And people are pissed.
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| Tess Holliday's Instagram |
I was recently reading this article on Tess by Pearl Gabel, and after Tess Holliday described her career successes as "out of body experiences" she went on to say "I'm always still that 13-year-old girl in Mississippi who people told I wasn't good enough. I never could have imagined that I could be here."
Her saying that in particular really hits home for me.
When I was in the eighth grade we had a class called Career Readiness. It was an extremely boring class, but there was one bright spot that semester: A career aptitude test. I answered the questions on that test as truthfully as I could. It resulted in three job possibilities for me: Actress, journalist, and model.
I was thrilled, of course; those all being things I wanted to do. Being thirteen at the time, I had no doubt in my mind that I could be all of those things.
Then life happened.
Just a few years after graduating high school, that thirteen-year-old me was just gone. I was a short, fat, college drop-out with low self-esteem. I finally began to see some worth in myself and started Prettiful Style to document that journey. It has been a long road for me, and it's not even nearly over.
Back to Tess. The short, fat and beautiful mother from Mississippi is really shaking things up. She is absolutely gorgeous, as evidenced by her Instagram account, yet people think it is terrible, even immoral for her to be a model and get to be in magazines with her fabulous fatness showing for all the world to see.
Why all the hate? This article by The Militant Baker explains so well what I have been thinking on the subject, and that is basically this: Misery loves company. If people are out there killing themselves to look "perfect", but are still unhappy, they feel that a fat person (oftentimes who they see as a lazy glutton) certainly has no right to feel good about themselves. Many feel that those who are fat shouldn't get to feel good in their own skin.
That "perfection" all of these people are out there trying to achieve is, most of the time, unattainable. Working toward being healthy is a good thing, and it's something we should all try to do for our own good, (Like Tess does; she works out and hikes and has a pretty active life) but that should be about actually being healthy, not trying to chase this ridiculous ideal of beauty that much of society is obsessed with.
What Tess Holliday is doing is groundbreaking. Not only is this a success in her own life, it is a victory for all of us plus-size gals who dream of a world where we will be treated like everyone else. She is sending a message out there to all women, that message is this: Don't let your size, weight, height, or shape hold you back. Be who you want to be, and don't let others tell you you can't.
Tess gives me hope. Most likely I will never do anything more than my blog, (which is fine; I love my blog) but Tess's success at least tells me one thing, and that is my childhood dreams are, at the very least, possibilities.
The thirteen-year-old girl I once was is alive again. She is still pretty weak, but she sees the world through young, wondering eyes. She still believes her dreams could some true. Every time the body-positive world achieves another victory against the "normal" beauty standards, she gets a little stronger.
And she's hungry for more.
Thanks for reading!
Love always,
Ashley
