"There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it...until they have grown so old that they forget the way. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again...The world calls them singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland."
- L.M Montgomery
Body-shaming is ubiquitous and abhorrent; it happens everywhere, to pretty much everyone, at one time or another. Fat-shaming is a specific variety of body-shaming. It is not the only kind of shaming that takes place, but it is one of the more common ones. Lots of folks think fat-shaming is perfectly acceptable. More than that, lots of folks think fat-shaming is actually a good thing, because with shame as a motivator, perhaps those darn fat people will stop being so fat.
It doesn’t work, though — shame is not a catalyst for change; it is a paralytic. Anyone who has ever carried extreme personal shame knows this. Shame doesn’t make you stronger, nor does it help you to grow, or to be healthy, or to be sane. It keeps you in one place, very, very still.
—Lesley Kinzel for xoJane (via broadist)
[Unrelated to the first part, which I do love, but good lord, the last lines… yeah, anyone who wonders why I’ve been paralyzed for the past year or so, I’ve been in a big shame spiral. This is so true. I never really thought of it that way, but cripes.]
(via 14kgoldnyc)
