Image source: www.sisterschoice.typepad.com/We all know how overweight people like to joke about how they're in shape - because circle is afterall, a shape. But the truth of the matter is that we're just plain and simple, just out of shape when compared to other people around us.
Out of shape means that no matter how good a person you are inside and how beautiful you are within, none of that matters because on the surface, you're just the wrong shape. Let's be brutally honest with ourselves here and not desperately cling onto the few people out there who do fall in love with and eventually marry their overweight mates, because how rare is that? Besides, not that many people in the world are actually willing to look past your well, shape. People may see that you're a nice person, a funny person, shining with so much positivity and warmth and love - all the things that would make you perfect - but because you're not a 'type' that literally looks fit enough to be a mate, you're just passed over and shelved under "Friend", and more often than not, in the "Great guy - but still only a Friend" section.
Overweight people feel it, and it sucks. I risk over generalising here, but we either compensate by just shedding everything and then hating our very existence because we can't think of anything else but our waistline, or we have glowing personalities, wit, charm and humour. We're happy people, don't get me wrong, because that's what we've made for ourselves so we surely will revel in the fruits of our hard work to cope in this utterly superficial world. But when we start seeing couples walk along Clarke Quay river, or have sweet little intimate picnics at the Botanic Gardens, it does sting quite abit, because at the back of your head you know that while you're a Great guy, you're 'still only a friend'.
Of course, it'll be absurdly myopic to assume that only overweight people are applicable to this. Surely, the small, the extremely slim, the pimply, the less eloquent, the eccentric, the quirky - they all feel it too, and definitely at some point in time, everyone's fallen into one of these imperfect categories. But the fact is that all of us insecure individuals still make the great effort to step out of them to step into the minority of perfect, able-bodied, impressive and wonderful people, just to guarantee our own right to a progeny. We want the assurance of a future, of compassion, of love and of security in finding a soulmate and a place to settle down into. So I guess, we all keep working to become that very model of perfection in order to find a safe place. And we never stop. Yeah. Nobody's perfect, and very few ever will be.
But apparently none of the majority of outcasts ever got that memo.