Ramble on Gardening and the Thin Ideal

When you grow plants, the aim is that they thrive and blossom and create beauty by being what they were meant to be. You don't feed your gardenias packing peanuts or water your tomatoes with toxic waste. You plant them in appropriate earth, nourish them with sunlight and water. If you're me, you talk to them; kind and gentle words have never hurt a leaf or petal.

If you see your plant's leaves turning yellow or withering away, you change something. Less sunlight, more nutritious soil. Less water, more fresh air. And if your plant is yielding what it's meant to yield, all is well.

When I was five years old, I walked around my house imitating Nutrisystem commercials. At this young age I had already imbibed the message proclaimed to all of humanity, but to women in particular: thinner is better. There is shame in being anything but small.

There is shame in loving food and shame in eating a quantity meant to maintain growth trajectory and expected body weight. There is shame in accepting your natural body, shame in not striving to be fragile and dainty and perfect, shame in embracing the parts of ourselves that make us unique. There is shame in not wanting to disappear.

When you do not succeed in raising thriving plants, something's gotta give.
When society isn't succeeding in raising thriving human beings, something's gotta give.

I'm tired. I'm tired of the normalization of self-dissatisfaction and hatred. I'm tired of the idolized model wherein thin equates to success and losing weight becomes your life's work. I'm tired of never being thin enough.

So many people are. And something's gotta give.