Hello Ugly,
I lately chatted with a middle-aged coworker about her buddy who’s sad being single and thinks she ought to shed extra pounds. As Gen X ladies rising up within the Nineteen Eighties, our largest concern was weight and calorie counting to manage it (now we will add wrinkles, yellow enamel and odd physique hair to the record).
After I (flippantly?) steered encouraging the buddy to simply accept her physique as it’s, my coworker mentioned, “Properly she will’t simply hand over!”
Giving up – that’s one other factor we Gen X ladies have at all times tried to keep away from. Like taking a look at our mothers in sweatpants and no make-up and considering they weren’t attempting to be lovely anymore. My query: are there different phrases to explain acceptance of your seems as they’re, at any age, or are we simply actually “giving up”?
– Gen Acceptance
One cause speak of “giving up” leaves a foul style within the mouth, writes psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his guide On Giving Up, is that it “is felt to be an ominous foreshadowing of, or reminder of, the final word giving up that’s suicide, or simply the milder model of dwelling a sort of death-in-life”.
In different phrases: your coworker unconsciously believes {that a} girl who provides up weight-reduction plan would possibly as nicely be useless.
Forgive me (and Phillips – and, not directly, Freud, the daddy of psychoanalysis) for being dramatic. However I believe it’s true! Perhaps doubly true in relation to bodily magnificence, which has lengthy been framed as much less decorative than important, significantly for girls and gender non-conforming individuals. We regularly consider magnificence as a declaration of self, a way of survival, a signifier of societal price. It will increase our financial and social potential. It opens doorways and buys grace; it affords entry and a focus.
To fall wanting it, conversely, is to edge towards a sort of cultural erasure.
Naturally, when one’s look is rewarded and/or punished like this, it begins to appear as vital as life itself. Or extra vital. Take into account a quote from a 2024 Washington Post story on the renewed reputation of tanning beds, recognized to intensify customers’ danger of pores and skin most cancers: “I’d reasonably die scorching than stay ugly.” (A rebuttal, if I’ll.)
This conflation of magnificence and life comes up fairly just a few occasions in your query, albeit in much less excessive phrases. You categorize weight reduction and stray hairs as a few of your “largest considerations”. You recall worrying about your mom not carrying make-up – which solely is sensible if make-up is a logo of one thing extra. (The desire to hold on, possibly?) Your coworker implies that giving up on thinness should imply giving up on relationship, which should imply giving up on love, which, nicely – why hassle happening, then?
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It is a bit absurd. (The unconscious is nothing if not irrational!) “The daunting affiliation” of giving up, Phillips writes, “has stopped us having the ability to consider the milder, extra instructive, extra promising givings up,” of which there are various.
Like giving up on sustaining magnificence requirements, for instance.
The pursuit of an unrealistic, typically unhealthy and ever-shifting look perfect is one thing that paradoxically “anaesthetizes” us to life, as Phillips would possibly say, whilst we consider it as providing extra life (or extra alternative). Skipping meals to shed extra pounds can deprive the physique of vitamins it must perform correctly. Getting Botox to look youthful can “alter the way [the] brain interprets and processes other people’s emotions”. Self-surveilling can prepare us to prioritize how we glance over how we really feel.
“As a way to really feel alive one might need to surrender, say, one’s recurring techniques and methods for deadening oneself,” Phillips writes.
On this sense, “giving up” is strictly the phrase you’re searching for, Gen Acceptance. Hand over, you understand, ravenous. Hand over vitamin deficiencies. Hand over calorie-counting, step-counting, mirror-staring. Hand over sucking in and Spanx-shaped pores and skin indentations. Hand over middle-aged males who demand somebody do any of the above in trade for completely satisfied hour apps at Applebee’s.
Extra from Jessica DeFino’s Ask Ugly:
If “giving up” nonetheless doesn’t sit proper, attempt recontextualizing it as getting one thing again: time, cash, vitality, mind area, well being – life, one would possibly say.
I’m not saying it’s simple. Giving up can immediate “very actual struggling”, as Phillips places it. Quitting includes reassessing what we worth, and this will get extra painful with age. Perhaps that’s why your coworker is so immune to the concept of her buddy accepting her physique as-is. It would drive her to ask herself: might she do the identical? Ought to she? In that case, what does that say about how she’s lived to date? Did she waste her one wild and treasured existence eager about dressing-on-the-side salads? Who’s she if she’s not skinny, or at the least attempting to be?
But when your coworker isn’t all in favour of reconsidering her beliefs, I’d hand over attempting to persuade her. As a result of typically, giving up is sweet.