Hello all. I’m just taking a moment to write here, because auditions for the summer musical are Monday and Tuesday night, and I’m the Stage Manager, and who knows when I’ll be able to write again? I was thinking about nightmares. The two things I remember dreaming about last night, I would classify as bad dreams, not necessarily nightmares. But when I started thinking about them, I wondered WHY on earth I or anyone else would ever be afraid of, or have negative feelings about, these two things, but so many are and do! It just got me into this deep, thoughtful, sort of reflective type of mood, and what a “fear” of these two things means for me and every other person (mostly women) in the world: ‘hair’ and ‘fat.’
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Now you’re probably wondering mostly about the first of these two words. Here’s the backstory, the shocking confession: I almost never remove the hair from my legs, by any method. Rarely shave, or wax, or anything of the sort. Yet they are virtually hair-free! It’s either genetic, or I have some serious disease I don’t know about, or I never wear shorts, and my long pants somehow inhibit hair growth, or something. I have a few little hairs here and there, but they are so light and thin and fine, I can barely even get hold of them with tweezers, which is how I usually remove them. So what does this have to do with last night’s dreams? Simple. In my dream, I started growing hair on my legs and no matter how much I shaved, I always missed some, and what I DID manage to shave grew right back almost immediately. That was upsetting and stressful to me in my dream. When I woke up it just got me thinking about women and standards of beauty and how most women are always waxed, shaved, tweezed to the max, just to feel beautiful. I think it’s sad. Women, in the past, now, and always, have been subjected to absolutely unnatural standards of beauty and desirability. Think of it! Corsets, foot-binding, bras, makeup, bikini wax! Craziness, I tell you!
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Like most people, I have been on both ends of the discussion. I went to a makeup party the other night- one of those facial and makeup demo things, you know. And everyone looked beautiful to me, without their makeup. Stunning WITH makeup, of course. But perfectly lovely and acceptable without it. And I, as a non-wearer of makeup daily, was heartily encouraged to continue with the routine of the makeup that was applied to my face that night, because my face “looks so much brighter!” And secondly I remember being shocked at the willingness to be seen in public of a lady I met at a writer’s group meeting a couple of weeks ago, who I SWEAR had a full beard and mustache, and I couldn’t believe she could go around outside her house like that. I distinctly remember telling someone that night that if I ever got that low on hormones, I wanted someone to shoot me. WHAT?!! I’d rather be dead than have hair on my face? A) There are several different solutions to this particular issue, and B) Something seriously wrong with my perspective here.
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Anyway. I don’t really have an answer for the problem. I don’t expect women to suddenly stop shaving and wear no makeup ever, just in the interest of rebelling against cultural expectations and standards of beauty, except to tell women everyone to love who you are and what you look like and try to be as natural and real and authentic as possible, and if men, people, the world, don’t appreciate you exactly as you are, then pooh on them. Who needs ’em?
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Which, of course, leads to the other dream, the topic of which is one I have struggled with my entire life and chronicled extensively throughout this blog, and that is fat. Weight. Weight LOSS. All that stuff. In this dream last night, I saw one of my old friends from high school. She has been up and down on the weight loss journey all her life, just as I have, and in the last couple of years has been doing really well. But the last time I talked to her, she mentioned how she had slacked off and lost some ground. So in this dream, I saw her, and she was much bigger than she had ever been. Bigger than at her heaviest. I swear she was actually three feet wide. And I saw her hips and her completely round face, and I felt fear. Desperate fear that I am headed to that exact same place, because I was talking with another friend last night about binge eating and out-of-control-ness, and it is all just terrifying.
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And therein lies the biggest problem that I have with fat. In this culture, in this country, people act like FAT is the absolute worst thing you can be. Worse than a liar, worse than a cheat, worse than lazy, worse than stupid, worse than selfish, worse than anything I can think of. People would rather be ANYTHING than fat.
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Ok, so it’s completely true that life, physical life, is easier at a normal weight. Movie seats, airplane seats, tourist attractions, doctor’s office visits, medical procedures, shopping, self-care and grooming (like shaving, for example). All of those are not things you really have to even give much thought to…when you’re not fat. You live longer, have more options for entertainment, like chasing a ball with your kids or walking the stupid dog, you have more life when you’re not living it insulated. And for the record, that insulation can come in other ways than fat, but that’s another post.
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My point is that…I don’t know what my point is. I just know I have been dealing with the upsliding scale for weeks and months, and it puts me in a state of terror, and I hate that. I guess I just need to work on the whole self-love thing no matter what my weight and appearance. I need to work toward complete self-approval, BUT I also need to focus on health. Just health. Good food choices, good activity choices. Remembering that the life I want to live is out of reach as long as I can’t easily reach my shoes. That awareness has got to count for something, right?
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Thanks for joining me on this ramble. Stay tuned for updates on my Stage Manager experience as it unfolds.
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Until next time,
D.
The Therapy Journals of the Fat-Headed Klingon Woman 
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