The Advice Column II

357

Advice Request
The requestor feels worthless and unwanted.

Answered Submission
Hello!

I am utterly disappointed to know that the adults around you keep comparing you with your sister and make you feel like you don't deserve to be loved just because you don't fit society's standard of beauty. I really want to stress the part where I said "society's standard of beauty" because what our society believes isn't always right.

Let me show you a situation:

"Women should only stay at home, take care of the kids, and cook because that's where they belong: in the kitchen."

If someone said this to you, would you agree with them? No, right? And that's what our society had believed before and still somewhat does to this day, even if some people have moved on from that mindset. Part of society still believes that a kitchen is where a woman will always belong.

What I'm trying to tell you is to try to teach yourself to not care about what they said because what they're telling you is not right—about how you should be more like your sister just because she's thin. Even if you are overweight, you still have the right to be appreciated and to be loved. So they are wrong to treat you like that.

If we talk about things through the health aspect, yes, it is good to lose weight in order to avoid the risk of having diseases that are related to being obese, but that does not mean that when someone is overweight, people automatically have the permission to not care about you, to not appreciate your existence, and to be rude to you. Remember, being overweight doesn't mean that you have no feelings. Being overweight doesn't mean that you are not a human being. You are still a human being as much as everyone else is.

Being thin doesn't mean that someone is fit, actually, but I get what your parents are trying to say. People have always viewed overweight people as unfit and have left out thin people. I'm not defending your parents by any means, but they may be saying that because they truly care about you, and it's the way they showed that that is wrong, coupled along with the fact that they had kept comparing you with your sister. They probably saw it as a way to motivate you to lose weight, but they did not realise that maybe their methods weren't exactly the most effective ones.

I can say that being alone doesn't mean that you are lonely, but as a human, I think we naturally seek at least one person to be our companion—our friend. If you find it hard to make new friends, I would say to focus more on yourself. You mentioned that you want to love yourself, but at the same time, you don't, and you said you don't want to die but you just want to stop existing. As I said earlier, I think what would help you in the current situation is to focus on yourself. Find a purpose in your life. Find something that will ignite your passion. Find something that will make you look forward to living every single day.

One of the tips that might help in how to love yourself is to ask yourself these questions:

If you met a person in your life, how would you treat them? You would treat them like a normal human being, right? No matter what their weight, their gender, their sexual orientation, and their race is, you would appreciate their existence and care about them fairly just as you care about other people, right? So try to put yourself as that person that you met. You need to love yourself like you love other people because you matter.

This is an article that I really think is helpful in learning how to love yourself. Even as I read it, it taught me a lot, and I even learned more about myself.

http://jasonconnell.co/love_yourself/

I hope this helps a lot, and I wish you the best of luck.

With lots of love,
The Advice Column Team