Today I messaged Aaron that my weight and body fat percentage had increased from my weekend shenanigans and he said “you monitor that stuff too closely.” To which I replied,
I can’t help it, I am equal parts motivated by my success, self loathing and numbers.
As much as I hate being motivated for the wrong reasons I can’t deny my desire to eliminate my stomach has had a powerful impact on my dedication.
I don’t really feel like we live in a time that allows women to feel good about their bodies. At the right angle, in the morning before eating and after I’ve gone to the bathroom I sometimes like what I see. But I don’t think I have ever felt satisfied with how I look. And enough comments have been made to let me know other people notice the problems I notice too. I try to keep these unhealthy thoughts to myself because I don’t really think there’s anything that can be done at this point but aim for as close to the ideal fitness as possible. The current fitness movement has just given me brand new ways to feel inadequate. My butt never occurred to me as a problem until the last few years. It’s sad and awful but at least it makes me take good care of myself which is equally important to me. I want a good quality of life. I’m sure men experience this too.
That’s a really sad, true paragraph. I don’t know how not to care about how I look, I don’t even know how to WANT to not care about how I look. I am vain. I sometimes think, “thank goodness I came out with potential because I am too vain for the alternative”. I’m embarrassed of these thoughts but I am sharing them anyways, because I don’t think I’ve met a single woman who was like “oh my gosh yes, 100% of the time I love my body no matter how it looks and I don’t think there’s one single improvement I want to make.” To be fair—I don’t think there’s a man who feels this way either, but in general it seems more accepted by women when their significant others “let themselves go” than it is by men. It’s also acceptable to date much younger women, and far more common though I think we will see a shift with that trend as women become increasingly confident and empowered. For the most part, I feel that women before the current generation of children were raised to feel like the way they looked was important, and to hear a constant barrage of jokes about getting old, aka turning 30 or 40.
I am afraid of death, I am afraid of getting older, I am afraid of my body sagging and losing its good quality. All of that frightens me. So living in a society where women stop having as much significance past a certain age is alarming. I am lucky to be alive during a time where that is changing. The show Grace & Frankie is the first show where I really felt women who I do consider “older” at 77 and 79 were continuing to have lives. They look great, they’re dating, they’re inventing, they’re living life as if it isn’t time to kick the bucket because they’re past a certain age. I found so much comfort in watching that show in a way I never felt watching the Golden Girls which if anything intensified my fears of growing older. They still experience the downsides of aging, but in a way that no longer makes me feel terrified for the future.
Weaving in and out of all these fears are concerns about the way I look. My goal now is to take care of myself in a way that eliminates my stomach, cellulite, and any preventable aging. If I just apply enough moisturizer—but wait, what’s the natural kind I should be putting on? Oil? Rose hip? I don’t know but I’ll take vitamin E to help, and I’ll make sure I wear enough sunblock but then of course I’ll look pale and like I’m dying, maybe I’ll just get a bit of sun-splashed look to me, but no because wrinkles aren’t worth it. Whatever I will simply work on my body until my butt sits high like a shelf and you can see my triceps and bulging quads because that is what’s hip right now. Strong is the new skinny. Real women have curves though. But also I do kind of want to be thin. And flexible, I should probably do yoga. I can’t even stand upside down yet, what a failure.
OH LORDY LORD THERE’S SO MANY WAYS TO BE. And on top of all these fitness movements we are also supposed to not care. Who needs makeup, who cares how we look, let’s shed all our clothes and just be who we are and let all that inner beauty shine! But wait, I don’t know if I’m smart enough, successful enough? AM I A BOSS BETCH!? Am I living my best life? Do I travel enough? Am I impressive enough? Do my food and apartment both look beautiful enough to be in a magazine? Am I supporting the right movements? Am I feeling sorry enough for other parts of the world and exerting the right efforts? Am I politically aware? Am I putting self care first because treat yoself? Am I enough? Am I? AM I?!
I constantly find myself at war with trying to be the right kind of woman, the right kind of person who cares about the right things and doesn’t focus on the wrong things. But this dichotomy of not caring vs. caring too much often places me at one extreme end of the spectrum. Either I don’t care at all, I stop worrying and grow increasingly apathetic OR I care to the point where it’s not exactly healthy. I feel competitive with myself and others, extremely concerned with my body, apartment, and talents and I succeed as a result. That’s why I can’t find it in myself to want not to care when I’m busy caring. I like being motivated, but how can I be motivated by the right reasons? I am genuinely not convinced that I can be. I am concerned that the society I was brought up in combined with unhealthy mental practices I’ve had since I was young has made healthy self love + improvement an impossibility. And the nagging thought that “if I could just be perfect, everything wouldn’t be so hard” is always there. Because I don’t have the problems of someone in a third world country I have the ability to reach close to “perfection” by American standards. I CAN have it all and so I feel like I should, not like I deserve it all, but like if it’s possible I have to go out and achieve it because other people will work twice as hard and get half as far simply because of circumstances outside of their control. Then I feel guilty about how the world is and start down a whole new worm hole.
It’s really hard to be a person sometimes. I talk about how it is for women but I feel this way for men too. They aren’t granted some of the gender fluidity that we are. Remember how women didn’t used to be able to wear pants and that was so weird and sexist? Can you HONESTLY say that you wouldn’t find it bizarre to see a straight man suddenly donning a dress in the same casual way we wear jeans? Would that not seem sort of radical? Or, can you imagine being a girl who found two guys making out as hot as many men find two girls making out? Would you genuinely be cool dating a straight man who experimented with his sexuality? Does it not have more significance for a little boy to want to play with dolls, dress up, love “girly” colors and activities than it does for a girl to be a tom boy? Being a tom boy is kind of a cool thing, where as boys aren’t given that same flexibility which is unfair to both genders. I’ve talked about this before. We aren’t raising men to be able to experience the same range of emotions we can, we insist they’re just idiots, and that they can’t multi-task, or do things women can and how is that any different then men asserting there are things men can do that women can’t? There is no difference.
And I feel like we are talking about all of it TOO much to the point where everyone is just straight up confused about how to be and what to say, and we are all feeling super sensitive and unheard. The ideal world is one in which everyone isn’t commenting on things outside of our control, or deciding which genders can like what, or where we are confining to social norms defined ages ago. I compare it to this: when I first got an apartment all I had was the furniture I had been given or found. So I made it work for many years. I enjoyed these limitations because I could only be so perfect within them. It felt safe. Then one day I woke up and realized I could save money for furniture I might like better, that there wasn’t one right way to arrange a room, and that I hadn’t been thinking innovatively at all. This was overwhelming, there were now so many ways to design my space “wrong” but it also opened up a world of possibility. I constantly ask myself, “what works for me? Think about the solution that makes sense, instead of the solution you’d automatically go with because of previous experiences.” This is how change happens. And it should probably not be noteworthy change. We have a lot of real issues that we should talk about, and the individual is perhaps getting too much attention resulting in a lot of self deprecation.
I kind of digressed from my initial topic which is that I’m overly fixated on caring about how I look. So I’m just going to abruptly transition back to that. I can tell you every single instance where someone made me feel insecure about my body. I round them up every time it’s time to exercise. And it’s ABSURD. I carry around a lot of rage and bitterness that these things were said to me because I can’t un-know them. I can’t pretend “no one notices” when they did notice. I use it, I use it to fuel my fire and workout harder so I can look the best I ever have. And when I post a photo of myself in my new swimsuit and get more likes on it than anything I’ve ever posted OoOoO do I feel validated. So what’s the solution, that people should also not comment on how good I look? Fuck that, I didn’t work this hard so no one could notice. I don’t know how to not feel bad if I’m not being told I look good, and so I don’t know how to not care. That’s why it’s important to me now that when I compliment children it’s about things they have a choice over: outfits they put together (style!), things they made, thoughts they had, the stuff that I’ll have control over when I’m old and I no longer look “good”. Instead I’ll probably age and hate it like everyone else, but darn if I’m not going to try and contribute to a society where that is no longer a thing.
I’m just ranting about the way things are right now and have been and might continue to be. I’m not looking for people to reassure me that I don’t need to care. I know that by normal standards I have a great figure, and me feeling badly about it is unfair to people who are working very hard at their own dream figure and may not have some of the genetic advantages I do. I feel shitty feeling bad about my body for those reasons, but I don’t think it’s my fault because I still hear negative comments about my body, and it’s pretty dang hard to shake those off as I’m sure we can all agree. But I’ll keep doing the best I can to love and nourish it for the right reasons.
Sometimes our society is sad and dumb, when I complain about things like this I definitely feel that. And then I feel dumb for contributing to it..and so on and so forth….
Love,
Heidi Girl
A VERY HEIDI TIME 