We cannot change the world unless the world wants to change...

Yesterday I spoke to my mom.  It did not go well.  Which is ironic, because I was so excited; I thought I'd come up with a Christmas present to rival the year I gave her Mr. Darcy on DVD.  Well, I say excited but that's not entirely accurate.  I also knew that brilliant as this idea was, my mom almost certainly wasn't going to want it.

With so much build up you're probably expecting something really amazing.  It's not.  I just wanted to buy my mom a dress.  Just a dress.

But the thing is if you know my mom you know that buying her a dress isn't as simple as it sounds.  I have already talked about my mom here.  I've talked about the way she sees herself and how that affects me.  Succinctly, my mother's life is an eternal struggle to conquer an adversarial body.

Nowhere is this more manifest than in my mom's wardrobe.  For the last 15 years my mom has carefully curated a collection of one dress.  The sack.  Not unlike the travesty that is Molly Ringwald's "dress" at the end of Pretty in Pink.

yes, this one, only with shoulders and without lace

To her, "clothing I like" means clothing in colors she likes.  Because styles she likes are non-existent...no, strike that.  There are actually quite a few styles my mom likes.  She actually has a really lovely and distinctive (if rather old fashioned) sense of style.  But you'd never know it to look at her because she wears none of it.  Why?  She's too fat!  It isn't comfortable!  She's too old!  All clothing beyond the shift is off limits to her!

except this pattern is definitely too busy for her...

So this Christmas I thought "Hey!  I happen to know of a great website that will custom build dresses to your exact measurements!  Wouldn't it be great if I were to get my mom a new dress, customized specifically to her that wasn't another of those wretched shifts?!"  It seemed brilliant.  If I could show her that even "fat" people can look good; that the world of pretty clothes that make you feel attractive wasn't forever beyond her; that she can wear whatever she wants!  If I could, with this one dress, open that door even just a crack, then what a magnificent gift I could give her!  So much more than just a dress!

from here, where there are several other cute outfits

But there was a problem.  I couldn't figure out how I could get her measurements any other way but to ask her.  And I knew that if I asked her she would need to know why.  See, I knew that this had to be a surprise because if I were to tell her she would instantly shut me down.  After 60 years, truly she has come to love her prison, if that's not too melodramatic a spin to put on it.  But it is the truth.  She has reasons, she has excuses, she has justifications, but the fact is that my mother is comfortable within her rigid world of body hate.  She knows the rules there (how could she not, she made them herself).  So I knew that at the slightest hint that I was thinking about breaking them she would close ranks and lock down.

But I couldn't figure out how to get those damn measurements.

So I convinced myself I was wrong and maybe she'd see what a great thing this was and suddenly change her personality.  After all, wasn't it smarter to supervise her picking out her own dress rather than risk getting one she hated?

No.  The answer to that question is no.

I called her yesterday morning and told her my plan and exactly what I knew would happen happened.  She shut me down.  She did let me show her the website (after I harassed her) and she managed to find the one sack dress they had.  But I couldn't handle listening to all her justifications for why she wouldn't even try something new.  Not when I had been so excited about this.  I got mad at her and ultimately had to get off the phone.

Because I am angry.

As a person who considers it a fundamental element of my identity that I almost never get really angry, this is important for me to say.

I am angry.

I am angry at my grandfather, whose obsession with arbitrary definitions of physical beauty warped his children's perspectives of themselves for their entire lives.  Every one of them has fought against and hated their bodies from childhood.  I'm angry at a society that both gave my grandfather that arbitrary definition and then told him it was okay to pursue and teach it the way he did.  The society that reinforced his beliefs in my mother's mind and proved to her he was right.  Right or wrong, I'm mad at my mom.  I'm angry that she cannot see through all of this stupidity and just let it all go.  I'm angry she can't see that "this is just who I am" only because she has decided it is.  And I'm angry at myself because I am still fighting the same battle myself.  Because I just had the exact same experience of feeling like I couldn't wear something because my body shape forbids it.  (Side note: I bought the dress anyway and wore it to church today and looked damn good, if I say so myself).  All of these "rules" are the purist form of bullshit and I'm angry that it still exists in the world.

And in the end, I'm angry I couldn't buy a dress and fix my mom's issues with her body.  It's an overly simple idea that obviously would never work, but I wanted it to so badly.

I think this is what I would have gotten her.
Nothing crazy.

More gym issues...

I think I just have to accept that, rather than a steady pull that builds like a literal snowball from the really annoying awkward shuffling around just sort of patting a tiny ball in the snow to a giant cartoon pinwheel of snow thundering down the side of a mountain, my efforts at self-improvement will happen in broken fits and starts sort of like a manual car being driven by someone who doesn't know how to drive stick.  Momentum is not something I will ever have on my side.

In the end, I think, the best I can hope for is to cut the time between each new effort down more and more until it might seem, to an outside observer, that they are, in fact, all one consolidated effort.

Tonight was yet another of those renewed efforts.

A month or two ago Kara put me on a two week challenge to eat better and to work out regularly.  The requirements were: breakfast every day, followed by at least one other real meal a reasonable number of hours later, including one serving of fruit and one of vegetables every day; cardio three times a week; and some sort of strength building twice a week.  I think I came up short some cardio both weeks, and the eating fell apart on the weekends, but overall it was a good experience.  Then the two weeks were over and I entered into the two weeks of insanity at work.  My tender little habit seedlings didn't stand a chance and were crushed mercilessly under the boot-heels of 10-12 hour work days.  As is my custom, after the crazy work subsided I made no attempt to reinstate Kara's regimen.  I think since then I've been to the gym 2-3 times.

But what is life but a daily opportunity to improve today what you failed to do yesterday?

So tonight I went to the gym.  I did not want to.  But I went and was blessed in the form of Ever After playing in the cardio cinema.  With credits, I arrived an almost perfect 30 minutes before the end of the movie.  It was like Fate or Jesus metaphorically patting my head and rewarding me with a biscuit.

I ran my customary 15 seconds to crank my heart rate up to near-heart-attack rates as quickly as possible.  The great irony of my life these days is the fact that I actually could theoretically run longer--perhaps 30-45 seconds even.  And the struggle is not, as you might be thinking, the bosom issue.  I have acquired an impressive torture device sports bra that manages to lift and compress my chest into a sort of clavicle-level squshd boob battering ram that minimizes the bouncing from a full on coordinated beating and smothering to simply a muted pounding on my chest.  The side effects of this impressive piece of engineering have been winnowed down to a feeling that my lungs are slightly collapsed and basic arrhythmia as the pounding on my chest confuses my heart as to which rhythm it should actually be following.  Both of which are completely manageable.

No, in the end, it is a different jiggle problem that stops me running.  As it turns out, I am fat.  And my particular fat likes to hang out in two major places: boobs and waist.  The boob situation may be under control, but alas, the waist remains free to jiggle all it wants.  And jiggle it does, to the point that after only a few steps I am in danger of my shorts shimmying right off.  And while it may be dark in the cardio cinema room, I am confident that it is not yet dark enough that no one would notice the shining white legs of the girl whose pants fell off whilst she was running on the treadmill.  Thus, every few steps I have to jump off the belt and hitch my shorts up, then jump back on and run for a few more steps.  Why there are not people working on solving this problem I do not know, because I do know I'm not the only one suffering.  In the end, it is my frustration with this ritual which puts an end to my running, not my lungs, heart, or even legs.  Oh irony, truly thou art a bitch...

Sadly, tonight was not the night I conquered the bros and the machines.

Instead I came home and improvised some very technical body-weight and strength exercises.  One of the bonuses of being fat is that you come with weights built in and ready to go.  If, however, I feel that I need to augment my own natural heft I have managed to find a successful free weight alternative.  Because who wants to buy fancy rubber-gripped weights if you don't have to?  Owning  a 12" cast iron gnome means you don't have to.  Miles actually makes a really good free weight.  And somehow, lifting a gnome is just more fun than lifting a boring dumbell.

And so tonight I began again the endless battle.  Attempting to take control of my life and my body.  Fat jiggles and free weight gnomes and all.  Tomorrow I am hoping to make it to the grocery store after my hair appointment to restock on yogurt so I can make another attempt at being a person who eats breakfast.  Somehow telling the interwebs about the struggle helps, so I shall try to continue to update on my repeated attempts.  Wish me luck!

Gym Issues

I went to the gym today.  It was part of my ongoing struggle to fill my Saturdays with something...ANYthing worthwhile.  Filling my time successfully is a topic for another post, however.  My point today is that I went to the gym.  

Every time I go to the gym my "routine" consists of the exact same thing.  I head straight back into the comfortably dark "cardio cinema" room, where I walk (with the very occasional addition of 15 seconds of jogging) at varying speeds on the treadmill.  I do this for 20-30 minutes, 45 if I like the movie they're playing.  Then I stop the treadmill and walk right back out to my car.  I might stop at the water fountain on my way out.

About 60% of the time I have much more ambitious aspirations about my workout on my way in.  I'm going to do my 20 minutes of cardio, but then I'm going to use some of those fancy fancy machines that I pass every time going in and out of my friendly cocoon of darkness in the back.  I'm going to stretch.  I'm going to really get the kind of work out you're "supposed" to get when you go to the gym.

Do you know how many times that has actually happened?

none.  none times.

The first blow to my plan is all the bros.  As I walk into the cardio cinema room I will pass on average 5-8 swole dudes sauntering around.  These are the guys who you look at and cannot imagine anything else they do with their life besides work out.  Except maybe summer sales.  And the strange wandering they do around the gym when they're not actually working out in it.  I mean, where are they walking to?  Why don't they just go home if they are done working out? 

There is literally no human being on earth more incompatible with my personality than a bro.  I'm more than willing to admit that this is partially my fault, but the fact is, bros (and their attendant ladybros to a marginally lesser extent) don't really appreciate the things that make me me.  They tend not to appreciate my sense of humor, my interests, and they definitely don't appreciate my physique.  And the feeling is almost always mutual.

Which is fine, btw.  It is perfectly ok if the bros and I never really hit it off.  We don't exactly have anything to do with each other.

except at the gym.

Because the gym is their house.  Going to the gym and expecting not to find bros there is like going to the chapel on Sunday morning and expecting not to find Mormons.  It's stupid.  Unfortunately, like church, you're still expected to go to the gym.

The second problem is, of course, only a problem because of the first.  And that is my complete ignorance of how to actually use all of those aforementioned fancy machines.  Put me in a room by myself and I'll happily sit down and start pushing and pulling till I figure it out.  I'll quote Bryan Regan.  It will be fun.  

But as we've already established, you're not alone at the gym.  You're surrounded by an entire flock of the people you find yourself most uncomfortable with (to be fair, I'd probably find myself more uncomfortable with, like, a room full of neo-nazi militant ultraconservatives, or perhaps a room full of cracked out pimps).  That is not a situation conducive to me dropping my guard enough to look like an idiot as I figure out the machines.  

And lastly, there's always the problem of me being fat and out of shape.  After my 20-30 minutes of walking I'm tired.  When confronted with all those bros and all those crazy machines my tiredness says "eh....you can always use the machines some other day." and it turns out my tiredness, when united with my uncomfortables and judgies, is a super persuasive kind of feeling. 

Perhaps one day I'll conquer the weight machines.  Maybe I'll even do it in front of all the bros and conquer that issue too.  I'd like to think I will.  But definitely not today.  Nah, it can wait for another day for sure... 

Prompt 2: A Photo of Yourself and a Description of How Your Day Was

First, a photo of me, taken on this very day

What is noticeably lacking here is the really stellar sunburn
I've since developed.  Photo is courtesy of Kara

And now a description of my day: 

It was sort of up and down.

I began by waking up at 7:30 am which was vulgar and unacceptable.  So I dozed more and less deeply till 9:00 when I woke up properly and commenced worrying about arriving at Thanksgiving Point on time to meet Kara at 11.  This proved to be both completely unnecessary and also very on point when Kara texted to tell me she was running late and we should bump our rendezvous back to noon...and yet, despite having been ready to go in time to make the original appointment, I still managed to arrive 20 minutes late.  

The plan was to catch the last day of the Thanksgiving Point annual tulip festival.  Tulips are Kara's favorite flower, so she tries to go every year.  I had never been, but it sounded lovely so I decided to make the pilgrimage.  Unfortunately, it seems that every other human along the Wasatch front had the same thought.  The place was crawling with humanity.  

Since I had previously informed Kara of my need of a picture of myself to post today, we were planning on taking one amongst the tulips.  The hordes of humans, however, proved an endless source of annoyance to Kara's photographic sensibilities.  Nevertheless, we perservered and took several pictures.  I also learned that over the last several months I have completely lost the ability to smile on command.  When I try I start thinking about each muscle that I'm using to form the expression and suddenly it feels like a completely unnatural shape for my face to be in and I can feel my expression sliding from smile to terrifying grimace.  Apparently my natural response to this experience is to assume what Kara not at all affectionately refers to as "The Face."  The Face, so I'm told, appears to express my extreme confidence in the stupidity of the person at which I am looking.  Unfortunately, it seems The Face comes of its own accord and without my conscious knowledge or effort.  It appears to be the product of me striving for a non-grimace-like expression.  I'm not sure what that says about me, but I know it must be something...

There was one good thing, however, which came out of my loss of facial abilities.  At one point a woman, overhearing Kara yelling at me to smile like a normal person, stood behind her and started making ridiculous faces at me to make me laugh.  Even more awesome, this then inspired a completely separate random Indian couple to also start making faces and giving me jazz hands.  This is possibly the most fantastic thing any stranger has ever done for me.

Hordes, grimaces, and some really unseasonable heat aside, the tulips were quite lovely.  Nothing makes me quite so happy as flowers.  I found myself missing Kew Gardens quite a lot as we ambled.  

After the tulips my day took a turn for the incredibly boring and mundane.  Much of it was spent resisting the urge to take a nap.  I wrote my blog post for yesterday, finally started reading Way of Kings (Mike lent it to me about 50 years ago), and chatted with Kara and Matt.

It was when Kara sent me a few of the pictures for this post that things took a dip.  When I look at myself in the mirror I don't think I look skinny, but I also don't think I look gigantic either.  But the first thing I thought when I saw these pictures was how I just looked like a morbidly obese blob.  Was that really what I looked like all day?  I thought I looked ok...

It was on that depressing note that I took off to satisfy my week-long craving for fish and chips.  And while I normally have no problem going out to eat alone, having set out already primed for melancholy, it hit me hard throughout dinner.  I had chosen to bring along a really abysmal book called Love Walked In (when the waitress asked why I was reading a bad book I explained that I hadn't wanted to get anything on any of my good books) which spends the first 30% of its pages describing a completely ridiculous romance.  Ridiculous though it was, even with such painful prose, I still got all pathetic and wistful.  The Lonlies plus the Loathings are a dark combination...

And that brings us to right now.  

You'll be glad to know that I am forcing myself to look at those pictures with a positive outlook.  I am trying to put my ideals into practice, as it were, in terms of self-love.  It's a struggle, but as you can see, I posted one of them, as instructed, at the beginning of this post.  I feel like that is a step in the right direction.  Against all expectations, my mood is looking slightly up (I feel like there's a Sunday School lesson in there for anyone who wishes to tease it out into full development) and I plan on watching a movie before I go to bed.  

Coming up tomorrow we have prompt 3: My Idea of the Perfect Date.  That should be interesting, so stay tuned!

Some thoughts on a Saturday...

My friend Jenna posted this video today on a friend's wall

I have so many thoughts about this video.  So many.  And, as the good Humanities major that I am, I am sitting here writing all those thoughts down in a blog post.

First and foremost is just...dang.  It's straight up funny.  I mean, completely and unequivocally funny.  Go ahead and laugh and don't feel bad.

Next, this video brings back all my fascination with the human impulse to exhibitionism.  How many videos or pictures have you seen of someone doing something crazy simply for the sake of being seen?  So many I can't even begin to count.  What is it about human nature that so craves attention that it is willing to do bizarre things like dance around in front of people nearly naked to get it.  That almost diminishes it, though.  To say that some of these people are just seeking attention.  Sure, some truly are.  But others, like this gentleman here I think, or like Amanda Palmer in her street performing days, or like certainly many others...some of these people are seeking connection, or love, or truly just to make people happy.

I'm referring to just the beginning of her talk here, but please listen to all of it as it is wonderful

Or perhaps they simply want to express themselves and themselves is an exuberant, demonstrative person who simply cannot be contained in one single self but must bubble over in dance and song and action.  Whatever the reason, I am constantly fascinated by these impulses.  Trying to decipher those reasons, trying to understand why this expression, simply enjoying their moment...

Then I think about this specific man.  Regardless of his reason, he was brave enough to display his, shall we say "less than ideal", body quite fully.  In fact, it seems as though he makes rather a habit of doing so.  You could say that, for this specific gentleman, clearly it does not actually require courage to dance around in a speedo.  But I disagree.  Even if this man couldn't care less about parading his physique naked in public...that doesn't change the significance of the act.  It doesn't make him any less brave.  It remains inspiring to me.

This is where it comes back to me.  It's my blog so I'm allowed.  Anyway.  Remember how I've hinted a couple of times at a project I was thinking about for a while that didn't work out?  This project I was thinking about was to become a model for the art department for the drawing classes.  For those of you who don't know what that entails, it would boil down to me striking various poses in front of rooms full of strangers for a couple of hours at a time...wearing nothing but a bikini.  Anywhere but BYU it would be completely naked, but we gotta maintain our standards here at the Lord's university.  But the point is that I would be stripping myself down almost completely and exposing myself to people.  Nothing between them and all my imperfections, my fatness, my awkward shape and movement, and my blemishes.  I literally cannot think of any more socially terrifying activity.  It didn't happen in the end, not because I chickened out, but because I'm not taking enough credits this semester to qualify for a campus job.

I just have to remember that it's ok that I don't look like this.  This is
a profile picture for this model

I wasn't going to strip down just to satisfy my own exhibitionist impulses.  I don't really have many of those.  They got lost in some box with my mob mentality.  I thought it would be good for me.  I have a couple of friends who do this and they've told me a little about the experience.  The people drawing you are not evaluating your attractiveness or relative levels of physical fitness.  They're viewing you as an art.   They are de-personing you in the best possible way.  In the process of drawing your body simply becomes a thing, neither good nor bad, to be captured on paper.  And the end results can, and often are, beautiful.  Letting someone draw you and then looking at that drawing is a way for you to dissociate from your mental filter and see yourself through someone else's eyes.  Not to mention, you're standing there in front of them for several hours...I can think of no more effective means to metaphorically throw your body image and self-confidence into a lake and let it swim or drown.

Which leads to my last thought about that man.  Yes, we're getting back to the rotund dancing fellow in naught but a speedo.  Scroll back up and watch him again for a few minutes.  Look at how happy he is.  Feel the confidence that flows out of him.  You watch him for a while and suddenly....you forget that it's funny cause a fat guy is dancing naked.  Suddenly you're watching a happy, wonderful man be happy and wonderful.  His physicality is peripheral.  His enjoyment of the moment overwhelms our impulse to judge and in the end we love him, even think he's beautiful, because we see happiness and vitality rather than a contrived social construct of beauty or ugliness.  You don't care that he's "gross".  You don't care that he keeps missing the changes and doesn't know the moves.  How could you care?

This is the best lesson this video teaches me.  Simply be happy and be confident.  No one cares if you screw up while you're trying.  No one cares if you aren't perfect.  No one cares about any of those negative things. What they care about is that you're happy and you're sharing that happiness with everyone around you.  Because you are happy, they have become happy as well.  If you can give that to people then no matter what you look like you will be beautiful in their eyes.

So I shall endeavor to stop worrying and simply dance.

The distorting properties of the inner looking glass

Those of you who read my blog (all 3 of you) know I've sort of been on a little bit of a theme recently.  A self improvement theme.  If you missed them, here's the first and second post.  I'd like to continue on that theme today, but from a slightly different angle.  This post is about my mother.

I have been suffering recently from a lot of frustration with my mom.  It's not what you're thinking.  I'm not talking about your typical teen/young adult parental angst.  I haven't lived with my mom in years, I'm pretty much done with all that angst.  No, I'm talking about something else entirely.  My mom is brilliant, extremely gifted, and beautiful.  My frustration stems from her absolute inability to accept those facts.

Let's start with a description of my mom.  My mother is beautiful.  She has brown hair and brown eyes and a uniquely lovely face.  I have always felt like she looks like a real-life Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painting.  

something much like this painting by John Williams Watherhouse 

She has these beautiful delicate hands and long wrists that, odd as it may sound, have long been my great envy.  As for her abilities...

My mom was strong enough to separate from my dad when he abused their relationship.  She was strong enough to forgive him completely and take him back, and then to leave for good when he abused that relationship again (I respect her for every single one of those decisions).  My mom raised two very young children singlehandedly.  She worked incredibly hard at some very menial jobs at first and then essentially created the need for a completely new position at the local boys and girls club in New Mexico for herself.  She then packed us up and moved us up to Oregon ostensibly to help my great aunt who was, at that time, taking care of my great grandmother whilst also dealing with a newborn.  However a large part of her motivation was nothing but her faith in a prompting she received that she would meet her future husband in Oregon.  She did  meet the man she ended up marrying; she then committed to this man with significant and sometimes frightening baggage of his own.  She has remained committed to him for the last 18 years and poured herself into their relationship.  And in the last couple of years she took the entire weight of caring for her own mother throughout the progression of grandma's dementia with no help from any of her siblings.  

My mom is an excellent cook and baker.  She decided there was no reason to pay exorbitant prices for store-bought chocolates so she taught herself how to make her own hand-dipped gourmet chocolates.  Her children wanted absurd and impractical birthday cakes so she taught herself how to make them.  She created extravagant costumes and dress-up clothing for us purely through trial and error--she didn't have patterns or Pinterest to tell her how to make a crown or a scepter or an entire Native American costume complete with teepee.  She taught herself how to paint and draw and sing and play the guitar and piano.  She makes cards, and hand-made boxes, and face pins, and Ukranian easter eggs, and  so many more amazing things I can't even remember them all.  She writes songs and makes her own jewelry.  She has created a beautiful, calming space in our front and back yard.  She has recently started writing a story.

these are nothing compared to some of the ones my mom has made

I haven't even mentioned my mom's ability to empathize with people, her sincere concern for others, her commitment to her responsibilities, her ability to understand and help people, or her determination to put others before herself.  Truly, the list of my mom's achievements, abilities, and gifts is a long one.  

But do you know what she'd say if you asked her to list her own gifts?  She might say something about her proclivity for counselling (the vocation she's always dreamed of), but almost immediately she would start telling you about anything but her positive qualities.  She might tell you about her sister and how much greater Vicky is than her.  She might tell you about her husband or her kids.  Or she might start telling you about all her own failings and faults and flaws.  This is because she legitimately does not see all of those amazing things that I just told you about.

You might say my mother has anorexia of the mind.  Just like an anorexic girl looks in the mirror and sees an obese delusion rather than the slender (often even unhealthily so) reality, my mother looks at herself and rather than the capable, creative, beautiful reality she sees an ugly, incompetent, stupid, inadequate illusion.  

No matter how many times you tell the anorexic that she's crazy; she isn't fat; she has to eat something because she is quite literally wasting away...she will not listen.  She cannot.  She can see herself right there in the mirror and she can see how fat she is.  So it is with my mother.  No matter how many times I or my aunt Vicky, or everyone else in the world tells my mother that she is smart and talented and able; no matter how many times we tell her that she can do things; we tell her that she is hurting herself and those around her...she will not...she cannot believe us.  Can't she see for herself how untrue all of that is?  Can't she see how inadequate she is?  

I cannot remember a time when my mother was happy with herself--with her weight or her appearance.  And I have a remarkably good memory.  My entire life I've been listening to my mom say that she isn't smart enough for this or that; she's not skinny or young enough to wear that dress or those earrings; she's not talented enough to play that song.  She is never good enough.  Never.

It could be argued that what divides us from the "lesser" animals is self-awareness.  But, like so many things in this life, our great blessing and strength is also our great weakness.  There is no more vicious voice of criticism, judgement, and critique than the one inside your head.  Because you are aware of exactly how often you fall short of the mark.  Outsiders don't have the benefit of seeing our expectations, intentions, and goals alongside our actions like we do.  So they don't know just how often those actions are actually pathetic, half-assed failures.  At least, that is how it seems to us.  Because that mark you're falling short of?  It is self-imposed.  It is your mark, not the rest of the world's.

So when people tell my mom that she is wonderful she looks at her self and her life and her plans and she sees that they aren't what they're "supposed" to be so she says "it's all fine and good for them to say that...but they don't know what's really going on."  

How do I know this is what is going on inside her head?  Well, I suppose I don't for sure.  But I'm pretty confident.  Because she passed this right on to me.  

came from this guy's pretty awesome blog here

Kara came over last night to visit.  We had a really great talk, during one point of which she said to me "We've both turned out to be pretty great.  We're both confident, smart, capable women."  Do you want to know what my instant mental response was?  Something along the lines of "hell no I'm not confident!"  I am terrified all the time of every single thing!  I don't feel capable of dealing with things, I don't think I am particularly good at much.  I think I'm smart, but I'm constantly worried that I'm about to discover that that is not the case.  I assume people don't want me around or they don't like me.  I believe that the man I marry will have sacrificed being married to a woman he finds physically attractive to be married to one with "other qualities".  I am not exaggerating.  These are the constant refrains inside my head.  

Where did I start this?  I said I am frustrated with my mom.  

My mom has told me that she is convinced that her children hate her.  She thinks that my brother and I hate her.  Our mother.  And that is why I am frustrated with my mom.  Because her self-loathing and self-doubt are reaching crippling levels.  And there is nothing I can do to shatter that mental mirror that is showing her such a lie.  There is no way for me to communicate to her that that inner critic is lying.  That her children love her.  That she is brilliant.  That she is creative and capable.  All she can see and all she can hear are her own perceived inadequacies.  Every conversation, every interaction, is filtered through the distorting lens of her insecurities so that it inevitably comes out supporting her negative opinion of herself.

As I struggle through the process of conquering my own issues, dealing with my own self-doubt and self-loathing I keep looking at my mom's life and that is what keeps me motivated.  Even before I started this project I can see that I have been doing some of this.  I am trying desperately to not be my mother.  Not because I don't love her and not because I don't think that she is amazing...but because she does not believe she is.  And that is what I don't want to emulate.  

Personal Progress...

I'm not gonna lie.  I kind of hated personal progress when I was a teenager.  It didn't seem important to me, the projects seemed like busy work, New Beginnings was an annoyance.  And yet, here I am at 26 struggling to take control of my life.....I'm trying to institute my own version of personal progress.  Howe humiliating.

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about a better way to motivate myself to improve the things that need improving.  I said at the time that it was likely to be the first in a series of, um, (for lack of a better/less cliche phrase) self-makeover posts.  At the time I was thinking my next post would be a continuation of the "I'm great right here, right now" theme.  However, the project I was thinking about at the time isn't happening just now (don't worry, I'll talk about it later).  Instead, I've been thinking today about the "where I want to be" side of things.

Last night I did 10 sit ups.  Just 10.  And then I stopped.  And I am not joking when I tell you that my abs didn't even wait till morning to let me know that they were not excited about that idea even a little bit.

this is how my guts felt.

I texted Kara after I finished: "I just did 10 sit ups and then stopped.  Clearly I am not good at exercise."  She texted back enthusiastically "that's excellent!"  Bless her heart.

But here's the thing.  Between none sit ups and 10 sit ups.......10 sit ups is excellent, if only because it isn't none.  Because even if I only did 10 yesterday, maybe today I'll do 15.  Or maybe I'll just do 11?  But the point is that I'm doing something, and if I start small, well then there's plenty of room for improvement.

the one place we all know will always have room for improvement
also, this is from xkcd.com, in case you live under a rock...

Part of the reason that I never work out is because I think about the prospect and I think about how much work it's going to be and it literally drains me of every ounce of....of anything!  Of desire and energy and good intentions.  (at this point I would like to post the clip of Jim Gaffigan talking about going to the gym, but alas it does not appear to exist on youtube.  so instead I'll tell you to go to netflix and watch both of his specials because they're ridiculously funny, and pay special attention to the part about the gym).  Anyway, I think this is because I assume that if I work out it is going to have to be super maximum hardcore and intense and I'll have to spend so much time on it and it will make me want to kill myself.  As I explained to Kara, the evening we spent making and gorging on poorly executed yet nonetheless delicious and fattening candy, I have never yet experienced the so-called "runner's high".  That is to say--I don't appear to have a body that releases endorphins when I work out.  I get exactly nothing from the experience except exhaustion and misery.  I'm not hyperbolizing for rhetorical effect.  I feel like shit after I exercise, and all I want to do is die.

ah grumpy cat...you never fail me

But I realized last night that when you're as out of shape as I am.....well, maybe starting with 10 sit ups is a perfectly good idea.  In my defense, I want you all to imagine not just that you're doing normal sit-ups, but that you're doing them with a 10 to 15 pound weight sitting on your chest.  Not to mention, you have the abdominal muscles of a 3 year old with stomach flu.  But the point is that I realized that...I could stop at 10.  It was something, but I didn't have to keep going till I hated life and wanted someone to punch me in the face to distract me from how much I hated it.  And more importantly, I stopped before I became overwhelmed at the impossibility of doing this insanity to myself more than one random night in my life.

And one last thing....even if I don't do 10 sit ups tonight, or 15, or 11, or whatever...I will do them tomorrow and that's ok.  Or if I do them tonight, but not tomorrow, that's ok too.  If you fail on any given day all it means is...well, nothing.  Tomorrow is, as Scarlet O'Hara says, another day upon which any previous days have no bearing.  I won't get overwhelmed and I won't get discouraged.  It's funny how cliches are cliche for a reason.

Sometimes a little self-love is not a bad thing...

One of the key aspects of Mormonism (and probably most other religions, but I don't have firsthand knowledge) is the idea of repetition.  That is--you can never hear those "plain and simple truths" too many times, you can never read the scriptures too often, you can never study the gospel so much that you no longer have anything to gain from it.  Endless relief society lessons on visiting teaching and motherhood aside, I have found this idea to be, more or less, true.  Not simply at church, either, but in many other facets of life.  In fact, there is one particular idea that comes to me, epiphany-like, every couple of years.  It's like seeing fireworks; even though you've seen them before and, really, one firework is pretty much exactly the same as the next firework, every time you see them again it's like the first time.  They're beautiful and thrilling and dazzling no matter how many times you see them.  That's like this idea of mine.  Every time it bursts inside my head it is illuminating and inspiring like the first time I ever thought of it.  Even though it's clichéd and recycled.  It is simply this:

The most effective changes in your life come from self-love, not self-hate.  

So many times I have taken stock of my life and and I have looked on the results with loathing.  I have been so disappointed in myself.  I've seen my failings and my faults and I have asked myself why I have not yet fixed them.  I can't understand it.  I know what is wrong, I know what needs to be done to fix it, and yet the problems remain.  How pathetic must I be that I can't just fix the damn things already?  Over and over again I come to the same conclusion:  I must not hate my problems--my sins--enough to excise them from my life.  I must secretly like all these faults.  I must not want it badly enough...

 I must not be unhappy enough.

That's consistently where my thoughts end up.  So many times.  So I just hate myself a little more.  And it's a beautiful system, really, because it's so self-sustaining.  Now, not only can I hate myself for my imperfections, but I can also hate myself for, apparently, deep down not hating them and for lacking the discipline to change all these things I hate, which means that I can hate myself for choosing to be miserable....you can see it just keeps going...

But amidst all that disappointment and dislike, do you know what doesn't happen?  Any of those changes I wanted way back in the beginning.  I get so distracted and weighed down with hating myself that either I don't have the time or attention for actually fixing the problems, or I simply give up and accept that it's not worth the effort for someone as pathetic as me (and even if it was, it wouldn't work anyway).  You can see the problem here, I think.

Do you know when I have had success changing myself and my life?  Clearly it is not when I am depressed and full of self-loathing.  The times when I have had the most success effecting the changes I want to see in my life are the times when I love myself, and am proud of myself, and tell myself that I'm doing ok.  

The way it works in my head is that the more I hate myself, the less I am worth the effort of trying to improve--why suffer through all the work I know it will take for something I actually dislike?  But the happier I am with the current me right here and right now, the greater the value in investing in this self.  If that makes sense...

Which finally leads us to the here and now.  I honestly have no idea why it is happening, but I find myself in a place where I am consciously trying to cultivate that positive attitude about myself .  Usually this sort of positivity requires the kick-start of an extended and extreme happiness.  But I can't really say I've been extremely happy all that much recently.  Regardless, I have started trying to invest in myself.  Those initially minute investments have been enough--not enough to inspire greater investment, but enough to remind me of that ever-recurring epiphany.  Enough to inspire me to start loving myself so that I will then want to continue investing even more in myself.  

There is a lot more I want to write on this theme.  There are some specific experiences and challenges that are looming on the horizon that I want to discuss.  But in the interest of length (this is already too long) and time (it's my bedtime now...) I shall leave those for another post.  This is enough to be going on with for the time being...