Tuesday 5: Body Positive Edition

I have been feeling rather dumpy lately. My legs hurt, I have gained back some weight, I hadn't worked out in 3 weeks. I just plain haven't been feeling it. Today was my first day back at the gym in 3 weeks and it took everything in me to pull into that parking lot, change clothes, fill up my water  bottle, and start my workout.  The reason for my absence?  Well, I was sick for a week, my shoulder hurt the next week, and the week after that was just laziness. I felt every bit of it today, too. That was one of my most difficult workouts,  mentally and physically.

So, in the interest of keeping myself going, here are 5 things I love about myself no matter my weight!

1.  My Eyes.  I think that I have very pretty eyes.  I have long eyelashes and my eyebrows are even and filled out.  They are thinning a bit, as everyone's does as you age, but not a lot.  They are arched perfectly over my eye.  I think my eyes are expressive, too.  You can usually see a lot within them.  

2.  I am tall.  I am 5'10" and I love being this height.  I can reach pretty much anything I may need from higher shelves and I carry my weight well.  Plus, it comes in handy if you are feeling confident, because sometimes with my height and weight, I intimidate people.  I'm not saying I like intimidating everyone, but it definitely has its perks in certain situations.  I can help people at the grocery store, too.  My favorite part of being tall is being super tall in high heels.  I'm lucky my husband is 6'2", so even in heels, he's still usually taller than I am.  

3.  I have great hair.  It's naturally wavy, thick, and glossy.  I rarely use product in my hair and I don't often color it or use heat on it.  That keeps it looking very shiny and healthy.  It's wavy enough that I can diffuse it into curls or straighten it fairly easily.  I just got a bunch of blonde highlights in it and chopped it for the summer and it looks great!  I also look good with longer hair, though I don't keep it long very much anymore.  I am definitely getting some grays, but they actually blend in pretty well.  

4.  I have a lot of scars that remind me that I'm a survivor.  I have scars from open and closed heart surgeries, my pacemaker surgery, and scars where they put tubes in my stomach as a baby.  I have scars on my hands from burns and cuts and scars from a bike wreck when I was in 5th grade.  They define me in a way that nothing else can.  They show that I have lived and been hurt and gotten up and dusted myself off and kept going.  As a child, I was asked a lot about my zipper on my chest and I never remember feeling bad about it.  I was proud.  It made me different.  It made me feel strong.

5.  I like my brain.  There are a lot of things about it that drive me crazy, like its need to obsess over little things and the endless counting of ALL THE THINGS, but it stores quite a bit of information.  My brothers tease me that I'm only 'trivia smart' and while I agree that I know a lot of useless knowledge, I know that I'm not stupid.  I pick directions and hobbies up very quickly.  Once you show me something, I don't usually have to ask how to do it again.  I have phone numbers stored in my brain from YEARS ago.  (I still know all my good friends' phone numbers from when we were kids as well as my library card number from my hometown library.)  I still know Mark Antony's soliloquy from Julius Caesar and I have a vast inventory of 90s songs, titles and artists, in my brain.  I have pretty good critical thinking skills and great short-term memory.  (That was helpful in high school for a lot of tests in which I studied 20 minutes ahead of time and passed the test with flying colors.)  My brain is big and beautiful, just like me.

I'm sure this random 5 was boring to a lot of you and may seem braggy, but I truly believe positive self-talk is crucial in making things happen.  I don't like feeling down and dumpy and with my anxiety, sometimes I feel like I have no choice.  Today, though?  Today I have a choice and my big, beautiful brain is telling me that I have a lot of good things going on.  I will chip away at the weight gain, little by little, and I will conquer more major steps in my journey.  I hope all of you take the time to be body positive today, too.  There's lots to love about all of us, so come on, tell me your best feature below!

In defense of you

I read an article this morning on the naming of Kate and William's newborn daughter.  The article discussed how awful it was that the author's 6-month old daughter was named Charlotte and now, horror of horrors, Kate and William named their daughter the same.  The author even stated that she was seriously contemplating changing her daughter's name because she didn't want her to have the same name as a bunch of other children in her class.  She wanted her daughter to be unique and ended the article apologizing to her daughter for "failing" in the name department.

To this author and her daughter and the myriad of other children out there named Charlotte, Olivia, Madison, and whatever other names are in the top 10 baby names this year, please hear me when I tell you:  YOU are enough.

A name does not lend you "uniqueness".  You are already unique, as a member of this planet, born with a mix of DNA that is uniquely yours.  Your quirks, your flaws, your skills, your experiences, your abilities, they are all completely unique to YOU.

I once felt that I was not enough.  Sometimes, when I am depressed or anxious, I still think it.  I feel like I am failing at life.  I feel like I may as well just go back to the old standby me, the one who sits around and eats, the one who cries because I never had many friends.  I sometimes feel like my uniqueness really hurt me, because I could not relate well to others.

Part of that was my own doing, because in longing for friends, I often overshot the mark and became someone I wasn't to be a part of that group.  Or, I practically stalked people so that I could become friends with them.  Imagine my surprise when showing up on someone's doorstep to talk didn't make someone a best friend either!  

My sister stayed the night here last night and Saturday night, as she was on her way to, and from, Iowa to go house hunting.  We were discussing a former friend of my stepdaughter's, who has had a lot of difficulty in school, mainly because she is highly intelligent and unafraid to speak her mind.  Let me tell you, I saw myself in her.  She sat at my table one day and corrected my stepdaughter when she misspelled a word, without being asked to, and I looked at her and tried to impart wisdom.  As I sat there looking at myself 25 years ago, I told her that I knew from personal experience, nobody likes a know-it-all.  How do I know?  Because I was that child.  My sister just nodded and said, "Yeah, you were, weren't you?"  Yeah, yeah, I was.

Why did I do that?  Well, I guess my 12-year old self thought that was the only way to impress others, because otherwise, I was not enough.  I was tall and stocky.  I couldn't play basketball because of my congenital heart defect.  I had anger issues.  I was super sensitive and cried easily whenever I was angry or upset.  I was a perfectionist who couldn't just let things go.  I overcompensated and pushed even more people away.

25 years later, I am much more comfortable in my own skin.  I embrace my intelligence.  I love my quirks.  I'm easily amused.  I love corny jokes.  I love music and will dance anywhere at any time.  I love the retro. modern aesthetic and my favorite color is purple.  I am super sarcastic and love to read.  I am an introverted extrovert.  I am boisterous and loud and chaotic, but I crave my space and time to be alone.  I often agree to go to parties and back out at the last minute because I cannot face new and different people, yet I am the first one to chat up random strangers in the elevator or at the grocery store.

I am uniquely me and I have learned that I am enough.  I am enough for my husband and my stepkids.  I am enough for my friends and most importantly, I am enough for God.

If I have some people that maybe don't like me, it's not because I am not good enough.  I am not a bad person, even though I do tend to interrupt people, because if I don't get out my thought, I tend to forget it.  I am not a bad woman, because I know more about sports than I do about hair and makeup.  I am not a bad wife because I hate scrubbing toilets.  I am not a bad friend even if I call or write infrequently.

Likewise, if you are feeling low today, if you are struggling to fit in or maintain friendships, or establish new ones, YOU are enough.  You don't have to wear yoga pants and a stained sweatshirt to prove you are a dedicated mommy.  You don't have to be dressed and made up perfectly to prove you are a hardworking person.  You don't have to listen to the music you don't like.  You don't have to play dumb or pretend to be someone you're not in order to 'fit in'.  Be you, unabashedly.  Do not apologize for your YOUness.  There were three Adams in my high school class, two Tonys, two Kristens, and two Kims.  Guess what?  They were all different.  They were all unique and their names were even spelled the SAME WAY.  *GASP*  Quelle horreur!  

A name does not define you.  A name is a great start to getting to know someone.

You'll find those that you are meant to be friends with.  I found a lot of mine in college.  I have a friend who I talk on the phone with probably twice a year.  Every time we talk, we end up quoting lines from "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles".  Every single time, we laugh.  She is my Diana Barry.

There are no unique names, people.  Unless you are making yours up out of thin air, there will be someone else (probably tens of thousands of others) with your name.  You don't need a superfluous Y, Z, K, or DEN, DYN on the end of your name to fit in to this world.  You already do.  God loves you.  Your parents love you.  You will make friends who love you and all of your quirks, too.

You are enough.

Crazy, Exhausted

This weekend was a great one.  We had a reprieve from the Kansas winter and Mother Nature blessed us with a 70 degree day yesterday and a 60+ day today.  We were busy.  We celebrated a couple's upcoming nuptials on Friday night, worked out, ran errands, Rick took my stepdaughter to the new Spongebob movie, went to the park, and hung out by our friends' firepit on Saturday night, and then today was a blur of church, park picnic, Boat and Outdoor show (where we had a fortuitous meeting with former Royals players Dennis Leonard and Tom Bruno), and zoo before coming home.

Packed weekends are fun, but totally and utterly exhausting.  We ran around like crazy and now I desperately want to crash early in my bed.  However, I cannot.  Why?  Because in the midst of all the crazy, we didn't get much time to do what needed to be done.

Laundry was piled up, dishes scattered about, cats whining to be fed (at least one), and groceries to be shopped for.  We have nothing in the house to bring to work for lunches for the week and we ate out for both lunch and dinner.  I was so hungry earlier I felt like puking and then scarfing down a Sonic bacon cheeseburger certainly didn't help.  Now I feel worse!

I'm bloated and cranky, frustrated with transitioning my cats to wet food and trying to get them to eat out of separate bowls.  I am overwhelmed with all that needs to be done and in the midst of all of this, I snapped because my hubby was hogging the wi-fi and I couldn't finish a game of Trivia Crack.  I yelled at my stepson because he left the empty cans of cat food on the counter in the kitchen and didn't rinse them out and my cat tried to jump up there and clean them out.  I got frustrated with both of the kids because they didn't rinse the dishes before they stuck them in the dishwasher and so now several dishes have stuck on food.  

What do you do when crazy meets exhausted and you are so worn out you can barely breathe?

The kids are back with their mothers and here I sit, contemplating just going to bed, knowing I can't, because my husband is going to ignore the laundry and watch The Walking Dead instead.  That's totally fine, but I can't even enjoy that with him anymore.

My anxiety creeps up at night and especially when I watch any kind of 'intense' programming.  So I made the decision to forego the rest of the season to keep myself (relatively) sane.

I've been needing to write a post since Tuesday and can't find anything to write about.  The weekend was so busy, it distracted me from this, but has also kept me from centering myself again before work tomorrow.  I just want to scream sometimes.  My exhaustion overwhelms me and makes me wonder if it contributes to my crazy, or if it's the other way 'round.

SERENITY NOW!!!  Serenity now.

Here I sit, half asleep, wondering if the groceries will magically appear.  Probably not, but I know one thing.  I'm not getting them.  I think I'm going to finish up the laundry and read in bed instead.