Never content with ourselves, we’re seemingly always trying to be someone else in a society that loves to inform us of all the ways that we’re lacking.
Stripping the soul from the vessel, based on the trajectory that we’re on, we’ll be gone before we die. Lugging a dead weight around where our souls used to be, the bones that we carry on our backs will be the only proof we have that we’re still alive.
Social media has exacerbated this problem tenfold. We can’t just live anymore; we’re constantly under scrutiny, scrolling our days away, hoping to reach the ever elusive* state of enoughness. But to no avail…
*Ever elusive because it’s unachievable. Like a bald man going for a haircut, going in pursuit of ‘enoughness’ is a losing game. You cannot attain that which you already have. You cannot become that which you already are.
If you are living as your true self and showing up only for you, then you cannot add or take anything away that will make you more or less enough. Only when you sacrifice the things that make you truly happy for the things that society tells you will make you happy does that change…
The good news? That, should you find yourself in this situation, you can take something away to make you feel more enough (or rather, more you). To do this, though, requires that you do one of the most difficultthings in life (aside from the obvious, realising that you were enough all along)… It requires you to differentiate between what and who you think you should be versus what and who you want to be. Get this right, and the former, realising that you were enough all along, comes easy…
Change society, don’t let society change you.
Society loves to tell women that they should be losing weight. I can quote diet ads off the top of my head, and that’s as someone to whom diet ads should’ve been going nowhere near.
I know where to go for Botox and lip filler, and what we are being sold to us as the holy grail, Ozempic. I know these things as a twenty-three-year-old woman, but I also knew them as a 14, 13, and 12-year-old girl, something which undoubtedly contributed to me being diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa at the age of 15.
While, thankfully, I am recovered now, tragically, one in four people with Anorexia don’t live to tell their story. The question, therefore, must be asked…
Would the same people who commodified our bodies yesterday stand up in court tomorrow and give evidence as to why having cash was more important to them than having a conscience?
Those who obsess about our bodies don’t just reside in the weight loss and beauty industries. They can often be seen occupying a seat in the back benches of parliament, too.
Society’s obsession with our bodies isn’t just about how we look. It’s also about who and how we love.
Sexuality, gender, and women’s bodies… Have you noticed a pattern yet? They’re all things that we actually have a semblance of control over, which is a rarity in today’s society.
It’s rare to have any control…
And so, because the people in power know that what goes into and on our bodies is ultimately controlled by us, they panic and try to strip us of that control.
It’s why transgender people are demonised in society, for there is nothing more radical in a world that demands we follow the rules than people who, not only create their own rules, but dismantle them. The same is true of queerness in any respect.
To be queer is to stand up and say ‘fuck you’ to systems that have existed for millennia, the patriarchy, heteronormativity, misogyny, all things which are, some might say, the very foundations of society.
To be queer is to go against the ways of the world, knowing that all it takes to change a current is one wave.
Writing from personal experience now, I denied who I was for a very long time, squirreled all the parts of me that made me happy away in exchange for a sense of belonging in a community within which I never could belong.
You can’t force yourself into a category that isn’t designed for you. It won’t work.
It was only when I let go of all the pressures and unrealistic expectations that I’d been holding myself to because I believed that I had to be something and someone that I wasn’t, that I truly found myself.
I didn’t find myself in Anorexia, or forced heterosexuality, or gender compliance, I found myself in everything that society hates ‘people like me’ (see also: people who are happy) for.
I am the epitome of what society tells us we shouldn’t be, yet I am happy. And so, surely that tells us everything we need to know…
Eat what you want to eat, wear what you want to wear, love who you want to love, be who you want to be. When gender and sexuality, and people full stop, are essentially nothing more than social constructs, don’t deny yourself happiness in pursuit of that which is make-believe.
Portfolio of Hope 