PrettyThin

See what happens when you leave this page to me? I write gibbering about holidays.   :-)

What goes on the page is in your hands.

The PrettyThin Facebook page has 195 likes. Not too bad - it's been a month. These are people (I hope) who will be on board to help spread awareness around eating disorders throughout the month of December. We're simply pooling member creativity, experience, and stories to help increase opportunities of informing people about what eating disorders are all about.

The goal is to increase awareness around EDs. NOT to draw attention around this site or around your personal struggle with EDs. If you want to share more than "what you know from knowing someone who had it," then that is up to you.

Otherwise on the homepage during December we will ask you to offer up designs, images, concepts, slogans, ideas, whatever thing you can think of to help promote Awareness around Eating Disorders.

Some simple ways are to "Create a Ribbon" contest where people would create ribbons to place on your facebook profile for one day to get people to ask "what is that?" This and other ideas like it will allow at least one more person in this world to be aware that what society thinks of eating disorders is not what EDs are all about. And that it is not wrong to talk about it.

Some people don't care about any of this Awareness stuff, and that's fine too. PT will remain the same as a site, SO LONG AS we do not draw attention to ourselves. Please, if you are going to participate in ED Awareness Month, don't say "this site PT is doing this thing...." Just say "It's Eating Disorder Awareness Month." After that, you can even leave it at "I don't really know anything about EDs. I just know a friend who's family had problems with it so I'm just doing it to support her." If you can take it further and really get people to understand more, then great. But NO mentioning PT in all of this.

Um....discuss this in the forum? I'll be in for a few hours.

James

...and pst....click the P30 thing below....

COMPLAINT! - You gotta have em. Question is, should anything change?

Art Request - What should this banner be in December? Submit!

ED Awareness Month - December
Join the discussion within the forums about creating our own Eating Disorder Awareness month. Discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly, as well as the reasons for considering this at all.

Eating Disorder Awareness and Support on Facebook - the page has been up for a few weeks now, and we usually find out if it's here to stay after it gets 100 members. Let's hope Facebook actually looks at what we're all about before deleting us. Want to help out? *Like* the page and add a comment.

And yeah, we're going to the old format.

James

It's Wednesday, and tomorrow is   Thanksgiving in America.  A brief history: settlers in the new world were having a harvest festival, and much of what they had been able to cultivation this new and untested land was made possible by the help of the Indians. The settlers thanked the Indians for sharing their abundance and would invite them to join in celebration. The feast and festival of Fall known now as Thanksgiving has been celebrated now for centuries in America. It was originally held a week later, but the government they moved the day back one week, so that there would be more shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We don't talk about the Indians (or Native-Americans) much in America, and when we do we have a funny perspective. I know we later had wars with them, destroyed their population with disease, stole land from them, and eventually isolated them on reservations - where they have amazing casinos now! But it seems that many of them went to the other side of the world? Not sure - from what I remember there was a huge dispute with the British, and this guy names Gandhi helped kick the Brits out but then was shot by one of his own people. Such a tragedy, the history of the Indians.

Here we are, years and years later, trying to figure out how best we can portray that history. How do we celebrate the contributions the Indians made, helping the settlers survive the winter? How can we show how truly thankful the pilgrims were? Here are some wonderful examples over the past few decades.

I don't think any of these are very accurate, but together.....

So tomorrow is a feast. A celebration. And it is an unfortunate part of our society that when we consume we consume in abundance. We over consume. And in that we somehow find happiness. It's an escape, an indulgence, an escape.

We do it to be happy. We do many things to be happy. And sometimes we find ourselves doing and doing and doing, more and more and more, hoping that is we keep on pushing we will find the happiness we seek. And deep down we know that's not going to get us any closer to the happiness we seek. But it isn't happiness...

What really makes you happy? Are you a writer? Should you start carrying your camera everywhere like me? (it's a man purse, what!?) Do you like to interact with others and can use to that give back to your community? Do you like to paint? What do you like to do?

A person who doesn't know the things that make them truly happy is a person who has not yet found themselves. It's not about what others seek in you; it's not even what you "seek" in yourself. It's not about seeking or striving at all. It's about simply doing the things that make you truly happy.

Stay Beautiful, just as you are,
James

See what happens when you give me the homepage back? :-p

Help out with Eating Disorder Awareness by checking out the PT Facebook and by contributing to PT30. How will you deal with Thanksgiving and how it relates to your eating disorder...

Also: I did not intend to insult anyone with my deliberate false associations between those native to the current lands of the Americas or of India. I come from a mixed background and find cultural jokes to be funny. Apologies if you took any offense - none was intended.