You Look Amazing - This is the write up for my portfolio by itself. PDF

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This is the write up for my portfolio by itself. ...

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You Look Amazing As opposed to the in person reading at the university I choose to talk about a few poems that I was able to watch online through Button Poetry’s Youtube. I’ll be discussing Blythe Bard’s “When the Fat Girl Gets Skinny,” Rachel Wiley’s “The Fat Joke,” and Bianca Phipps’ “When the Boy Says He loves My Body.” These poems have similarities of course due to the subject matter, but each poet has her own take on the things presented, and I think it’s interesting to see different styles all speaking about overlapping things. In Bard’s poem she talks about her past history with an eating disorder, namely anorexia, pointing out that when you develop an eating disorder as a fat female, people are proud of you for losing weight, even when you tell them you’re suffering. This particular poem hit home for me because it does kind of point to what kind of friends you have, and that’s a hard thing to hear. Not eating and being grossly underweight will show you that people equate skinny with healthy, no matter what you actually say on the matter. The praise makes it almost impossible to love your body again after it undergoes any changes, having what everyone thinks they want on the outside, and crumbling on the inside. I think that this is a sentiment that a lot of people miss with anorexia, they don’t understand that it’s a social- cultural thing too, not just a disorder. Wiley’s poem was another one that hit home for me, for different reasons. She discusses people equating fat with unhealthy, inactive, uncaring, mentioning that yes, a body can still be fat while active. She discusses being wary of the doctor to the point of not going anymore and not only is it a disheartening thing to hear, it’s also very true. Fat people’s medical issues and complaints can tend to fall on deaf ears simply because they are fat. Misdiagnosis in women or lack of diagnosis in women is already extremely high, especially to be tied to one of the largest industries in the country. But, as someone who was underweight and overweight, the response

from doctors gets very different. At 20 pounds underweight, I’m congratulated, at a mysterious 7 pound drop in my weight I’m met by my doctor’s relief that I’m “taking care of that.” 20 pounds underweight and I’m freezing and bleeding for weeks at a time, not understanding any of it, finally within a “healthy weight” and finally understanding that that’s not a way that I should be living. Healthy weight, reminded what foods never to eat because they’re too salty, too sugary, too much for my now soft body to handle, underweight and told about my perfection, assumed healthy by virtue of flat stomach. Finally, Phipp’s poem. Her poem presents part of this argument that everyone tells you shouldn’t be part of it. She talks about having her body loved but not herself, and losing some of herself in the process, something people tend to respond to with some sort of “You shouldn’t care what ______ thinks” which causes more damage than actual empathy would. It becomes easy to step outside of yourself and create a persona when people see you as a talking body as opposed to a whole person. Chat up lines having always to do with the body and never the person within that skin are not compliments, they’re something to lay in bed at night and think about because when you’re young and the only thing about you anyone has ever put any love into is your body, it becomes difficult to see yourself as more than that and eventually to be more than that outwardly without fearing or toning yourself down....