Friday, May 10

chin up, beautiful.

at school we have what is called pastoral care. apparently, someone invented pastoral care so that a student can feel united with his or her peers, and do some learning. every week, we would learn how to manage our stress, lives, time etc. i don't know what happened, but this idea sunk very very low. the reality of things is that pastoral care consists of a heap of girls on their phones squealing now and then at some comment or 'like' on facebook, and a heap of sly remarks coming from the boys, and a tired, stressed teacher. i usually kick back with my friends, and prepare for the worst.

today was different. today we started talking about anorexia, and bulimia, and how society has handed us such a distorted image of women that it is hurting girls. daily.
i have a friend whom i care for, and today she burst into tears. i asked her what was wrong and she said that she was afraid.
i asked her why and she said that she was being forced to put on weight. basically at some point last year this girl had thought she was fat, and had started dieting.
first the desert went, then the bread, then the veggies and she had become consumed by a little voice in her mind.
'thinner, come one you can do it, thinner'.
(now, she is seeing help, and has a circle of friends who support her, and who tell her that being healthy and feeling good from the inside is the only thing that can make you beautiful)

in pastoral care today we started talking about ellen degeneres' partners novel: unbearable lightness which talked about these issues.
for a split second the girls and boys and teachers sent out a thought for those girls, and even boys, who were suffering from these ugly, ugly thoughts, and who felt trapped and what they thought were ugly, ugly bodies.

after that, the girls kept on giggling about their facebook accounts, and the boys resumed their nasty weird boy-gossiping. but there was that split-second. i swear there was.

please, if you are in this situation and trying to get out, i want you to know something.


4 thoughts:

  1. have you read unbearable lightness yourself? i have a copy and i started it but didn't get very far. i plan to go back to it sometime though. :-)

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    1. no actually i haven't, but i wouldn't mind reading it someday...

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  2. That is a very beautiful and heartfelt post, it brought tears to my eyes. I think the thinness issue is like cigarettes, just a big scam to make you consume something you don't need (diet products, buy more clothes in search of the elusive ones that'll make you look skinny, hide yourself with makeup, buy magazines, try to emulate photo shopped figurines, etc.) and it's no coincidence that smoking is also supposed to suppress your appetite. A lot is done to make you forget your real you, who you are inside, to agitate you and make you yearn for something else. Then peer pressure adds on to it...
    It is really worth it to stop and think "why again was I trying to do that?".
    Keep on blogging!

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    1. thank you very much for reading, and for your thoughts.

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Thank you so much for taking the time to say 'hi'; it's great hearing from you. ❀