Weighty Matters

There’s long been a myth that fat people are jolly.  You see happy obese people in books, movies, television shows.  It’s almost a stereotype.  However, logical, reasonable people realize that being overweight does not create an abundance of happiness.  I’m not saying that all of us who are or were overweight are miserable all of the time, but we’re not Ho, Ho, Hoing all over the place a disproportionate amount of our lives.

We’re happy sometimes.  We’re sad sometimes.  We can be jolly and upbeat and the opposites also hold true.

Just like with other people.

Now, there are no doubt many overweight people who put on the show of being smiley, happy, full of joie de vivre and perennially upbeat, regardless of whether we’re actually feeling those things.  I spent years going out of my way to do whatever I could so that people would like me.  I was convinced I had to work harder at this.  I had to put out this shining, everything’s great, whatever you want I’ll go along with it demeanor.  That’s how positive I was that being fat literally and figuratively outweighed my perfectly fine, loveable qualities.  Yes, that was all the bloom of that stinkwood known as lousy self-esteem.

To the friends who knew me and stuck with me in those years, loving me for me no matter what, you have my love and my gratitude.  I wish I’d understood myself better and been able to accept myself the way that you always did and continue to do today.

This is not the real root of this post.  It’s just something that came to mind while I was processing some other emotional stuff that’s been going on for me this week so I thought I’d put it out there.  I don’t actually have a conclusion or anything wise to say about the fat and jolly myth, but it’s better that I put the bleckidy blurk blurk out in the post than keep it inside.

Anyway, the last two days have been fairly crappy for me emotionally.  I even had a mini-meltdown about it yesterday.  In retrospect, I can laugh.  When some people have meltdowns, it’s like emotional lava spewing up and then running down the sides, destroying everything in its path.  When I was much younger, if I’d stuffed anger for too long and then something triggered the eruption, it was ugly.  When I finally expressed that I was really, really mad, everybody around me knew it.  Hell, everyone in a three block radius probably heard it.

Now, with, *cough* maturity, I’m much more contained.  This is not the same as repressed.  It’s just that I don’t keep a lid on things until the steam pressure builds and explodes.  I’ll vent appropriately to a friend.  If the situation has reached the point where I feel overwhelmed or overcome, I shut the door and have a nice, private cry.

So, it’s been that kind of two days.  While the emotional stew has bubbled I have, naturally, wanted to eat everything in sight.  I’ve been good about resisting the food urges for the most part.

I’m glad it’s the weekend.  I’m really glad that I have an evening where I can take my tea and my dogs out onto my porch and just chill out.  I’m also going to be honest with myself and say that, overall, I’m grumpy as all get out.  Seriously irritable and prickly, and it’s obvious.   I went to get a polish change on my nails.  While the polish dried, I was enjoying some relaxation in the massaging pedicure chair, just sort of zoning.  Someone in the salon walked over and just sort of proclaimed, “Wow, you look tired, Mary.”

I really hate when someone says that to me.  Nice Mary would have given her a small smile and a polite, “It’s been a long week” response.  Tonight, I instead gave her a somewhat, “I can’t believe you said that” look and a moderately sarcastic, “Gee, thanks.”

A few moments later when I was leaving, a perfectly nice woman who just saw me a few days ago said, again loudly despite the fact that there were many customers in the salon, “You’ve lost even more weight, Mary!”   Well, the truth is that I haven’t since she saw me a few days ago.  I could, and probably should, have let the comment lie with only a polite, “Thank you”.  But instead I said, “No, not really.”  At least when the other woman then said, “Oh, but you look wonderful anyway”, I was able to find a scrap of my normal graciousness and thank her for the compliment.

I thought about this and the last couple of days while I ran into the supermarket, when I got home, as I ate and tried to figure out what is bothering me the most.

Then I read Jenny Crusie’s Good Wolf Lunch post on Reinventing Fabulous.  I realized that my Bad Wolf is telling me that I was a bitch and haven’t been playing nice with others.  The Bad Wolf wants me to think I’m wrong for being pissed off about some stuff that happened this week because, after all, fat people aren’t supposed to be pissy.  We’re supposed to always be jolly.  The Bad Wolf says, “You know better.  Suck it up.”

The Good Wolf says, “Nobody on the planet is required to be in a good mood all of the time. ”  The Good Wolf reminds me that I’m perfectly allowed to be cranky sometimes and to respond with authenticity even if authentic at that moment does not mean sunshine and roses.

So, tonight I give myself permission to just be however I want, to feel my feelings whether negative or positive, and to not feel badly about myself for any reason.  That’s how tonight I will live in reality instead of myth.

I don’t guide my life by my astrology charts, but I have to admit that I think there is some strange cosmic validity to Mercury in retrograde and the way that things get messed up during those times of the year.  I think of it as planetary Murphy’s Law.  Communications, paperwork and stuff that should just be simple to accomplish all go screwy.

A week ago on Friday, my iPhone blinked and when it returned, my phone contacts had vanished.  I didn’t have my main laptop with me on my weekend jaunt to Miami so I had to wait until I returned home on Sunday in order to resynch my phone.  Even then, because I am truly bad about remembering to back up my phone, I lost any numbers that I’d added since last June.

My brother recommended that I activate “The Cloud” to make a backup accessible from wherever.  I truly meant to do that last week but I was formidably busy both at work and in the evenings.  I thought I’d be fine and went about getting in touch with some colleagues and asking them to resend their phone numbers to I could replace the numbers that were still missing.  In the meantime, the wind blew up around the Keys and, for reasons I am yet to figure out, that messed up my home Internet service.  I couldn’t stay online for more than a few minutes at a time before the service would go out, reset, come back, go out, resent, come back, lather, rinse and repeat.

The long and short of this tale of woe is that yesterday, at almost the exact time as the previous week, when one factors in that we leapt forward an hour, my phone blinked again and my contacts once more disappeared.  I called AT&T and then spoke with Apple.  The only thing Apple could suggest was that I restore my phone as if new.

Last night was a long, drawn-out affair of  resynching, then uploading to the Cloud (three hours!), then restoring the phone which also involved upgrading to the latest operating system and then synching back my contacts, apps, calendar, etc. etc. etc, blah, blah blah.

I persevered and everything appears to be fine.  Let’s see if it remains so after 9:00 a.m. eastern time next Friday.

So what does all of this complaining have to do with my weighty matters?  I had a really good food week last week with a steady weight loss, as you know.  Then, beginning last night and continuing through to today I’ve had a consistent urge to snack.  I also wanted more carbs and chocolate.

I do not think this is coincidental.  It just goes to show that no matter how far I come and how much success I achieve in this journey, I still need to battle compulsive eating.   As important is that I need to battle the things that trip my trigger.  Stress is one of those trip wires.

When I think about it, it’s honestly ridiculous to let phone and communication challenges throw me off track.  I’ve definitely been offline.  Time to reboot, restore and resynch myself.

I’m not going to punish myself with stinking thinking, castigating myself for being human and fallible.  I went to the supermarket tonight and bought “healthy” goods that are on my good plan.  I’m already planning out the next few days of meals.  Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day.  I’m not planning to indulge in wild partying, although I am going to a local St. Patrick’s Day Parade.  Actually, I’m walking in it.  I’m on the Board of Directors for the organization that runs the local animal shelter.  The executive director asked a few days ago for volunteers who were willing to come and walk some of the shelter dogs in the parade.  The weather’s supposed to be really nice and I know this is a great opportunity to show off some of the animals that need to be adopted into new “furever” homes.  I’ll walk my own pups in the morning for our mutual exercise, and then enjoy the parade stroll.

After, I’ll stop by one of the local restaurants for a quick bite of some corned beef and cabbage, but avoid the beer.

While my Irish friends and those who want to be Irish for the day connect with the holiday, I’ll reconnect with my journey and goals.

In a conversation with some friends the other day, we talked about how each of us has experienced toxic people, places or situations in our lives at some point in time.  Some of the poison is created by other people and they then transport it with them into our lives like one might bring a virus germs.  Their condition then infects us and takes over.  Unfortunately, sometimes we infect ourselves.  We let toxic thoughts take hold and replicate until they mess us up mind, body and spirit.

Toxicity sucks.

There.  How’s that for a powerful and enlightening assessment?  🙂

Okay, seriously now, I’ve thought about this a lot and cannot for the life of me come up with one good reason why any of us either create a toxic soup for ourselves or permit others to be toxic or bring theirs with them into our lives.  Really, who want their life to be a Superfund site?

There are various depths and manifestations of this emotional waste.  We have people who are always negative.  That’s their go-to place.  Everything’s bad or hard or doomed.  Nothing good happens.  Everyone treats them horribly.  Life sucks no matter what.   Those lemons can’t be made into lemonade because they where rotten when they got them, damn it!  I’m miserable just describing negative people.

Don’t we all know people who live in a place of constant drama and, boy oh boy, don’t they always cast themselves in the lead role?  The older that I get, the more exhausted I am by the mere thought of conjuring up that much sturm un drang.

When I’m surrounded by negativity or drama, I feel its effects.  It drags on my spirit.  Stress results and impacts my body.  Mentally, it wears me out.

Granted, life isn’t always going to be sunshine and sweet smelling flowers.  It would be horribly naive of me to expect that as a perpetual state.  However, I firmly believe that we can counteract the crap that sometimes falls.  We don’t have to wallow.  We also can choice to what extent we permit toxic people into our lives.  While it might be our nature to be empathetic and supportive, we need to set the boundaries, too.  It goes back to the airplane analogy that I’ve used before.  If you’re traveling with someone who might need assistance, put the mask over your own face first.  Note that this means you pick up your mask and put it over your own face.  It does not mean that you give up your mask to the other person.  It doesn’t mean that you suck in your air and then feed it to the other person.  Sometimes the best thing that we can do for someone else is not take over their problems or drama but to instead give them the space to deal on their own.  If you assist them in putting on their mask, it’s then their responsibility to breathe on their own.

One of my personal goals this year is to be aware of other people’s toxicity and avoid getting mired in the emotional sludge.  I can also refuse to play any role in someone else’s drama.  I want to surround myself with upbeat, grounded, healthy people, places and situations, to experience positive energy, and to continue to experience and take part in life with a healthy, positive attitude.

If this means that I need to choose to expell toxicity and reduce my exposure or connection with the people who revel in it, then I need to be strong enough to do so.  In the end, I’ll be better off.