As a very fat person, and as the fattest person in most rooms where I live, diet talk is a constant. Nearly everywhere I go, people much thinner than me are eager to tell me everything they’re doing to avoid looking like me. Without knowing what I eat or how I move, they confidently tell me I’m eating myself into an early grave. It is surreal, being followed by a Greek chorus so eager to foretell my untimely death, seemingly relishing the opportunity to make me a martyr to their cause. But it doesn’t end with diet talk. Strangers remove items from my grocery cart. They recommend weight loss surgeons without so much as a hello. Some shout slurs and insults from passing cars, even in my otherwise progressive hometown.

My change of circumstance made me hyperaware of what I wanted everyone to see: a woman in charge of herself. A Strong Woman Doing Well On Her Own. A woman (I’m sorry) thriving. The logic was this: if I looked good I was doing well, in a way that anyone could see before I opened my mouth. I was tired of the gentle arm squeezes and soft-eyed how-you-holding-ups, of people checking in to make sure I was “taking care of myself”. I figured that becoming inarguably, conventionally attractive would cut them off at the pass, giving them a narrative they understood (“glow up” is a universal language) and saving myself the trouble of figuring out what I actually felt. I was comforted by the cut-throat simplicity of it: to be hot was to be doing well. Better than before, better than him. Better than other, weaker people who are broken by something as small as grief. I didn’t pause for a minute to consider how unhealthy it was to look on a breakup as a competition. I just knew that I did not want to be a loser. I wanted to be the winner, and very hot. […] It became clear that my post-breakup plans were unlikely to materialise: I would glow laterally at best. But I kept going, no longer in service of being seen, but to luxuriate in not being so. I know many if not most people attend Spin class because it makes their butts look good. But I’m sure there are others, like me, who are there because it makes them feel like their butt, and the rest of them, have dissolved into a fine mist.

Get this: All bodies are different. But I don’t mean this in some flip way. I mean it in a bone-deep, beautiful, complicated way. All of the dogs’ bodies are so different.

Crowded beaches are a great place for you to live out all of your body-image neuroses.

We can decline. We can change our patterns. Identity is far deeper than any of these labels and habits. We are not what we do, or even how we do it or why. We are what we feel. Identity is in the surge when you recognize unverifiable truth, or the pang when something snaps that you can't see, or the way you know that you love something you'd never even contemplated. We are not the sum of our fears or our atrophies or our helplessnesses, we are the product of our hopes and our surprise and our inexplicable instincts. We are broken as a test; we are repaired as a challenge. We contain divinity and infinity and infamy. We are beautiful under these terrible layers and clothes, in motion where we sit, warm in these climes, improvised in panic. We can walk away from the stories they're trying to sell us, and write our own. If they hang on us, we can throw them off. If they pursue us, we can run.

‘2011 indeed was a remarkable year for the pop body in all of its beautiful, ugly, complex, and grotesque forms.’

This is beautiful. "Mutsugoto is an intimate communication device intended for a bedroom environment. Mutsugoto allows distant partners to communicate through the language of touch as expressed on the canvas of the human body. A custom computer vision and projection system allows users to draw on each other's bodies while lying in bed. Drawings are transmitted 'live' between the two beds, enabling a different kind of synchronous communication that leverages the emotional quality of physical gesture." Thanks for the link, Ara.

Interesting project: implants to raise the skin into Braille. "opportunity for blind people to have a meaningful body alteration, but also something what could be used by those who live or work with blind people."

"Our obsession with physical appearance may not be so shallow after all." Symmetry and youth rule.