Posts tagged “acceptance

Stop Trying to Outrun Yourself

Posted on February 24, 2019

I can trace back to as early as eleven, things about myself that I remember running away from. I had a penchant for cussing, picked up from sitting along the periphery of my dad’s poker games. The vocabulary would escape with enthusiasm on the playground. “You’re a bad influence. We don’t want you around because you bring trouble. Just because you’re parents are splitting up doesn’t mean you can act like an animal.” Her name was Lisa, we were at Amazon Park in Eugene, and I can still see the way the weeping willow limbs cast shadows on her face. She had a hint of a smile as she said it, the other kids gathering around her. I was poison. Too strong, too loud,…

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A Game of Chicken with Weight

Posted on February 12, 2017

I have obsessed about weight. In college I abused laxatives. I’ve battled with disordered eating. I said hateful things to myself. I compared myself to women in magazine, classmates, strangers, and, quite possibly, people who didn’t even exist. The lengths I took to keep the bar of how I was supposed to look and what I should weigh just out of reach was staggering. I made it impossible to succeed. As I raise three daughters I feel terror because of all the very real threats in the world, hating ourselves can be the most devastating. I watch them grow, their shapes changing constantly, and each new contour and curve makes me fall more intensely in love with who they are. They have never had a…

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Love Postponed—Feeling My Own Love

Posted on April 2, 2016

My hands were resting in my lap as I waited in the X-ray room. It was 8:30 in the morning and I’d already been through two orthodontist appointments with the girls. I was trying squeeze in a chest X-ray my doctor had ordered weeks before. The technician came in, she wore raspberry scrubs and had a warm smile. “Good morning, hun. I’m going to have you undress to your waist, everything up top comes off, then you put on the robe, ok?” I nodded. The door closed behind her and I looked around. The austere and dated room was jarring— no pastoral scenes taped to the ceiling over where you might lie down like in a gynecologist’s office, no signs to read or magazines to flip through to pass the time.…

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Limiting “All”

Posted on September 19, 2015

Six months ago, give or take, I discovered a new word. It was love at first sight. I loved the way I couldn’t say it without making a funny face or how reading its definition felt like permission granted. habseligkeiten, which I never want to capitalize because it feels as if it deserves to live forever as a lowercase word, a member of the eternal tribe of dreamers and collectors, discoverers and believers.   Montages danced before me of bits of bark, ends of ribbons, metal shavings, and dry eraser ink stained tissues. A lump threatened in my throat as guilt lanced me, all the things I’ve tossed into garbage bags. We can’t keep every single thing that we collect or sustain an impenetrable awareness…

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Expectations: Yours, Mine, and Ours

Posted on March 19, 2015

Potentially the most tedious thing about this post is that it is such a tired, damn argument. I’m not the first to write about it, nor will I be the last. I was trucking along, chatting with friends on twitter while I surfed in another window to the side. It was a perfectly lovely time, until an alert came through for a new email. I checked it on my phone.     Presumably the email was sent to make me feel as if the sender and I were tight. Good friends. Real friends. Why? Because together we were going to celebrate a better, truer, more real kind of woman. We were going to feel better by emphasizing one body or lifestyle type as more authentic…

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