A friend of mine wanted to read this blog post I posted many moons ago. So here it is:
This is what I get for surfing through xanga. I was just looking at some of my blogrings Books, Books,&More Books and I checked out one of the blogs that seemed interesting called "Tear in ur eyes". I was looking through her blogrings and I saw an interesting blogring called "Korean Anas." Ok, I'm not a complete idiot, but I seriously didn't know what this blogring was about for like the first 5 minutes. Then a word kept coming up in names and descriptions: "skinny." Then it dawned on me and I was a little sickened. I was sad just as I am always sad when I come upon a woman/girls blog specifically accounting their desire to be skinny and readily affirming their Anorexiaand/or Bulimia. I was aware of the nick name Ana, but Mia was a new one to me. What cute ways of describing such a sick act to afflict upon ones self. As I looked through a few of the blogs and commented on one of them I started to think about this issue.
My ex g/f is Korean-American. She was a very skinny girl at one time, but through college she did take on some weight. I remember she would tell me how her Korean mother would say such rude remarks concerning her weight that would hurt her feelings deeply. She struggled with her weight and body image issues, but it was never something that concerned me and my attraction to her. She was not fat, but she was not skinny. I would do my best to help her in that area and encourage her. My primary concern was that she was "healthy" and the weight issue is secondary. They are not necessarily the same thing. A person can eat very well, not go to the gym, and be "healthy." Health is something that when you lose it, it is very difficult or impossible to gain back. Weight can come and go.
It also made me think of this western culture. We create some of the worse food to eat that causes so much weight and then we worship thin. It is a self-deprecation and self-worship to the point of uber-narcissim. We love our "bad eating habits" and we "love being thin." The sad part is we are exporting not only our bad eating habits, but our western narcissism to the East.
The picture on the right above is from this article:
Also these articles:
For me, my main concern has been about the plight of North Koreans and specifically those starving in North Korea. The picture on the left and especially the one picture in the middle shows a starving North Korean woman and her emaciated body. This is in stark contrast to the picture on the right where we in the West can "chose" to emaciate ourselves for body image reasons (no matter the health problems later or then). I don't have to point out the irony.
The brain is a powerful thing. I should know as someone who once struggled with anxiety attacks. If you tell yourself something and believe it to a certian extent it is a huge struggle to confront those "natural thoughts" with logic that contradicts your way of thinking. There are people who have a fear of many things that are irrational, but it is rational in their mind. It is a process of unhinging that. But on top of confronting your irrational thoughts, you need rational thoughts to replace them. Faith (although some will say another irrational thought) in Christ helped me overcome my anxiety attacks by seeing a true prespective of who I am in Christ and what I can confront in Him. I pray for these girls that put themselves through such horrible things, but really how far are any of us from them?
Originally posted January 29, 2008
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
