Skip to main content

Bodies Are Amazing and I Kind of Love Mine: A Postscript

I know I promised a three-part series, but I just want to wrap up with these few final thoughts:
This is my niece. Because she's cute & we've had enough pictures of me recently.

1. If ever there is a time in life when it should be easy to love my body, it is now. Is all this love simply because I'm in good shape and have finally figured out how to work with curly hair? That is definitely a part of it. BUT. There are deep shifts in my thinking and in my heart that I think might (just maybe) last longer than my amateur-athletic career. As my wrinkles deepen and my fat deposits grow, I am hoping that these truths will have taken root enough to come along with whatever the future holds for this body.

2. You all have been so surprising and encouraging. Thank you for that. Honestly. I am terribly awkward at receiving compliments, and have blathered on (my new favourite term) on more than one occasion when I've felt embarrassed and vulnerable, realizing that I actually wrote things about how I view my body, and you really read them. But without a doubt, it has affirmed to me that these are conversations that need to happen, for my own sake, if not for all of us. Let's be real! Let's speak the truth and hear the truth and be encouraged, even when we're awkward.

3. There are a few other blog entries that I re-read as I wrote this series, and I wanted to share them because in my head, at least, they are related and relevant:
I have come to this realization/belief: there is a difference between loneliness and what I call "only-ness." Onlyness is the reality that only I experience my life, and that there will always be a level of my personhood that is inaccessible/viewed differently/misunderstood by others.

When I look forward a dozen years, I have hope that I will measure my beauty not by the softness of my belly or size of my pipes but by the increase in my laugh lines and the scars that will tell stories of giving and receiving love, of sacrifice and patience.

My friends have been victims. I have been a victim. It isn't okay. And it isn't okay to think that the conversation is simply about crimes against women. The conversation is huge; it's about what it means to be a woman, what it means to treat women as equals in all areas of life, and what cultural views of women need to be left behind once and for all.


4. For all of you who are new here, welcome! I can't promise that every entry will be as exciting as the last few, but I can tell you that there will be other entries, and some of them will be about big topics like this. Others will be about books I've read, or about school (yay, seminary!), or about the funny things my niece and nephews say. Most recently, my baby nephew saw a photo of me and started moo-ing like a cow. That's always flattering. Granted, I DID spend the majority of our last visit making farm animal noises.


My next post will be about music, because I haven't said much about music lately, and it is time for what has become an annual tradition...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Simone Weil: On "Forms of the Implicit Love of God"

Simone Weil time again! One of the essays in Waiting for God  is entitled "Forms of the Implicit Love of God." Her main argument is that before a soul has "direct contact" with God, there are three types of love that are implicitly  the love of God, though they seem to have a different explicit  object. That is, in loving X, you are really loving Y. (in this case, Y = God). As for the X of the equation, she lists: Love of neighbor  Love of the beauty of the world  Love of religious practices  and a special sidebar to Friendship “Each has the virtue of a sacrament,” she writes. Each of these loves is something to be respected, honoured, and understood both symbolically and concretely. On each page of this essay, I found myself underlining profound, challenging, and thought-provoking words. There's so much to consider that I've gone back several times, mulling it over and wondering how my life would look if I truly believed even half of these thi...
1 comment
Read more

I Like to Keep My Issues Drawn

It's Sunday night and I am multi-tasking. Paid some bills, catching up on free musical downloads from the past month, thinking about the mix-tape I need to make and planning my last assignment for writing class. Shortly, I will abandon the laptop to write my first draft by hand. But until then, I am thinking about music. This song played for me earlier this afternoon, as I attempted to nap. I woke up somewhere between 5 and 5:30 this morning, then lay in bed until 8 o'clock flipping sides and thinking about every part of my life that exists. It wasn't stressful, but it wasn't quite restful either...This past month, I have spent a lot of time rebuffing lies and refusing to believe that the inside of my heart and mind can never change. I feel like Florence + The Machine 's song "Shake it Out" captures many of these feelings & thoughts. (addendum: is the line "I like to keep my issues strong or drawn ?" Lyrics sites have it as "stro...
2 comments
Read more

Esse - Czeslaw Milosz

I'm on a bit of a poetry binge this week, and Monday afternoon found me lying on the luxurious shag rug of a friend's tiny apartment, re-reading some of my favourite poets (ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Czeslaw Milosz). It is an adventure to re-open a collection and wonder what will pop out, knowing something you've read before will strike you afresh, or you will be reminded of a particularly moving line that you had somehow forgotten. Like this piece from Milosz, which floors me. Every. damn.* time. The first time I read it, I lay in a park with a friend (this same friend who offered me her rug as my reading burrow) and demanded that I share it with her. I spoke it carefully, and then, into the post-reading silence, I slammed the book shut, and dropped it as loudly as I could onto the grass. "I'm never reading anything again," I declared, "What else is there to say?" Esse I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro st...
Post a Comment
Read more