Decisions have been made

Babble will be permanently closing up shop sometime between now and the end of August.

The FA Links Feed will be closing up shop around the same time.

No, i haven’t decided when. I don’t plan on setting an actual date/time. But this is – really, honestly, and truly – the final post here. I mean it this time.

I’ve set up a new blog. No, it is not a fat acceptance blog. It’s a me acceptance blog. It is my personal body blog, where i talk about my own body and self-esteem issues, my thoughts on myself (and my self) as a whole, etc. There may occasionally be some tie-in with what goes on in the society and cultures of which i am a part, but that’s not the primary focus.

It may not always be comfortable to write, and as such, not always comfortable to read. I cannot (and will not) preface every single post with a “trigger warning”, so if you find yourself easily upset by such things, i suggest not reading the blog.

All that being said, if you’re interested in reading, here ’tis: body bits.

The demise/return of babble/bits?

When i logged into wordpress.com this morning, i received a notification that the domain redirect (the one that pushes babble.sneakykitty.com to babblebits.wordpress.com) is going to expire soon. I knew it would happen eventually, but hadn’t thought about it in some time. But since it’s due to expire a month from yesterday, i suppose it’s time i give it some actual thought.

I am relatively undecided about what to do, here.

Most people who link to this blog are using the sneakykitty address, so a lot of links will break. Not to be harsh, but realistically that’s not my problem: i can’t help what people are/aren’t linking. If this blog were still active, i’d renew the redirect or encourage people to fix their links. But it’s not still active, and that actually makes it more interesting.

I still have thoughts about body image, mostly because i still have body image issues. This is not a dead issue to me, far from it.

Here’s what i’m considering:

1. delete the babble.sneakykitty.com subdomain, delete the google account that’s pushing the FA Links feed, erase all posts, pages and links the babblebits.wordpress.com and start over at that address.
2. just delete everything (the subdomain, the wordpress blog and the FA Links feed) and keep my body image issues to myself (which most likely means keeping them behind a friends lock on livejournal).
3. leave everything as-is and let people either figure it out themselves or, yanno, not figure it out; whichever.

I have the luxury of Time To Decide. But i figured, as a courtesy, i’d give a heads up as to what’s going on; i know there are still people who link the FA Links feed on their blogs, and to suddenly find it all gone with no information as to why? I’d hate to have that done to me, and i don’t like the idea of doing that to anyone else.

So, yeah. Undecided. Big shocker. If this blog does come back in any form, it’s going to be pretty different. Less political, less focused on the external aspects of FA/size/body acceptance. More navel-gazing and self-acceptance, more about fixing my own issues before i worry about anyone else’s issues.

But still, you have been warned advised:

1. The FA Links feed is most likely going to be deleted.
   1. If i can figure some way to post the OPML export file for it, i’ll make it available for anyone who wants to use it to create their own feed,  subscribe to all the blogs at once, or print it out by the dozens and wallpaper their bathroom with it.
2. This blog may be deleted altogether, in every form.
3. This blog may return.

Final Post

In early January, i decided it was time to close up shop here. There is no one single answer as to why; part of it is being tired of the politics of the fatosphere, part of it is the cold shoulder i’ve received as a result of those politics, and probably the largest part of it is simply not knowing how many more ways i can keep saying the same thing: it is wrong to discriminate on someone because of their size. End of story. Quite simple, really.

I brainstormed for a while on how i wanted to bring this blog to a stopping point. Did i want to leave the entire blog up? What was i going to do with the Feed, with the Links page, with all of the resources i created?

Perhaps most importantly: how could i do this all in a way that would give me the closure i needed? I knew that i wouldn’t get it from the fatosphere: a scattered few would probably bid me a merry good riddance, while others would say they were sad to see me go. Neither is entirely satisfying: one breeds resentment, and the other, guilt. I realized that i needed to bear the responsibility for finding my own closure in the matter, and not expect to get it in a satisfying form from anyone else out there.

One of my online friends has been working for months on getting her self-publishing gig up and running. In the many conversations that she and i had about layout, design, methods, reasons and everything else, i felt more and more that self-publishing was an entirely valid solution for just about anything i would write. My thoughts are a bit off the beaten path, and any book-length amount of text i might write would need to go off the beaten path to be found by people who would be most interested in reading it.

And like getting my peanut butter mixed up with someone else’s chocolate, i stumbled upon a truly delicious solution: i would try to turn this blog into a book. That way, i would be able to have both electronic and hard copies of my favorite and best posts. I honestly don’t care if anyone else decides to buy it.  I was never in this blog for the money, and i see no reason to start that now.

For the past few weeks, i have been going through all of my old posts. It’s been an exhausting but rewarding experience. I exported everything to a private blog where i could work on this without any sort of pressure or time commitment. I didn’t mention it to anyone because hey, if i decided to not do it, there’d be no muss and no fuss. On the first pass, i removed anything that was solely commentary on external articles, posts or sites. On the next pass, i removed the “fluff” – i started out with 284 posts, and by the time i was starting to really go through the meaty bits, i had narrowed it down to 95.

That, in and of itself was pretty humbling. Fully 2/3rds of my blog had been commentary on external content, site updates, or outright fluff. As i went further, separating the remaining 95 into “definites” and “maybes”, i came to realize that there were only 20something definites – only a tenth of the original number of posts. For about half an hour, i asked myself if this was really worth the effort.

The answer was maybe. I decided to just go ahead with the plan and ignore the numbers. I would see what i would see when i was done doing what i needed to do. By then i had decided that even if i didn’t close up shop (or didn’t close it up the way i’d originally intended), it would give me some sense of closure.

I’ve been rewriting bits here and there – sometimes to clarify or rephrase for better grammar, sometimes to add things that were clarified or added in comments, but never with the intent to alter the original meaning of the post. As i’ve had to go through all of the remaining content, i’ve noticed something fascinating: most of my better posts had little to do with fat acceptance. They were about body and/or self-acceptance. My best content has been a series of explorations of mind and body, identity and love, acceptance and pain, i.e., some pretty damn deep stuff grounded in practical experience.

As Ben put it, trying to fit all of that into a Fat Acceptance mindset was like using the wrong lens for a landscape shot – a macro lens for an Ansel Adams photograph. My simple analogy: square peg, round hole. Maybe part of the reason i felt so often that i didn’t fit in in the fatosphere was simply because that wasn’t the true undercurrent of what i was thinking about. I didn’t fit in because i was actually in the wrong place.

So, long story short: i am putting this blog to rest. This means…

• I have removed all of the posts except this one.
• I will leave the Links page and the Feed up for now, but i will not be updating them anymore. If you want to re-create them on your own time and dime, you’re welcome to do so.

I will most likely be carrying on my thoughts on body and self acceptance elsewhere; whether or not that place is online or off still remains to be seen. In any case, it will not be continuing here.

I wish you all the best of luck. Thank you for the good times, as well as the bad; i’ve learned a lot from both.

If you would like a copy of the book i’ve created from this blog, you can purchase a copy of it here: Babble – a body acceptance blog book. You are also welcome to download a free PDF copy of it if you would like to do so.