From One Fat Chick to Another: An Open Letter (whatever the hell that means...)

Dear Ladies (and the occasional wandering eyes of gentlemen),

Once upon a time there was a little baby girl, and for some reason or another she grew and Grew and GREW into an enormous, unhealthy woman.

She blamed her state on everyone else:
Even though no one was force-feeding her like a goose.
Even though she was perfectly capable of lifting whatever five pound object was in her home (a large jar from a failed DIY project, one of her many cats).
Or put on a pair of shoes and walk outside at a brisk pace.
With slim exceptions, such as the bleak hours of the night where one secretly admits to the Sandman their folly- her unhealthy state was, unequivocally not her responsibility or fault.
She blamed all men for not seeing her inner beauty.
At times, people were mean to her about her weight, so clearly she had the right to be mean to others, considering she was the victim and all...

For hours she'd stare zombily at social media sites.
She posted quotes by amazing people, as if to live vicariously through their minds (although most were dead, so it was more retroactive...) but never acted on anything that inspired her.
She ogled pictures of faraway places and beautiful cultures, but decided the mountains looked too steep for her, the oceans too deep.
Her favorite thing she COULD do, however, was mock ugly pictures of celebs.
Or wait sneakily, like the villainous cat from 'The Great Mouse Detective', for someone to post something, anything to sink her teeth into.
With a whole list of retorts she'd been holding back since middle school (because kids are judgey assholes at that age) finely crafted through the years- she was a warrior of the comment section!
The touch pad her sword and the 'delete' button her shield.
Titles like:
"Blah blah FAT SHAMING blah blah"
and 
"REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES!"
and
"Insert Generic Comment Here About How Every Womyn's A Goddess And Men Are Pigs."
and
"Health Tip Only Meant For Already Healthy People But The Blogger Is Trying To Raise Their Viewership, So They Make It Seem Anyone Can Do It!"

To these, the woman would tear vehemently at the article and posters, with the ferocity she'd show a German Chocolate Cupcake with a truffle in the middle.
She cheered and shouted out, and wrote how true it was her curves were that of a woman- men SHOULD love her the way she was!
With puffed chest, she'd look down upon the kingdom of her feline masses like the Goddess she was meant to be.
She'd repost the health tips, as if everyone but her should be doing them, because, after all, they'd never have known it without her.

She'd tear down the people she longed to be like and raise up those that were just like her. 

There were times she'd watch a woman or girl she considered much fatter than herself walk by, hand in hand with a universally hot guy.
Sometimes it was a hot woman with a balding, pork-bellied man.
She wondered how it was possible (and not in a good, self-respective way).

At some point she may have found love.
Maybe they were both just settling because neither wanted to 'die alone'.
He may have accepted her weight, maybe not.
In those bleak, Sandman hours maybe both wished they were lying next to their ideal instead.  
Maybe he was just like her and content to talk about all the things he'd like to do as he binge-watched Netflix with her for the rest of their lives. 
She may even have had kids; fat chubby bastards, just like their parents- after all, monkey see monkey do.

What I do know is that she was always tired.
Her skin was always oily.
Her hair greasy despite all the fancy shampoos at Sephora.
In her thirties, without any sort of disaster or infortuitous circumstance, her body began to ache at the joints.
First her knees.
Then her hips.
Next to rebel were her arches.
She began to have 'pains', like her nerves twitching in odd places.
Paranoia set in about heart attacks just in time to get diabetes.
The electronic chair helped her get around, despite everyone always being in her way.
She wasn't very kind at this point either.
The world owed her.
She watched from her chair as women twenty years her senior still laughed and moved around, unhindered.
She died eventually, like we all do.


And that was her life.
She never went on an adventure because she knew she couldn't make it up the mountain or across the river.
Certainly not without help.
Certainly not without embarrassing herself and having to admit she couldn't make it.
Admitting it out loud.
And she never found the person she felt she deserved, unlike that bitch, Savannah down the street, still outside everyday doing yard work. 


My morals of the story are these ladies:

-Weight has nothing to do with health.
-Our health is the only true thing we have control of in this world.
--Thus: Your health is your responsibility. No one else's. Only yours.

-Healthy people want to spend their time with other people who care about their health.
--It's not that our personalities are necessarily lacking, but we can't blame others for finding value in one's body when we aren't showing we do as well.
---Healthy doesn't mean a size '0' or being able to run a triathlon while skipping: it's being able to physically do all those things you want to do, and only stopped by physics, genetics and anatomy. 

-Choosing to spend the amount of time ALL of us do on Social Media and Netflix, letting those hours slip by unnoticed, is a fault.
--If you have the time to spend doing all that, you can equally chose to improve your health with that time.

-A "Real Woman" has two X chromosomes. And then there are those that want to have two X chromosomes and guess what? They can be real women too. The more the merrier! So knock the rest of that crap off.

-Being happy with one's self isn't usually followed with verbal hostilities about someone else.
--Shrinks call it 'masking' or 'projecting'. Recognize yourself.

And most importantly:
I want you all (myself included) to live an amazing, healthy and happy life filled with all the potential you could possibly achieve.
So please, let's all drop the ego, the act, and the excuses and get our own asses out there.
That's my New Years wish at least... 


Sincerely,
Dust in the Wind

A Commentary on Value, Because of Chicken

'Worth' and 'value' is a curious thing.

We grade ourselves against society. Friends. Enemies. Family. Our own ideals of self.
All by a sliding, fictional scale. And instead of helping us grow, it seems to reflect an ugly image back of everything we are not, everything we lack and are convinced we'll never be. Slowly chipping away at our sense of self.
I would take the leap in saying many good feelings leap away with it.

Story time! Settle in kiddies.
When I was in 6th or 7th grade, among dozens of assemblies for awareness about home abuse, bullying and sexual harassment/assault, there was a man who, ever so candidly, referred to 'victims' of sexual assault as,
“Second Hand Virgins”...
No matter how you spin this term, or your Maklemore'ick infatuation with thrift stores, there's no good connotation here. The implication is a person thus violated is no longer 'new'. Deemed worthless, it is rejected. Put on a shelf at a bargain price. Shuffled through strange hands, left waiting. Unwanted. To gather dust among the nick-knacks, or be snatched up as a 'deal' or DIY project.
This term devalues people.
Almost to a sub-human level.
Much like 'victim' and 'survivor' unconsciously do.
And it made me very angry.
But the damage of these three, incredibly careless words was done... And without my permission, I might add, which is very rude.

Now, let me be candid here; don't get your nickers twisted. I'm 'sharing' bits about myself to lend to a larger observation I had today which I (for some reason) needed to share. That's all. So cool your jets, some of you.
I'll tie this in later.

I'll start with the 'Oh!/Huh...' moment, I had while on my 480th pound of frying mochiko chicken earlier and that is this:
I/you/we are valueless.

There's no scientific scale that spits out a number- rating who we are, at all times, during this experience.
But the concept of trying to estimate our abstract worth is so ingrained that it leads to some very serious consequences.

Our skills have worth to an employer who can apply them and THAT is tabulatable, but on the flip side, a doctor has no use for a mechanic if he needs an RN. That doesn't mean the mechanic is any less skilled.

No one (thank hades) knows what is going through our heads every moment. Or how quickly our opinions and judgments change...
I think it'd look like a school of sardines, swirling refractivly and almost chaotically together in the dark blue and open ocean.
With this constant flow, growth and contraction of character and ideals, a set value is not only inconsequential, but meaningless.

So a guy at a bar thinks a lass is homely and droll but suddenly she's great because... let's say... she bought him a beer... You judge him to be shallow, or her to be trying too hard- but that's a moment, not a whole.
He's a person and, who he IS, isn't that judgment. Just as her single action of buying beer, for whatever the motivation, doesn't change who she is.

With that logic in mind (if you could follow it), here is why I think our instinctual need to place value on ourselves is not a good, or accurate way of thinking.

We aim too high and we fall too low.

The full-grown woman who flounces around arrogantly, stating she deserves to be treated like a princess or the man demanding to be treated as a king; outwardly, they value themselves above the rest but in their heads, to reach such an extreme as to ignore societal etiquettes such as 'modesty', can't one argue that they must actually value themselves very low? That there is a part of them that is clearly not being fulfilled and is instead reaching for a concept that is not in this reality?

Soldiers, who go for country (and college tuition) to fight with bravado, don't always come back proud. Decent and hard working men call themselves murderer instead of hero; thinking less of themselves because they've taken a life(s). As, at least, one society will agree (whomever was fought), it only solidifies a low self worth. It's such heavy tally-mark to add against oneself.

'Worth' is where we lose ourselves.
If depression had a root, I'd call this a catalyst.
See, unbeknownst to me, my worth became 'second-hand' and from this, I treated every relationship with a underlying desperation (this was today's 'Oh' moment, brought to you by Chicken!).
Try to be amicable to everyone...
Don't share my conflicting thoughts...
Try to diversify myself so that no one gets bored of me...
Modify how I behave to who I'm with...
Don't give them a reason to throw me away.
And, at first, it was fucking exhausting!
Then it became who I was.
But it wasn't a real.
Checks and balances are great for politics, but shit for mental development.
Until I became a cook.
People don't understand what that meant to me. As my skills grew in the kitchen and I became part of the line instead of a hindrance, I stopped worrying about my worth, I did my job and well; I was judged by my peers on that alone. I started to take pride in myself and what emerged from that pride was who I always wanted to be.
A person.
Not a 'victim'.
Not a 'survivor'.
Those are labels for something that happened to you, or something you've come through; society sticks you with them, badge-like. Like wearing a suit of avocado green shag carpeting.
But they aren't all we are, as much as people insist on it. Like the soldier who kills so as not to be killed. It's just a thing that happened. And hopefully, eventually, it helps us grow.
Stronger. Wiser. Calmer.
One careless maneuver from an old man later and I had five months in a confined apartment to feel the dullness that was the loss of who I'd become...
I really had liked her.
Then there was seething and bitter anger, then dullness again. Then elevator music... maybe some sonnets...

My worth was intrinsically tied to my career. And I was told I would probably need to find a new one because my stupid knee was being stupid and may be stupid for the rest of my life (Medical terminology, I swear!). I was back to being less.
Even the guy who stumbled upon the mess of a person I was sloping back into, was swallowed up by my fears of lacking. Secretly hoping, as I used too in days o' yore, that he would place a value on me that was high enough and thus accept me, whom had not accepted herself.
It's foolish, really.
And super unfair of me.
Between being mad at him for taking the 'out' I gave born from insecurity, while wishing he hadn't, and moping over the rejection like a Shakespearean writ pup, the hole in my chest got wider.
With everything else compiling, I began to feel numb.
If I wasn't numb, then I was highly irritable. About. EVERYTHING.
Depression sucks like that.
I could tell I was off kilter, my calm slipping away. I'd rear my head like a startled horse every now and then, shocked at the heinousness of my attitude. If I thought on it really hard, hearkening on a truth that no one deserved to bear my poor behavior, I could pull myself out, at least until I was alone again.
Sleep, an old nemesis of mine, stopped visiting. Which is rude because I'd bought some lovely teas to share. I was more weary than I had been, doing three back to back shifts between two jobs. An overwhelming thought became, “I just want to rest.”

All this pirouetting of emotional debauchery stemmed, not simply from situations. I'd dealt with worse and been fine.
Took my licks, my lessons and moved on. It came because, without using anything as cover or mask, I'd never placed a high value on who I was.
And that very concept of plus and minus is what kept me down.

I think everyone needs to jump into the rabbit hole eventually. Evaluating oneself, rolling over events; reactions to events.
It's okay to feel disappointed in people close to you.
It's okay to get upset or be angry.
As long as it's felt and you keep thinking on it, pushing through to all sides of the argument... Well, it helps.
Rabbit holes, like our lives, aren't endless. Even in our own, endemic experiences, we haven't individually existed for 1,000 years. Hell, most of us won't make it to 100. So we can see through all, to the depths of our issues. Like that hole, we can all come back up to face the sun.

So there I was, frying (you guessed it!) chicken! Yay chicken! Ihateyouchicken.
The memory of that man flashed in my head. I thought, with the horse head raise of bewilderment:
'Wait a minute. Have I been living my life by that assholes words?'
...I think we all know the answer to that.
Then I came to think about everything I've written down now. And my conclusion is this:
We are valueless because we are limitless.
That's a good thing.
It means we can go in any direction we chose.
It's scary, but I've never felt so free.




Now if you'll excuse me, I need a shower. I reek of the fryer.