No one can define you but you unless you choose otherwise

I had no intention of writing about Jennifer Livingston’s amazing display of awesome, after some concern troll sent her a letter informing of her of the obvious…yeah she’s a big girl. If you haven’t seen the video and have no idea of who Jennifer is, you have to watch this video. Seriously, she gave it back to this asshat. On top of that, Liz over at Six Year Itch also wrote an amazing post inspired by Jennifer, so really I didn’t think the world needed my two cents.

Until I saw this tweet that someone tweeted me in response to one of my tweets. “Our weight defines who we are.” I admit seeing that tweet, made me sit up and take notice and well here I am. I have made no secret of the fact that since my late 20’s, I have been riding the weight gain roller coaster. I go up and I go down, I have had some medical issues in recent years that knocked me off my comfortably thin perch and at times have brought me lower than a snake’s belly.

We live in a culture that for women puts a high premium on being thin, so much so that more women than not seem to wrap their self-esteem and value as humans up into numbers, either the numbers on the scale or the numbers on the tags of their clothes. Unlike money where higher numbers are better, for weight, we want smaller numbers, the smaller the better and if for some reason the numbers aren’t small, we seem to take it as a sign of human failure. So we live life at half capacity, limiting ourselves because we don’t think we are worthy enough. All because we don’t have the right numbers.

Granted there are growing numbers of women, who are learning to love themselves and accept their bodies and their lives regardless of their numbers. Sadly though their numbers are still small and it’s still an uphill battle since accepting one’s body and its imperfections is often harder said than done when thin is queen and is everywhere we go.

The funny thing is men while they have their own issues, rarely seem as fixated on numbers as women. I was thinking this morning about men that I know who have accepted their imperfections including the middle aged guy paunch that often occurs and the level of sexy that many of these guys still display. While I accept that men and women are vastly different, this is one time I think that maybe women should take a tip from the men.

Look those numbers mean not a damn thing unless you choose to give them value, you wear a size 16? Great, why does it matter? Things only matter and have value if we choose to let them have value otherwise they are just things or again in this case numbers. If you are a wonderfully talented whatever, let that define you. The person who wakes up in the quiet of the morning and feels the stillness of the day and takes it all in is who you are and it’s who I am, not a fucking number.

I have been on a quest to be fabulously fit by 40, so far it’s going slow and my birthday will be here in January. While there is a good chance I may lose the pounds I want to lose, the fact is maybe I won’t. However my body is far more flexible than it ever was, I can do difficult poses in yoga that 2 years ago I could only dream about. My “numbers” that count like blood pressure are good and I am looking at food with new eyes. Nothing is bad, double chocolate cake is only cake until I decide otherwise and a few nights ago, I decided it was what my body wanted and it was good.

I know some of my regular readers probably get a little tired of me talking about getting older, but one of the reasons I talk about it quite often is that there are real gifts that come from spending more time on this planet. One being that at certain point, the realization that your time here is limited, after all even if you die at 90; it still means you will die. So you realize that eventually you get tired of others defining who and what you should be and if Sophia Wisdom decides to rain down on you, you realize that you are in control of your life, therefore the only person who can define you is you. In the end we are souls and spirits housed in bodies that eventually fade and that everything else is simply window dressing.

 

 

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