me and see my skinny frame as ugly, or vulnerable, or repulsive. Or if they just don’t like me, I guess.
In researching this, I also came across a few voices that seemed to speak sense to me, asking why the war on words? “Skinny” isn’t a bad word. No word is, by its nature, bad. “Fat” isn’t a bad word, either. It’s a descriptive word. An adjective existent in this language we’ve all agreed on.
I assure you, when they were “making words” to talk about this big, beautiful, crazy world around us, they weren’t filing them into groups. Bad words. Good words. Potentially antiheroic words? Like a word that’s essentially good but has got a deep, dark, brooding allure?
From a writer perspective, that’s bullsh!t. To return to the words of the late Hunter Thompson,
Politics is the art of controlling your environment.
Which is all we’re really doing in banning words, or getting all fired up about a mere formation of syllables.
You don’t want to engage in politics, do you? After we’ve all seen what a circus it is? How full of lies, deception, and cruelty? Why would you wanna do that?
Also, for who’s interested, I personally try to avoid any sort of this potentially triggering dialogue around people. Because I’m aware how something that sounds like a compliment to me has the potential to backfire. But here’s the thing, I only came to understand that once I began this introspective journey, and started getting a better understanding of my own self and my history with words, people, and trauma.
Which we should all be doing, if we really want to create a healthier environment for everybody to get along.
I can only speak from and of my own experience with weight loss/gain, and weight-related comments. This post doesn’t pretend to speak for anyone else, or offer universal truths. There are none.
I find, as I move through life, that often, when speaking of themselves or their own experiences, people aren’t setting out to hurt others. It’s less a matter of hurting you, as it is of getting you to see me. :)
Thank you for reading! I’m fairly scatterbrained, and this was one of the many random subjects that pique my interest.
I recently put out my first book (the first in a fantasy trilogy), and am working on the next two. So there’s a chance I’ll be talking about that, sometimes.
So if you’re someone who enjoys that kinda writing, well, why not subscribe? It’s free. And I’m desperate. So there, honesty.
