glamour, movement, magic, fat, perception double mirrored
Now that I am fat (by most assessments) I feel that people don't see my glamour, my unearthly ethereal magic, anymore. I realized this when watching The L Word again and seeing so many of my movements in Jenny -- the way ze puts hands on hips, or gestures, or tilts zir head, or moves zir eyes, or touches others, or responds to touch. I feel a strong resonance with that character for a lot of reasons, but I hadn't thought about the fact that a big part of that feeling is in the glamour that Jenny carries (at least in the second season). And I realized that most people see fat as the opposite of magic, and in the same way that some of my relatives can't see my grandmother's features reproduced SO CLEARLY in my cousin's face because of a different eye shape and skin color, fat is just such a dominating feature to the average person that they couldn't see similarities between me and Jenny even if we were exactly alike except for fat and hairstyle.
This hurts because my glamour (and I'm using this word in the fae sense not the fashion sense) is a vital part of me. I know that it has not decreased; if anything it is more than it used to be, yet people don't react to it. I used to feel people notice it, interact with me as though I wore it like a cloak. I could sense them enjoying it, or being mystified by it, or feeling drawn to it, or being scared of it. But then again, these were always fleeting feelings. Most of the time I did not feel that people sensed it at all. I think there was really just one short bit of time where I felt my magic was treated as a vital and omnipresent part of me on a regular basis, and that was the summer and early fall when I lived at Serendipity. I think it was because deliberately interacting with magic was important to everyone who was close to me at that time.
I don't really know. Even when I dress to my fullest self, in a way that I feel makes my magic very obvious, people notice my fat first and feel embarrassed for me, like I "don't know better" than to wear things that neither smush nor hide me. If I wore the same style of things as a thin person, people would understand that my choices are deliberate and they might think I am very weird but they wouldn't see me as clownish or failing to be something else. People see my body and either make me invisible or project their shame onto me.
Obviously all of this could be entirely wrong, as it is my perception of other people's perception of me. But the point is that I feel that my fat obscures my magic and grace for many people, and that makes it hard for me to connect with it.
This hurts because my glamour (and I'm using this word in the fae sense not the fashion sense) is a vital part of me. I know that it has not decreased; if anything it is more than it used to be, yet people don't react to it. I used to feel people notice it, interact with me as though I wore it like a cloak. I could sense them enjoying it, or being mystified by it, or feeling drawn to it, or being scared of it. But then again, these were always fleeting feelings. Most of the time I did not feel that people sensed it at all. I think there was really just one short bit of time where I felt my magic was treated as a vital and omnipresent part of me on a regular basis, and that was the summer and early fall when I lived at Serendipity. I think it was because deliberately interacting with magic was important to everyone who was close to me at that time.
I don't really know. Even when I dress to my fullest self, in a way that I feel makes my magic very obvious, people notice my fat first and feel embarrassed for me, like I "don't know better" than to wear things that neither smush nor hide me. If I wore the same style of things as a thin person, people would understand that my choices are deliberate and they might think I am very weird but they wouldn't see me as clownish or failing to be something else. People see my body and either make me invisible or project their shame onto me.
Obviously all of this could be entirely wrong, as it is my perception of other people's perception of me. But the point is that I feel that my fat obscures my magic and grace for many people, and that makes it hard for me to connect with it.