#BoPoPoetry: Enough. by Caroline Fearns

Enough.

Diet culture is so rampant and insidious,
Making women feel less than and hideous.
Such a cleverly orchestrated manipulation,
Causing devastating confidence mutilation.
Everywhere you look airbrushed images flood your consciousness.
Leaving your mind a tangled mess
The message they send is loud and clear.
You are not good enough, change how you appear.
This is how the voice took root telling me to shrink, shrink, shrink.
Impossible to quiet it, louder than anything else I could think.
On and on, perpetual and incessant,
Giving daily motivational rants.
Well done, clever you,
Another pound gone, tomorrow let’s make it 2.
It was never enough, she was never satisfied.
Her sole focus was shrinking my thighs.
Determined to squash me until all my dreams were dead.
Replaced with her rules and demands instead.
My head full of numbers, scales and calories.
A total slave to this invisible disease.
Strangers congratulated me on how small I had become,
Like wasting away somehow meant I had won,
This twisted game set by the patriarchy.
To keep women ensnared with no chance of getting free.
What an ironic state of affairs,
That weight gain and recovery was met with judgmental stares.
I’ve let myself go apparently.
But I know that I have set myself free.
I underwent my own quiet revolution,
Realising all along I had held the solution.
Drawing my worth from inside of me,
Not allowing external forces to dictate who I should be.
In a society so concerned with looks and accumulating stuff.
It’s quite the rebellion to believe that you are enough.