Musing randomly
A lot of my life has been spent desperately trying to ignore my body and when it refused to be ignored I resorted to hiding it; I'm female so I doubt that would surprise anyone, certainly not another female. When I hit puberty it seemed that the world, (by world I mean every media purveyor on the market) placed high value on petite,blonde,blue-eyed females. I was none of those, and like so many others, I thought that meant that I couldn't be desirable - that I was less of a person. Sadly, many youths gage their value based on mass media images and (even in the 1970's) my peers and I were as susceptible to the media hyper-marketing of stereotypes as youths are today. Anyway, as a result I tried hard to make myself into what ever the flavor-of-the-month was at the time. At one point I dyed my naturally red/auburn hair to a platinum blonde and gave up food for Dunhill cigarettes. I became the thinnest I've ever been, was ridiculously unhealthy and as a result anxiety ridden and suffering bouts of depression. So, obviously that wasn't the way to go but it took me a while to come to that conclusion because my unhealthy behavior was reinforced positively by everyone. Family constantly marveled at how good I looked,the men I worked with at the time seemed to suddenly realize that I was female and Bill tended to preen when we were in public. I was gratified,confused,sick and more than a little freaked-out to be on the receiving end of all the attention that I had spent most of my life fantasizing about.
Thankfully, those days are part of my past and I was able to take some positive lessons from the experience. The most important (to me) was how easy it was to become what others wanted and how very unsatisfying it was to me personally. I also learned what NOT to do - which is how physical fitness became one of the priorities in my life.
When I say physical fitness, I'm not talking about athlete level of physical fitness (which I wouldn't mind but isn't practical for my life), I mean physical fitness for me. It's the level of fitness that gets me up in the morning looking forward to a busy day, the type of fitness that makes doing daily workouts a new revelation in how well my body can feel and work and how exciting and satisfying it is to feel muscles master coordinated,graceful movements that require a strength and balance that they struggled with two weeks before.
It's pretty damn awesome when your body is working like the organic machine that it is;that you relish the feel of being in your body instead of spending precious time trying to find new ways to ignore and/or hide it.
Thankfully, those days are part of my past and I was able to take some positive lessons from the experience. The most important (to me) was how easy it was to become what others wanted and how very unsatisfying it was to me personally. I also learned what NOT to do - which is how physical fitness became one of the priorities in my life.
When I say physical fitness, I'm not talking about athlete level of physical fitness (which I wouldn't mind but isn't practical for my life), I mean physical fitness for me. It's the level of fitness that gets me up in the morning looking forward to a busy day, the type of fitness that makes doing daily workouts a new revelation in how well my body can feel and work and how exciting and satisfying it is to feel muscles master coordinated,graceful movements that require a strength and balance that they struggled with two weeks before.
It's pretty damn awesome when your body is working like the organic machine that it is;that you relish the feel of being in your body instead of spending precious time trying to find new ways to ignore and/or hide it.