When younger I could drink and dance for hours. After yesterday’s evening of four pints, my body tells me: ‘you can’t really do that any more.’
Tag Archives: #40daysto40
Day 2: let’s get the heavy stuff over with #40daysto40
It’s still raining today, more vertical than diagonal today. The back garden is slowly turning into a marsh. I wonder whether Calderdale will turn into a giant lake with its own Nessie myths. I’m feeling rounded, fleshy, the feeling that I’m gathering hibernation weight for what could be a long winter ahead. Ah, the ingrained fatphobia that’s been handed down, matrilineal.
Let’s get the heavy stuff over with, this post comes with a bit of a content note: it will be about body image, about weight, about that feeling when you feel like you don’t fit. About fat. About perceptions of fat. About trying to control fat in questionable ways.
I have always been overweight. Even at my thinnest I had a soft peach belly roll that pushed against the size 10 jeans I’d borrowed from a friend and just about managed to squeeze into with shallow breaths and a sense of shame. That shame. That bloody shame from those who don’t matter, or the shame that has come from two generations of women ashamed of their bodies. Taking supplements, starving, being sick to fight the flab, to be considered, perhaps (whisper it) sexy.
I tried to fight back against this learned behaviour. I did my best to question the crappy images fed into my head from the TV and make-up promotion heavy magazines aimed at young women. I tried to ignore the ribs and rounded orbs of Eva Herzigová looking down from those 90s roadside Wonderbra adverts. In my early twenties, I got my belly button pierced, I (sort of) embraced the curves on the good days. And I wrote: poems, feminist poems about ‘getting grief from a lettuce leaf’, a news article about posing naked for a charity calendar – modesty protected by three cardboard bees Penned a performance poem about not giving a toss about body shape and embracing body hair (performed with some serious beer courage). I ended a relationship with someone who made me feel awful and like the worst person who dragged herself across the surface of the earth.
And yet. And yet. And yet.
The familiar feeling, the fat-shaming, the magazines located in what I call the ‘Self Hate’ section of newsagencies. (You know the ones: the magazines where one week they’re celebrating curvy celebrities, the next pointing out the stretch marks, every single line of cellulite, expressing mock concern and barely concealed disgust.)
Of course, it’s all rubbish; it’s about being healthy (and hopefully happy) whatever the size of your thighs. As I enter into my fifth decade, I am hoping that I care less about how I look and more about who I am, how my actions affect others, how I can speak out and listen and champion others who may feel similar.
And as this sign puts it:
Image from: https://boldomatic.com/p/LXJTNQ/how-to-get-a-bikini-body-for-summer-1-put-a-bikini-on-your-body-2-stop-giving-a
(I’d add a 3 which is it’s no-one else’s flipping business what you’re wearing! Whether it’s tankini or mankini!)
Day 1: taking stock #40daysto40
The rain is diagonal at the moment. It’s lashing, smashing, splashing it down onto the concrete pavings of the back garden. Soaked up by the newly planted lawn, an attempt to prevent runoff, a meagre gesture towards flood mitigation.
Apple tree in the rain, with the remains of the fence that the last storm took out.
In 40 days time, I will be 40. I thought it might be worth taking stock of the last decade, plus lob a load of random other thoughts out in this blog, my little corner of the internet. (Hello reader, thanks for reading!)
I was ecstatic to leave my twenties; I was quite miserable in my late twenties. I embraced entering the thirties with open arms and heart. So, entering my fifth decade comes with a little poignancy, the feeling of certain things coming to an end but the positive feeling that there are potential adventures ahead.
So with a vague countdown, here are some life stats (for what it’s worth)! Over the last decade:
- I have moved house four times
- I have completed two university courses (PGCE and MA) and about to complete the third (and final?!) one
- I have had two jobs (one of which I honestly loved) and a fair few freelance/temporary contracted opportunities
- I have co-authored a book, and have had several poems published. I am now not scared to call myself a writer (I was reticent for a long time)
- I know a little more about botany and wildlife identification but am always learning
- I gained four stone (70 pounds / about 32kg), lost four stone, and then re-gained two stone (35 pounds / about 16kg), in terms of ongoing fun with my weight (ah, the ongoing, and pointless, battle with my body image)
- I adopted three felines in a new quest to become the ultimate cat woman.
- I have had the great fortune to travel around the world to: Hong Kong (via a looong stopover in Doha airport), Bangkok, Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Alicante, Rojales, Benijofar, Mercia, Torrevieja, Valencia, Paris (twice, not quite by choice), Bordeaux, Toulouse, Andorra (like a big outdoors duty free shop!), Barcelona, Cartegena, Bilbao, Oviedo, Spokane, Moscow (in Idaho), Chicago, New York City (twice – NYC kind of has my heart), New Jersey, Corfu, Copenhagen (twice, I love the city!), and Malmö. Plus wonderful trips around the UK (fun fact: I’ve now nipped to various places in every single county in England) and Ireland. The earth is so interesting, and I’m constantly astonished by the fact that I will never see all of it. And that’s OK; I’ll do my best to see as much as I can while trying to tread as lightly as I can. (Several of my travels were by train and boat, however, not all of them. My carbon footprint has expanded over this decade.)
- I have done more things on my own which has become less scary as I get older but I’m aware of my place in the world and of my own privileges. (Or, at least, try to ensure that I’m more self-aware!)
- I have made more friends which I’m completely blessed with, and have had the joy of working with fantastic colleagues
- But I have experienced life-changing loss and the deaths of my step-grandfather and my granddad
- Yet I am always learning.
Over the next forty days – not promising every day though because I don’t need that kind of pressure piled on myself – I will try to throw out some other thoughts, writing and photographs in the run-up to forty.