while the prefatory remarks are brief, the text itself is, well, not so much
I was going to go to sleep half an hour ago; and then I was just going to skim through my friends page and go to bed; and then I had a really strange reaction to Sunil's post and I thought I'd try to jot down my feelings about it
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Your post really struck a chord with me, and many of the reasons I frequently hate being a woman, and why I can be so incredibly messed up inside at times. I feel all this pressure to be perfect. It's not enough to be good at my job, I have to be better than all the men in the office, and I have to look good while doing it. I've spoken to other women in engineering who feel the same way, too. Like we've gone through phases of wearing business casual to work in the hopes that it'll make certain people take us more seriously, to saying fuck it and coming in wearing jeans and a t-shirt. But I digress, because I still annoyed that a vendor this week mistook me for being the office manager.
I constantly feel the pressure to look perfect, and you know, that's just not going to happen. So instead I have this dream that a magic genie will appear, and I'll get to wish for the body I want. My hips will be smaller, my breasts perkier, fewer freckles, and I'll never have to pluck my eyebrows again. And instead I get guilt, whether it's because I had carbs for breakfast, or a burrito for lunch instead of a salad. I'm really a quivering mess inside, but I've gotten very good at hiding it. (Well, until I admit it on the internet.)
And the really depressing thing is, that while I know I'm being completely neurotic, I also know that I'm not alone. Have you ever watched someone who's thin and obsessed about staying that way eat? It's all about the salad, no cheese, no nuts, dressing on the side. Seriously, how do they eat like that and still have the energy to move? And yet leaving the cheese on my salad is enough to make me feel guilty. Maybe it is just me that's really fucked up. So today for lunch, I'll have a salad, and I'll order it with avocado, and I'll wonder if maybe that number on the scale would have crept just slightly lower if I had left the avocado off and had the dressing on the side. Sigh.
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