Lions Don't Lose Sleep

So. I got into a Twitter fight. With a stranger. I'm going to assume we've all been there at some point in our social media lives. I'm not necessarily ashamed of fighting. Or even of fighting with a stranger. I'm ashamed of the content over which we were having our unintelligible argument. I’ll paraphrase for those who don’t follow me on Twitter.

This week, according to my active twitter feed, is #FatShamingWeek. I'll give you a moment to reread that sentence. For some of you, it's old news. For the more ironic of you, you're thinking "That's my LIFE, why does one designated week make a difference." For countless others, you're probably shocked. I know I was. In retrospect, I'm not sure why I was shocked, as I am familiar with the sometimes ruthless nature of social media sites and the trolls who frequent them. Several tweets came across my feed from infuriated women and men, giving those participants of fat shaming week the proverbial finger. But I had no idea to what they were referencing. So, like the emotional sadist I am, I made my little way over. Ninety percent of the tweets were by people in support of body acceptance and fat acceptance. These people came in a variety of sizes, shapes, ethnicities, and yes, even genders. Then there was the rest. Thin privilege comments, gym rat advice, motivation to put down the pastries (Like it's permanently affixed to my hand. Pah-lease), and so much more. And the more I read, the more indignant I became. These people, with nothing more constructive to do, were spending their mornings demoralizing an entire group of people, a large percentage of the US population and people in various states of self-love and self-hate. I saw red. The angry tweets couldn't fly fast enough from my overly animated fingers. I usually started them with "@soandso, you are a moron." or "@youandthem, you must be truly ignorant." As the victim I saw myself to be, I latched on to anything I could to use against them. When people voice their close-minded and cliché views, I usually label them as idiots. A person's lack of intelligence is ammunition enough for me. My enemies rarely have faces, but they have an educational background. One completely devoid of advanced schooling. I sound like an elitist in that regard.

Now before you pipe up with "Erin, you may not be a weight bigot, but you sure do sound like a hypocrite." I know. I had this realization mid-tweet. Actually, it was less of a realization and more a response from a less verbose adversary. To begin with, she tweeted something along the lines of, "Do you ever see chunky girls with socially acknowledged attractive men? Yeah, me neither. #size0." She didn't stop there, though. She included a selfie. In my humble opinion, I saw nothing any more attractive about her than I see in myself, but just the fact that she used this picture as a way of asserting her fully recognized physical superiority made my blood boil. Well. I called her a horse face. I'm not proud of that. It felt good. But I'm not proud of my juvenile response. We tweeted back and forth. I called her a bigot. And then she called me a hypocrite. And I took pause. I was fighting so aggressively against these name-callers that I wasn't keeping myself in check. I wanted to prove them wrong. Enough that I forfeited my peace of mind and integrity. You could say I lowered myself to their level.

In an unrelated conversation that day, Tanesha at GirlWithCurves said something to me that played directly in to what was happening with this stranger. She said "Society's acceptance starts with you accepting yourself, and refusing to let anyone make you feel inferior." Haters gonna hate. Lions don't lose sleep over the opinions of sheep. How had I overlooked this obvious fact in my journey toward self-love and total acceptance? I was inferior in that instance because, not only was I casting stones just as hard as those on the opposite side of the trenches, but I was letting them strike me down.

So. If you are looking for the Cliff Notes version, here are the two lessons I learned from my ridiculous twitter fight and my less ridiculous conversation with Tanesha. You will never win the war (i.e. body acceptance on a global scale and respect for people of all shapes and sizes) by lashing out. And never allow the words of another to fracture what truths you believe about yourself. Don't ever let anyone dull your sparkle.