Starving

StarvingJennifer Schmidt

Flash Fiction

Stop eating so much. No matter how much you will want to, you cannot afford to eat those cookies; you cannot eat those wings; you cannot eat that burger; you cannot eat that pretzel. You will see the food just sitting there and, after a long debate with yourself, you will end your cravings by scarfing them down. The rest of the day you will feel gross and fat. Then you will exercise and feel better about yourself, until you see that pizza on the counter. You will know you aren’t hungry, but it will look SO GOOD. As you bite into your third greasy slice, the regret will set in. You will wish you ate healthier and will try to reverse the effects that are already setting into your body from the pizza by eating an apple. You know it wont help. You still feel better, even if it is just for a second. You will go to bed that night telling yourself you will start your diet tomorrow. It will never happen. 

Artist Statement 

In my flash fiction I try to display my inner conflict with food and my body image. I feel as if I eat way too much and it is beginning to affect my body in a negative way. My writing is my present-self talking to my past-self and commanding her to change her eating habits. It connects to my self-portrait because I feel the picture encompasses my feeling toward food. I photoshopped unhealthy food clipart into the photo and kept it in color because that is the focus of my writing and I felt it was important to emphasis that. The food in the air as if I'm almost praising it, but the look on my face is so it seems as if I am upset or unsure of if I should be or not. This is my way to show my version of a love-hate relationship I feel I have with food. The rest of the picture is black and white because I wanted it to be dark and dull because that represents how I feel after eating too much food. After eating a lot of food I don’t feel like doing much, especially if it is anything beyond sitting on the couch in the biggest sweatshirt and pants I can find. I am sitting, slumped on the ground to represent the exhaustion that clouds above me from constantly worrying about eating healthy and maintaining a good body image.

Reflection 

Everyone has biases, yet most people don’t want to admit they do. Most often a person doesn’t even recognize their biases. Whether these prejudices are about little things such a favoring a certain brand of cereal over another, or if they are on a much larger scale like treating people different because of their race, they all affect a person’s thoughts and actions daily. It seems like bias and prejudice is shown more and more every day, especially by people we look up to and who have lots of influence on social media. Between elections and just everyday arguments, people are purposely showing more of their biases to cause the most harm to others. These biases are separating all different groups of people from race to gender to political parties. When that’s all that is seen on social media and the news it spreads like wildfire and it implant even more bias into not only adult’s brains, but kids who are growing up witnessing it too. They are caused by over advertisement of people exhibiting their extreme biases. Society is in a regression in terms of prejudice and it will not stop unless something is done about it.  

In a TED Talk about biases, Verna Meyers promotes the idea that people need to recognize their biases and overcome them. In her statement “I leaned on a bias that I didn’t even know I had," (Meyers) she admits that even she has biases that she wasn’t aware of. Throughout her speech, she talks about her biases towards black men and how she was surprised to find out she had them because her herself is an African-American woman. She also makes it a point to focus on uncovering these biases we have but are unaware of and trying to suppress these thoughts. Another example of hidden bias and it is clouding a person’s judgement is in “The Personality Myth” Invisibilia Podcast. This hour-long podcast mostly covers the topic of personality but since personality and bias are closely related, there are examples of bias as well. In the text Delia, who is the focus of the podcast, meets Dan, a prison inmate. She immediately and unconsciously relied on her prejudice to characterize and assume the worst about him. According to Delia, Dan’s personality didn’t match his appearance. When she first met him, she was hesitant but still thought of him as just another average man. After hearing about his crimes, she automatically changed her image of Dan she had in her head. When asked about it she even called described him as “permanently rotten.” Simply knowing about his crime made her lean on her biases and associate him with what she assumes criminals like him are like. He couldn’t be a good person because how what he had done in the past. Even though he wasn’t some wild animal, because Delia found out what he had done, she changed how she thought of him, and it was almost impossible for her to think any other way.  

In the past several weeks in this class I have discovered how biases are formed and how they not only affect, but are affected by, the environment. In this journey I also uncovered some of my own biases I wasn’t aware that I had. I learned, according to a test, I have a very slight bias based on how much people weigh, even though I personally don’t think I look at people differently because of weight (www.16personalities.com). By knowing this, I might know why I am so nervous about eating way too much and am able to change my thought process towards these people; it’s hard to change something you don’t know about. Watching, listening to, and reading texts, has opened my eyes to many different perspectives and even changed some of my own perspectives. In my opinion, people should  be exposed to such a range of other perspectives so they  will eventually overcome their prejudice overtime. Now I am aware that every day I am changing my biases based on what I see in my environment and every day I take in the information around me and alter it to fit my own beliefs. Others need to do the same. We as a society need to realize our biases and overcome them. By informing and helping others understand their own preconceptions people can help others to form a better society. In the end, there is no way to completely get rid of them, but we can try to suppress our biases and learn from them.