I’m very late to the body image party, and if you’ll forgive me, I’m not going to add my two cents. All the emotional outpouring got me thinking, though, about why I follow all of you. I found you all mainly because you’re all really funny. And funny, it comes at a price. Funny is the subtle armadillo shell that covers up the part of you that is broken.
Whether you’re overweight, the only Tongan kid in your class, a nerd, social retarded, gay, peg-legged, alcoholic parent-having, big nose-sporting, acne-bedecked, freakishly tall, or whatever, something about you makes you different. Broken. A rejected jack-in-the-box (or Dentist), looking for The Island of Misfit Toys. It makes you come here, and to Twitter, and to where ever else you express yourself, and pour it all out. For me (fine, also for everyone else).
So I just wanted to say thank you. Thanks for being slightly broken. Thanks for sharing that broken part with me. I’m broken, too. It’s why I’m here. So rather than look at yourself in the mirror and *try* to see yourself as “beautiful,” realize instead that with every joke you tell, with every secret part of yourself you share with us other imaginary people, with every stroke of brush to canvas or pen to paper, you are saying: “Here is how I am broken. Today I mend a tiny, tiny piece.”
We see it. I see it. And we are saying it, too: “You are beautiful, especially the broken part.”
I love this.
