Greetings!
Firstly, please let me thank all you wordpressers for taking the time to read and follow my very newborn blog. It’s wonderful to start connecting with so many kind souls so thank you and I look forward to finding out all about you : )
I’m not due a blog update for another week, but I’ve found recently that on social media sites there seems to be a ressurgance of body beauty issues … and this all came about because of a facebook post I made regarded my Hypothyroidism.
My last blood test was in early October and my TSH and T4 levels were through the roof (I’ll explain in my next blog post what these are) so my medication dosage was lowered. This has had an immediate and damning impact on my day-to-day life; my energy levels are low, I have a perpetual sore throat and flu like symptoms, I go into commatose on the sofa and, perhaps most disturbingly, I gained substantial weight .
I
posted to my friends about my aches, my lethargy and my desire for the next blood test to come around. Cue a very well rounded discussion about proper medication, proper medical support and requests for medicines that contain T3. One such medicine is called Armour, and oddly enough you can purchase it without prescription over the Internet . Then
, a friend asked the dreaded question:
“Does [Armour] make you lose weight?”
And I froze. This, I imagine, is the question doctors dread from hypothyroid patients who are at the end of their tether because they know that there is NOTHING to stop a patient from self medicating if they have access to these meds and decide to double their dosage, unsupervised, and overdose.
Let me make this very clear – an overdose of meds in a hypothyroid patient is extremely dangerous. It can turn you hyperthyroid, destroy your immune system and even, on prolonged use, stress your heart.
In a person who has a healthy functioning thyroid, it can kill you. Even instantly. It’s like taking speed.
Needless to say, I carefully explained the functions and highlighted the dangers of unsupervised use. I also urged her to get a blood test to determine whether she might be hypo.
I know that this person is desperate to lose weight, at almost any cost. She has over the past 4 years lost so much weight she is almost unrecognisable, and that’s not to say she was by any means fat to begin with. She is svelte, curvy, beautiful and if she lost more weight she would become underweight. All in the name of beauty.
There’s a thing about beauty in our culture that exists if only to enslave people, and it is practised more vehemently in the west than any other region in the world (at least openly).
That thing is this:
We only possess ownership of our beauty within the years that we are not biologically ready to be sexually mature and therefore powerful. Once we move past adolescence, ownership of an individuals beauty is usurped by society and often never, ever reclaimed wholly.
This idea isn’t new nor will it change within the global consciousness of our constantly evolving world. It’s a survival mechanism designed to temporarily save women living in the crisis of a dangerous world.
In 1978, Granada Television commissioned a series of documentaries entitled ‘The World Around Us’ – one of which was about the Nazi Auscwitch doctor Josef Mengele. The documentary opens with descriptions of his appearance from his contemporaries, confidants and a one prisoner of camp – Margaret Englander. In her own words, Margaret relates that Dr Mengeler was a very handsome, clean cut man. More harrowingly, she explains that he spared her .. because of her beauty. Her beauty, her socially accepted features of sexual beauty, attractiveness and – from what I personally understand – as the insidious mental desire, fed by his attraction to her, that he might have congress with her – spared Englander from certain death. Her daughter was also spared, also because of her beauty, although she was killed 2 days before the camp was freed.
For those with an interest in the documentary, it’s available on youtube here.
Nazi Eugenics, Genocide and Racism have one common trait: the dehumanising of individuals by stating that their DNA makes them sub human, asserting the belief that they are ‘ugly’. There are countless academic journals written on the importance of Aesthetics within the cogs of the ‘Final Solution’ that are a realisation of such an extremity of this concept of “unacceptable ugliness”.
From the sexualising of child brides and trafficked prostitutes to the iconographic fashion industry, the aesthetic value of beauty and its merits in sexual power, commerce or financial reign has long been associated with a skewed concept of the achievement of beauty as a sexual conquest: the aim of which is to attain a champion, trophy, or kingdom. Ironically, this idea has dehumanised our natural beautiful selves beyond all recognition in the name of self defence – and it supports a violent, anti-love culture.
I spent many years of my youth trapped in a toxic hell of private mental anguish because of my physical appearance. Like many adolescents and teenagers, I suffered from severe cystic acne – a skin virus which has little to do with diet and much more to do with environment. Unlike most teenagers, the roaccutane tablets I was prescribed and forced to take (by being lied to and told that my acne was part of a potentially fatal heart problem) were coated in an untreated percentile mercury layer. Aside from the obvious dent in self esteem, being repeatedly referred to as a test subject in the third party, or continually corrected when I exchanged that I was fine and not self conscious about my acne, which I was not, I was imprisoned into a lucid, hallucinogenic state of normality where I spoke in philosophical riddles and made observations openly that are not socially acceptable. Such was the detrimental effect of my mental state that one of my teachers asked a school psychologist to have me tested for schizophrenia and have me sectioned against my will. Were it not for a doctor who was a family friend I may have had to battle my way out of a legal request to have me institutionalised for no real reason. Dr Valarino who lowered my dosage, changed my prescription tablets, referred me to a specialist uk dr and when I arrived in Winchester, only then was it revealed to me that I had been poisoned.
Such was the disgrace of being ‘ugly’ that I did’nt posess ownership of my own body until I was 19 years old. Society, in it’s backwardly infinite wisdom decided I would be better dead on illegal medicine that was cheap rather than alive as a less aesthetically pleasing yet valuable human being.
To this day I still cannot leave the house without wearing make up, though I wear alot less of it. It is my mask of self-preservation. It empowers me with control over perception based judgement and action in accordance (which is wrong on every level). It gives me a defence against the public by pre-empting their reaction based on what they see … and sadly, it’s based on what they seek in terms of value, which lies in the aesthetic of first impression.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop wearing make up all together in my lifetime. I hope to. For my daughter at least. But I do hope that if there is a revolution I can be a part of it, and that the little things – like this blog – can be the first steps
Xx
Don't believe the Hyp! 