hunger pangs

amazing 15-year-old girl’s slam poetry to a Kimberly Henry ad for plastic surgery, on a menu, across from the salad options.  

Dear Kimberly Henry, I saw your ad last night.
The menu at the cheesecake factory-
your smile so bright on the page next to the page
with the weight management salads.
So people have to know the calories of every order,
or they might accidentally indulge themselves in flavour,
and that’s not right?
Because your ad says I should indulge myself under the knife. Because something about me is so broken and wrong? That I have to listen to every line of your song? And follow every rule of your game?
Go on a diet? Change my name? Or go insane at my own reflection, or the scale? Start calling myself an ugly pig, cow, whale?
Or remember I’m human, that’s all I can be. And my humanity is more beautiful than any sad plastic dream.
No, cause if I let myself get happy, I might get fat.
Which I guess is even worse than being empty and needing?
Or on a table cut open and bleeding?
Or obsessing over numbers, or hiding behind clothes?
Or really believing there’s no way I’ll glow~
unless I change this, lose this, cut this, change that? You know what?
I’d rather be fat.
I’d rather be really fat, not just a pinch of some skin.
I’d rather remember that food isn’t sin, because fat’s just a word like blonde-haired, or brown eyed. And when’s the last time somebody starved themselves until they died, because their eyes weren’t blue, even though they tried? And you know what?
The things you tell yourself are lies.
And they aren’t your lies.
You aren’t that creative.
You aren’t the first one infatuated with self hatred.
You’re just part of the chain on a dusty old bike,
and you’ve been pushed into the ground all of your life. Because it’s so accepted? So wide spread and celebrated, that skinny is happy and fat is wrong?
It’s written all over magazines and billboards and love songs and in me and in everybody, so I wonder, Kimberly.
What happened to you?
That you risked your own life attempting to be beautiful? And you tell other girls that’s what they should do?
And you reap love and peace like the grimmest reality,
and when I’m trying to eat you’re all over my menu?
How dare you tell girls that plastic surgery is fun?
That they have to char their skin under a fake sun, and put plastic in their chest to be any fun, to laugh and to tease and weigh and reweigh
and spend day after day
spreading more lies and causing more pain?
For the sake of their makeup, staying out of the rain?
More terrified to gain a pound than their health and dreams hitting the ground,
shattered by this cloud of despair
that’s infecting people everywhere,
so you can find little girls who only care
about skipping lunch, and they don’t even know, that in some reality, this isn’t acceptable.
To scream at women all day and all night, how is it any better than when women didn’t have any rights? Because yeah I can vote, and get a job, but I have to shave my legs, get a tan, go on a fast, get a man, lose the weight as fast as I can, boast, compare, cry, lie, and die?
So sure I can vote, but I can also fly away from this whole place of toxic air.
Because I don’t really care what you say, and if you think I should have a problem with that?
No thanks, I’d rather be fat.

i wish i could have been anywhere near this enlightened when i was 15.

i think anybody that really knows me knows i have body-related issues, and even though i've made huge strides this past year towards accepting myself and realizing i'm more than my body, that my body is just fine and is strong and capable of doing everything i need it to do so therefore i shouldn't be so hard on it, and even if i did have a "perfect" body it still wouldn't fix all of my problems, i still have my dark moments, and i probably always will.  but every little oasis in my desert helps. this one really helped me out today. as a person with anxiety issues in dealing with other people and feelings of constantly being judged, it's easy to get caught up in perceived expectations of me and let it distort what i know to be true, to let myself become complacent to my own oppression. it's not cool. i realize i need to work harder on not giving a fuck.

also i think the majority of it is rubbish, but i liked this one excerpt from The Witches of Eastwick:

She recognized as she labored in her kitchen the something sadly menstrual in all this, the bloodlike sauce to be ladled upon the white spaghetti. The fat white strings would become her own white fat. This female struggle of hers against her own weight: at the age of thirty-eight she found it increasingly unnatural. In order to attract love must she deny her own body, like a neurotic saint of old? Nature is the index and context of all health and if we have an appetite it is there to be satisfied, satisfying thereby the cosmic order...