Lately, I’ve been full of introspection – more so than usual.
As I manage to do from time to time (as The World’s Worst Buddhist,) I’ve been paying more attention to His Holiness the Dalai Lama when he pops into my periphery. He epitomizes so much I want to be in my life, yet short of which I soft often fall.
In a nutshell, His Holiness’ function in this world is to spread lovingkindness and compassion, and to love all beings. No judgment, no resentment.
I’ve seen him speak twice in person, and it is a profound experience. It was the site of the most powerful spiritual insight I’ve had, but even apart from that, sitting and listening to him speak, just being in his presence, was… it was calming, uplifting, soothing, enlightening. It made me strongly consider leaving a secular life and becoming a Buddhist nun.
Needless to say, that didn’t happen.
Still, when I am able to gather my senses briefly and go back to that almost magical space/time of being in his presence, it calms me. It provides much more fertile mental ground for introspection and self-analysis. I surely cannot call it meditation, per se, because it lacks any kind of disciplined focus. It does, though, sometimes provide good insights – some of which are basic enough to be forehead-smackers, like “how could I have been so stupid this whole time?”
Such as the following:
I spend a fair amount of mental time in the past – reliving moments, conversations, embarrassments, shame, happiness, love, excitement. I think many of us do. What I tend to do, however, is to place attachments and values on those moments, sometimes even subconsciously reorganizing present life to try to regain or relive some of those past moments – which are, naturally, gone. Sometimes, I foolishly try to reorganize present life to avoid the moments of the past – those moments that are long gone, but still affect me in some way. There is, of course, no avoiding them – they happened. But allowing them to dictate my present is just silly.
The majority of my emotional baggage comes from my mother, from when I was about 8 until well after I was in college. She relentlessly heaped her judgment upon me, mixed in with a lot of love and praise, mind you, but oh, the judgment, and even more, the disappointment. I live in that disappointment, I see my mother’s disapproval everywhere.
For fuck’s sake, people, I am nearly 40 years old. That’s got to stop!
Do daughters carry Mommy Issues around with them for their whole lives? Oh, probably. But I think I can probably shed some of this extraneous bullshit about what I should or should not be/do/look like. I don’t conform to what other people think I should be doing in most regards – I have usually gone and done My Own Thing, regardless of stereotypes, general societal norms, et cetera. But the past harsh words and judgments from my mother? Those still haunt me many times per day. It turns me into a more negative and judgmental person, myself.
NOTE TO ME: My school years are gone – long gone. While what happened during those times surely is a large part of who I am, I am free to be different, to become whatever else I want to be. Those years were practice for The Big Show, The Real Deal – this is the life part of Life. This is where I can make things happen.
Why, then, do I let myself be carried along by the river?
There are surely times when I feel more myself than I usually do, and those are happy times. The rest of the time, I am burdened by feelings of inadequacy, ineptness, of not living up to what other people expect of me, of disappointing. I care far too much about disappointing people, and I am frequently in awe of people who seem not to live in fear of it or who can outright brush it off and carry on unfazed.
To me, that is nothing short of AMAZING.
Reading this over, it all seems so “duh, Erin; it took you twenty years as an adult to realize this? Seriously?” and “how come you can fly in the face of what’s expected some of the time, but be so traditional and cowed by other things?”
I don’t know
I’m trying to figure it out.
When I practice mindfulness, I feel a pull internally and externally. It is only present when I am being mindful. It remind me of when I was a little girl, taking ballet lessons. The dance instructor told us all to visualize a string going through our bodies, from deep in the ground way up past our heads, running through our spines. With that vision in mind, it was easy to maintain good posture – but when it slipped, I slouched a little.
Our bodies, my body, respond so well to a little mental discipline – why is it so hard for some of us to exercise it?
With this realization have come many others, including “why do I continue emotionally raging at my body?” It is the shape it is likely to be, without a great deal of variation, for the remainder of my years. For me, being thin means hard work; I have to work out a lot, deny myself all manner of foods, be hungry most of the time and focus a lot of energy on the task of staying fit. Well, guess what: I don’t have that kind of time or energy anymore. Sure, I covet the slender women around me with their defined waists and their overall non-lumpy appearances, but that is not me. Not anymore.
“But Erin, it’s just a matter of eating right and getting some exercise!” No, no it’s not. If I ate well and got some exercise daily, yes – I would lose some weight. I would go back to my normal self, probably, of forty pounds ago, at which point I am still not thin. Don’t get me wrong – that’s a great cause, losing those forty pounds – I hope I can get there at some point when I’m not battling food allergies and sundry other issues. But until I have a bit more motivation, a bit less frustration, a bit more energy, this is who I am.
Even if I were at the same weight, but slightly more hourglass-shaped, I’d have an easier time with the whole thing. BUT I’M NOT.
I need to accept this person, this body.
I am a gluten-intolerant size 18 vegetarian.
Being pissed off about being fat (but not motivated enough to do anything about it) and raging at having a food allergy (over which I have absolutely no control, this is the rest of my life) is just wasting precious time and emotional energy.
This is me.
It’s me with all the stretch marks, rolls and lumps and non-standard shapes.
There is enough in my life that is about denying myself – looking just at food, meat was hard enough, now all the yummy gluten-having things – I’ve spent the last seven years denying feeling good about myself, feeling pretty or attractive, because I am fat. And now, fat and … older.
Heading into my forties, it’s finally occurred to me that it is a somewhat futile battle. I don’t have the willpower to stay fit – fine. Accept it and move on. I need to not buy into the market and feel guilty and sub-standard all the time because I won’t go to the gym, I hate running and I love eating delicious food. There are sacrifices that will accompany those things with my metabolism. So be it.
I have spent a lot of time trying to hide my shape. Baggy clothes sometimes hide the rolls but exacerbate the appears of hugeness. Tight clothes emphasize the rolls but give a more adequate impression. Lately, I’ve just been buying Comfortable Clothes, irrespective of visible fat.
Maybe someday, the pounds will drop slightly as I balance aspects of myself out – maybe they won’t.
I need to learn not to feel like shit about myself based on how much I weigh.
The Other Erin at work inspires me in this regard. She’s not petite, either, but she pretty vocally doesn’t buy into the media hype surrounding size. If I had to guess, I’d say she doesn’t obsess about her weight or how her clothes make her look. She seems to care more about whether or not they’re comfortable, and whether or not she likes them. She’s one of those people confident enough in herself she doesn’t fret about the same size-/shape-oriented bullshit I do. I’m sure she frets over some kind of bullshit needlessly, because we all do, but in this area, Erin has herself sorted out – or so I would guess. I admire her.
I need more of that, less of my mother’s constant harping and nagging about how [insert piece of clothing here] makes me look [chubby/trashy/unstylish/whatever.] Hearing that throughout my formative years (when I weighed a whopping 110 pounds at 5’6″ tall) put the hurt on my ego in a huge way. But dammit, I am an adult now, I get to play by my own emotional rules… at least I can, once I figure out what those might be.
Look how many sentences start with “I’ here, huh? Self-obsessed? Perhaps, but starting now, I’m going to try to be less negatively self-obsessed. I don’t expect a switch to get thrown, but my internal barometer is beginning to rise.
Our culture isn’t helping any – the few fat women on television and in films are generally relegated to the “happy, friendly friend wearing conservative clothes and not even thinking about sex,” or “matronly mother of three, happily married to equally-chubby-or-chubbier-man to whom Size Does Not Matter.” How many smokin’ hot overweight women do we see out there in a positive light?
NOT MANY.
But they exist. Oh yes, yes they do. Watch this. Marginally unsafe for work.
This ad was censored by the ABC and Fox Networks, both of whom do air Victoria’s Secret ads that leave even less to the imagination. What’s the take-home message for the curvy woman from their actions? Yeah.
Now granted, that woman out-hots me in every conceivable way, and isn’t as overweight as I am – but her message is clear.
Still, it’s hard. So are a lot of other things for a lot of other people. They suck it up and sally forth, and so shall I.
Getting all the vestiges of this off of me, however, is like trying to get gum out of my hair. Or spiderwebs off my face. Or extricate myself from quicksand. Indeed, the analogies are endless.
For you other “plus-size” women out there – how have you overcome all the brainwashing? Or, if you haven’t, how do you cope?
I’m looking everywhere for inspiration, and I’m finding some good stuff. I’ll share next time.
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First, please accept my apologies for the months of blog neglect.
I hope the following story will help make up for it.
The company I work for is filled with brilliant, clever, amazing, witty and extremely funny people. The banter in our Jabber conversations usually has me laughing out loud throughout the day, and it makes things much more pleasant to be surrounded by awesomeness.
In my new(ish) position on the monitoring team, I’m fairly well isolated in Data Center 1. There are only three of us there during the day, and things are usually pretty quiet. Sundays, however, I work in our brand stinkin’ new Data Center 3, a 90,000-square-foot horking huge building housing a bunch more people – except on Sundays, when there are usually only three or four of us spread out across the space. I like my solitude, though; I’m an only child. Quiet is good.
At 3pm yesterday, MattAdor, a senior monitoring technician, arrived to train a newbie, thusly ending my isolation.
But I like MattAdor.
As a plus, he ended my isolation with a flourish, however, first having a car that wouldn’t shut off properly, and second by regaling both the noob and me with a short, hilarious story.
“Hey Erin. Did you ever hear about the server with the very high levels of [excised]?”
“Lol, no?”
“Ok, so get this. Back when I was still in support, we got a ticket that started out, ‘I’m having problems with my [effing] server.’ The tech who had the ticket asked him what was up, and the customer finally responded that his server had ‘very high levels of Claude.’”
I completely lost it at that point, bashing my head on the desk as I doubled in two, laughing and snorting out loud uncontrollably.
Finally, I choked out, “…Claude?”
“Seriously. How do you even check for high levels of Claude? So the tech creates the file /etc/vandamme and puts ‘Claude=1′ in there to make sure the Claude level stayed low.”
I can’t remember what else he said, and it’s lost a bit in the telling because I was so busy laughing, I’ve forgotten the finer details.
I’m sorry if no one here finds that hysterical. It’s still making me giggle right now.
Our customers really come up with priceless gems from time to time, from the guy who accused the company of “trying to Detroit his biz” to the guy who managed to get a translation website to throw in the word “watusi” completely out of context.
That’s all for now – I hope you are all well.
Homestead Geek gets updated a bit here and there, if you’re interested in what else has been going on (Chickens! Kombucha!)
I haven’t responded to anyone’s comments in a good month, at least. I’m sorry, that’s just terrible form. Haven’t been reading my Google Reader in a week, either, so I’ve not kept up with anyone else.
Truth is, I’m just exhausted most of the time. It’s this big, long, meeehhhhh punctuated by infrequent bursts of energy and enthusiasm. It’s hard to find the energy to do much of anything.
To those of you who’ve taken the time to leave comments but haven’t received a response – I’m so sorry for being impolite. I will get this taken care of soon.
Next week, I should be moving into a new job at work that will be less stressful – I think. I’m moving to the monitoring team, whose job it is to make sure all servers are up and running, and if they are not, fix them. There will be stress, but it will be of a short-term/burst nature, more of an OMG FIX THIS URGENT ISSUE NOW, as opposed to the oozing, long-term, emotionally draining full-on support I’ve been doing.
I’m a bit sad to be leaving the Enterprise team and my favorite customers, especially since we now have our very own supervisor looking after us – things will assuredly improve. However, I’ve done many years of computer support, two of them at my current place of employ, and I am Le Burned Out. Knowing there’s a light at the end of this particular tunnel makes my days much more bearable.
I hope once my insides purge the toxins and recalibrate, and once I get into the swing of the new job, things will take a turn for the better. Plus, spring is coming! I have to find the energy to get all this Outside Stuff done, right?
In the meantime, I made this for dessert tonight (recipe pointed out by Barbara) and it was quite good:
Tomorrow, I’m hauling wooden pallets, perhaps buying lumber, clearing out space in the garage for the chick enclosure, and possibly building the enclosure itself. Also, I might make these: French chocolate/raspberry macaroons. For some reason, I’d always thought macaroons were those odd little coconut cookies, and I wasn’t ever wild about them. With The Giant Macaroon Craze sweeping the world right now, I figured I’d better at least Google a recipe to make sure what I’m actually missing is what I think I’m missing. Well, it’s not. And they’re even gluten-free. And I have almond flour. Score!
Of course, I have that tart to dispose of first… but I bet I could pawn some off, somewhere.
