Fat & Happy
I was in bed the other day, being worshiped by the man.
Not that he doesn’t do a consistently good job of that; I rarely feel less than beautiful in his eyes. But there was something about the way he attended me that day that brought me a personal observation about this body I am in. This body that has been causing me no small amount of consternation.
You may have heard me bitch about getting fat recently (LOL, right?). Its been a helluva hard ride, especially since I haven’t really done anything different than I have ever done. As a matter of fact, I may be eating more healthfully and thoughtfully than at any other point in my life. Yet, this doesn’t seem to be reflected in the shape and size of the body I wear. Despite all of my attention, I have moved from angles and planes to rolling hills and waves.
I am ferociously curvy these days.
But as he was kissing every last inch of my rolling hills, I came to observe that is isn’t only my body that has softened with age into waves. My personality and all that concept encompasses has also gone curvy. Once I was hard angles and firm planes in every way that a person could be. I had a hard body. But I also had a hard mind and a hard way of being.
I used to be tough. I had a manner of speaking that was flat and full of hard edges. It made for problems (go ahead and scroll through the archives, you’ll see me talking about it). I am still very honest and more than a little blunt, but I have softer edges. I don’t feel the need to pierce through peoples walls; I am not on a mission to educate. Now I go around, or under, or I just wait until the tide is right to enter. Somewhere over the course of time, I got soft.
So what if this is how it actually goes? What if the physical vessel is a living reflection of the current mode of being? As in, when I was hard and tough, my body was hard and tough. Now that I am softer and more easy, the body has gone soft and easy. And if you want to blow that out, what happens to the mental state if you try and alter the natural reflection of the physical body?
Sure, I really want to be liberated from the horror of shopping for clothes with this body. I want to stop looking in shopfront windows, or considering if the mirror I am approaching is a “fat” mirror or a “skinny” mirror. I want to never feel like I have to compare this body of hills and waves against a much younger version of fertile farmland. But in no way do I ever want to return to the way of being I experienced when I was uber fit and tight.
I was sad. I was quietly angry. I was in a type of control-freak denial about who I was and how I was being. I lived in constant competition and I never felt like I could settle down and just be. Gratefully, those days are gone and my mental state is completely the opposite. I’m still tough and I always will be. But I have nothing left to prove. I am happy. And in many ways, I have adopted a que sera attitude about many things that would have once put me over the edge. Life is so very good.
A hundred and fifty years ago, this body would have been considered the height of beauty. I am a gorgeous woman today, and yet I am still challenged by the modern, visual onslaught of women who don’t have this body. I’m fat. I’m well shaped, curvy and sexy as hell. But in comparison, I am fat. Yet I don’t think that I could even begin to get back to a culturally standard physical form of beauty. Like, even thinking about it makes me tired. My time is the most valuable thing I have and I am pretty confident that I don’t want to spend all of it fitting into a shoebox of beauty.
But now that I examine it, I think that I may have the absolute perfect body for who I am right now. And I don’t want to risk the possibility that the physical state creates the mental state. My mental state is great, why fuck with that in order to be Instagram beautiful. So, hey. That’s the message and the thought of the day. You, my friends, are in the body that reflects your current mode of being. And maybe, just maybe, trying to force the body into something that is a cultural mode instead of a personal mode could change your way of being and living. That could be a great thing—or it could be a hot fucking disaster.
Bottom line: Be you. Wear your skin because it is your skin. Love it, be nice to it, feed it all the good things and a few of the not good things. I’m learning that there may be a really good reason that they call it “fat and happy”.