My grandfather just passed away, which is terrible in itself, but a really interesting study in family interaction. Basically, my family is crazy and we’re trying to make sure they don’t kill each other over the color of the casket.
Luckily, my favorite uncle stood up when my grandmother said I eat too much and made me flex, then spent the next half hour discussing how I could beat up all his coworkers on the trash trucks.
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You know your life has changed when you’re more excited about new Nikes than new heels.
90% of my advice could be this: say what you need to say. Yes, that is a John Mayer song. Sorry about that. The truth is, the world would run a whole lot more smoothly if people spoke up.
Open your mouth and say the words, write them down, sign them, send morse code, sing it, do an interpretative dance to it. Say you need help with math or your college choices or depression or friends or your inability to do a cats cradle. Say I like you, or I don’t like you like that, or I’m sorry, or you hurt me. Say you don’t want to go to the college your parents want you to or that you wanna go to assassin school to be a world class hitman or monkey trainer school to work at the circus. (Before you turn this around on me, you never NEED to say that someone is ugly or stupid or their hair looks terrible- unless they’re your best friend and they ask.)
Why? Because your sighing just sounds like you’re deflating. Slamming the room to your door doesn’t explain anything. Glaring doesn’t convey your problem. Your loved ones are watching you, wondering what is wrong, waiting for you to explain it to them. So suck it up, gather your courage, and speak up.
I have this list of stuff I want to do that scares me. It started strictly as a list of shit that freaks me out but then it got cluttered with spiders and clowns and road detours and got totally out of hand.
I turned it into a sort of bucket list, but the kind that consists of things that makes it feel like you have a creature in your chest trying desperately to get out. AKA, things that make my social anxiety skyrocket. Today, that was hot yoga.
‘But it’s just yoga in a hot room!’ I know, but sit down, Judgmental Judy. I’m afraid of hot yoga because I get nauseous freakishly easy. Like a 20 minute car ride or walking too fast in the Florida heat on vacation. So while I can yoga fairly well (though you don’t believe me because I just used yoga as a verb) but I have a tendency to hurl at a moment’s notice.
I went with my best friend at 930 in the morning and ate what may have been too much food first. This was the first thing I panicked about on the ride over. Then I had to open the door to the hot room and it was HOT. You know when they train you how to check if a room is on fire by touching the door handle, and if you burn a fucking hole in your hand that the room is possibly on fire? It felt like that. But A was behind me, shuffling me in, so I didn’t stand a chance. I kicked off my shoes and waved awkwardly and sat on my mat. It was so hot I couldn’t breathe. Then I had to pee. I left to pee. When I came back it seemed less suffocating.
It became suffocating again when we laid down and I noticed that the ceiling was filled with these massive pipes covered in that stuff your mom used to lie out in the sun with. I feel like Stu used one once on Rugrats. Sun blanket reflective things.
Anyway, all I could think of was one of those falling down on me, which made it a little scary to be in shavasana (aka corpse, aka lay down and nap). But aside from that, I loved it. I sweat like a fucking pig, more than I have ever sweat in my whole goddamn life, so much that I couldn’t do a bridge because I was too slippery (and also because I lost that talent by the age of 12). It didn’t feel like coming home, or finding peace, or being at one with the earth like people swear it does, but it was pretty fucking awesome.
One of my best friends in the world is pretty much perfect. C is leggy, tall, thin but curvy with always-perfect blond hair and a gorgeous face. You want to hate her but she’s so incredibly genuine and nice, that you love her. She has a dry, self deprecating humor, and she’s super sweet. This is the girl who, on Halloween when I wanted to be a cowgirl, thought I wasn’t decked out enough so she dragged the huge box of Halloween stuff that she thought was neccessary to bring to her very small apartment so she could offer me a sheriff’s badge and the option of two guns (zebra or realistic). Everyone wants to be her, and sometimes when you’re around her, you feel a little insignificant, even though she barely seems to notice that everyone is looking at her.
So we were getting ready to go out and C was wiping her armpits with a towel in an extremely attractive manner so she wouldn’t have to shower when she opened her mouth and said, ‘I was just going to tell you guys something but it’s way too fucking weird.’ Naturally we’re all, ‘tell us more!’ because even though we’re in our early twenties we’re starved for excitement. C smiles, points to her tanktop and goes, ‘have I ever told you guys I have four nipples?’She had not. She goes into the whole story about these little things she noticed when she was a teenager and her doctor said they’re nipples because they’re on her milk line. I was all, ‘what happens when you get pregnant.’ She doesn’t want to know. On a roll, she explains that when she was little a dislocated shoulder never healed right, so she has one arm freakishly longer than the other so she never stands with them both hanging by her side. She says all this with a huge smile on her face, entirely unselfconscious, and that’s when I realizedthat’swhat makes her hot.
Then we all told each other about our weird body things - A has one pointy boob, mine are totally not the same size, C’s middle toe is absurdly longer than all the others. None of us are perfect. Some of us are part gorilla. For all you know, the girl you desperately want to be is staring at your toes thinking, ‘god, her toes are so normal. Why can’t I have them?’
Anonymous asked: Did you ever want to fit in so bad at school? Were you popular?
This is going to be lengthy, so hold on tight. Here’s the short version.
I never did. I was this weirdly moral kid, but my morals were super liberal for some reason. When I was 12, one day I decided to be a vegetarian and never went back. Even earlier in life I was like this leftist 6 year old. In elementary school, for some weird ass reason, despite the fact that I was in AP reading which is as nerdy as you could get, the popular girls liked me. I personally think they just needed to recruit more friends or maybe, they were still a little nice back then.
What sealed my fate was when, in elementary school, the popular girls announced that everyone on this half of the table was cool, and everyone to the left was a loser. I was on the left. Then a popular girl put her very cool, limited edition Barbie lunchbox next to me so that I would be included in the cool part. I was glowing. I was so excited. I was a cool kid! Then they started trash talking the newly deemed ‘loser kids’ and I got all upset and pushed her super-awesome Barbie lunchbox back at her and happily involved myself in the loser kids. From then on, I was a loser, but whatever man. I’ll never forget it, because I still hate myself a little for reveling in being cool for .5 seconds. It still upsets me.
I was bullied freshman and sophomore year of high school, probably because I still read a lot of books, wore a lot of punk clothing, and had a terrible Stephanie Tanner haircut. I was a strange mix of extremely nerdy and horrendously pop punk. I was a cross of Hermione Granger and Avril Lavigne. It was brutal. Then, junior year, I started to get ‘conventionally decent looking.’ I got boobs. I grew out my bangs and my hair lightened up to golden blond. I finally lost my chubby cheeks. So, like a normal girl, I freaked out. I dyed my hair a truly horrendous purple. I carried around The Bell Jar all the time. I was terrified to get kicked out of the misfit outsiders squad. Like most people get over trying to get in with the cool kids, I got over trying to fit in with the outsiders because the great thing about outsiders is that there isn’t a rigid set of rules. You can’t do much to fuck it up because they don’t care enough about who is or isn’t in their group. I let my hair grow out to be blond again. I got sweaters instead of band tees. But I was still a fucking weirdo and people knew it, and most of all, I knew it.
That hasn’t changed and never will.
I get asked this a lot, and I assume you all don’t mean in the metaphorical sense like, how did we all end up here mentally, or the scientific sense which I only have a vague grasp of from one semester of biology that I frequently skipped because it was taught by the world’s worst professor (he always looked nine months pregnant too, which was strange, it was like, are you going to give birth or what?). Anyway, I assume you mean like, ‘how did you end up being relatively normal and stable?’
Let me stop you right there by telling you that I am neither normal or stable. The people who overheard me in Target yelling, ‘I don’t need a 20 piece dishwear set, I’m all alone, goddammit!’ can justify that. But I do have a fairly decent grasp on reality and I like to think I’m kind of level-headed and I apparently make you guys think that. I got an actual ask about my childhood and how stable it must have been. Please picture me laughing in that obnoxious way large, mustached men always do in the movies (my biology teacher excelled at this), and telling you to, ‘hold it right there, missy.’
My childhood was not normal. My mother tried incredibly hard to give us the most stable childhood possible, which, naturally, has the opposite effect and turns you into the weird kid. It’s a scientific fact. Maybe. Once again, that class was my Nam. So right. Normal. Do you consider your father flinging you down a rocky, barely snow covered ramp in an inflatable raft which, when airborne, was sliced open by a tree sending you crashing six feet onto a completely deflated raft? No? How about a brother locking you in the trunk of the car just to see if you’ll fit (I did) and then leaving you there for an hour. Or learning how to raise then kill chickens and bunnies (you wondered why I went vegetarian at 12)? Sit and let me tell you the story of my life. It’ll be worth it (maybe).
I come from a town so small that if you ran its width, it would barely qualify as a 10k. If you visited now, you’d think the place is totally normal. Like, there’s a Staples, Chilis, and a Stop & Shop. Still no mall or Walmart though. When I grew up there was only one tiny supermarket, so it was like an unusual monopoly in which instead of a chain owning the town, everyone had to come to this no-name place and assume their deals were the best. If you’re confused, you’re thinking of Monopoly the game and you need to revisit 11th grade history class. Our town was safe in the way that everyone leaves their doors wide open all night in the summer because it’s hot (80 is hot for New Englanders) and no one was ever robbed. Lots of bugs found shelter though. My brother and I were allowed (read: forced) to play outside all day and to stumble home sunburned and covered in dirt at 11 o’clock at night because, you know, the door was open anyway. During those days I learned how to ride a bike directly into the river, climb a tree, and that falling from a tree does not always result in broken limbs.
My mom was tolerant to the extreme. When I say this, I mean it. Her goal in life is to be a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race. She has loved the queens since the beginning of time. I think it has something to do with the fact that she was an aerobics instructor, which apparently was a gay mecca back in the day. Maybe it still is. Who knows. My father did not posses the same tolerance, but I can’t hate him for it because, despite flinging me down a ramp on a defective ramp, he loves me and built me a playhouse (which I never played in because it became infested with earwigs which he insisted didn’t hurt terribly when they bit you) and like, paid for my college tuition. Also, he is growing more and more invested in who will win RuPaul’s Drag Race. He says Sharon Needles.
I guess with a chicken raising, ‘rub some dirt in it,’ father and a drag queen loving mother, I didn’t stand much of a chance at being normal, but so what? If you think I’m normal you’re way off and clearly have not been visiting here often enough. Come join us. Have a cookie. Listen to me spew advice and realize that either you’re not alone as you thought, or you’re not nearly as fucking bizarre as you previously believed. You probably think I’m making most of this up, but it’s 99% true. Whatever you think is true and whats a lie is almost definitely wrong.
Get back to the healthy basics!
Eat cleanwith recipes like these. Search the farmers markets for organic berries, apples, veggies, and legumes. More protein! More good carbs! There’s no need to go hungry.
Work it out with HIIT, lifting, or running.
Love yourself! Tell yourself every single day how gorgeous you are no matter the number on the scale or size of your pants because numbers do not define you! See your friends. Give hugs. Play outside. Get dirty.
Get out there and own it!
I get asked a lot of I think fitspo can be harmful. The short version is yes, absolutely. If you’re obsessive and addicted to thinspo, turning that obsession onto fit ladies/men is just as dangerous. There’s still an obsessive need to be something other than yourself and the idea that your body isn’t good enough. Addictive personalities will transfer over, like alcoholics turning to cigarettes or food when they quit drinking.
Do I think fitspo in general is harmful and should be eradicated? No. Pictures of fit women and men can be super motivating, as long as you’re thinking, ‘I can do that,’ not, ‘Why don’t I look like that? I’m fat.’
So when is it healthy and when is it disorded?
Calorie counting
Exercise
The scale
Lately I’m seeing a disturbing number of posts telling women to deal with men gawking at or harassing them in the gym because, “men just can’t help it,” because youre pretty or they arent used to women in the weight room. I’m here to remind you that that’s bullshit. Stop making excuses for men being inappropriate. Theyre not children. They know right from wrong. The gym may be a public place but your body isn’t. Lets stop contributing to our, “dont get raped,” culture. Would a man stand getting gawked at or heckled or catcalled at by another man? I think not, so why would you? If you feel uncomfortable, even if nothing verbal happens, talk to management. I’ve seen gyms post a trainer in the weight room just to keep an eye on things. It’s your weight room just as much as a man’s. Just like you wouldn’t gawk at a man in spin class, you shouldn’t be stared at while lifting. The gym is a place to feel safe. Make sure that it is.
