My health or worth can’t be measured based on what I choose to eat.
1. Truth: Once I become aware of something, I start seeing it everywhere. This phenomenon was described to me in grad school as the palladium window effect. Once you know what palladium window is, you start noticing them everywhere. This happens to me every time I get a new car. I go from never even noticing white Toyota Highlanders to suddenly seeing them everywhere. Or now that I have a Cattle Dog, I see them all over. It’s not really because there’s more, it’s just that I notice.
2. Truth: As I’ve raised my awareness about body issues, I’m suddenly seeing shaming and bullying everywhere. In the media, in advertising, in the news, in healthcare, and especially on social media. My health plan at work wants to offer me a “reward” if they can measure my height and weight, record and track it, see where I land on the BMI scale, but I know it’s only so they can start to “counsel” me about my choices, that they intend to promote a particular lifestyle as the only healthy option. My gym starts ramping up its messages about healthy eating and exercise, warning that if I’m not careful I’ll gain weight over the holidays, making it very clear I should be worried about that. On my Facebook feed, someone posts a meme of “Crispy Creme Barbie” and it breaks my heart because the woman pictured, blonde and dressed in typically Barbie clothes (short skirt, low cut top, high heels, everything bright pink) looks just like a woman who came to my yoga class that same morning. What right does anyone have to assume they understand someone’s experience or can assess someone’s health based solely on how they look?! And if the woman in my yoga class went straight from yoga to eat a donut (or more), what right does anyone else have to judge, to criticize her choice?! And how does anyone know she’s not perfectly happy and healthy — just as she is?!
3. Truth: Judgement, criticism, bullying, and shaming will never create change, it only generates more suffering. This is so clearly true, but when I speak out about the shaming I see, the pushback is often that I’m too sensitive, (or better yet that I only think that way because I’m fat). This has always been my experience with bullies — they never take responsibility for the suffering they generate. Rather, the victim is just being too sensitive, can’t take a joke, is weak, needs to toughen up, needs to drop a few pounds. Two middle schoolers in my community committed suicide this week, and at least one was the result of bullying. Someone who stands in judgement of another, who moves beyond that to direct criticism, to bullying and shaming, is practicing a particular form of aggression. If, like me, you ever find yourself thinking how much better you are than someone else, you (we) are doing it too. We are guilty. At its worst, judgment becomes violence, and even at its “best” it generates suffering — and we don’t need anymore of that.
One wish: That instead of judging, criticizing, bullying, and shaming, we extend ourselves in compassion, love, and support, that we offer our help to those who need it and keep our “help” to ourselves when it’s unwanted.
So great to be partnering with Wanderlustto share this list with a larger audience.
1. Adele’s latest album, 25. I’ve been listening to it nonstop since it was released. And this prank she pulled on a group of Adele impersonators is so sweet.
2. Wisdom from Susan Piver, “Love is the least safe thing there is. It’s fierce. You can’t domesticate it. It’s wild. When you find it you should rejoice. When you lose it you should grieve.”
3. 31 Days of Gifts You So Deserve from Be More With Less, “is like an advent calendar in your inbox designed to deliver the gifts you so deserve. The gifts are meaningful, some are magical, and all of them remind you to fully embrace the simplicity and meaning of the holidays with purpose and intention.” Added bonus? Pay what you want! This would make a great gift, for yourself or someone else.
9. Finding Your Way Back to the Practices that Serve Your Soul, Willo O’Brien on Medium. This, in particular, is brilliant, “Fully allowing and feeling the emotions. Letting them be and letting them come through. Listening to what they have to say, giving them love, compassion, and space. This is the ultimate practice at the heart of it all.”
13. One letter can change your life–or someone else’s, “a free digital booklet all about the art of letter writing” from Alexandra Franzen. With the holidays coming up, this is a great practice to start cultivating.
15. The *new* Black Friday hosted by the amazing Sherry Richert Belul. “This Black Friday, go with the new black: Spend at least part of the day making a Love List as a holiday gift for someone you love.”
19. READY ♥ SET ♥ REFLECT an online retreat being offered by the amazing Susie Stonefield Miller. This is for “anyone who is yearning to take some time to reflect on the past year, to let it inform this next year, to choose a word for the year and to make a gorgeous deck of inspiration cards,” and will include “short guided meditations with art journaling prompts, video tutorials, thoughtful worksheets, and community connection.” Good stuff.
21. Wisdom from Brave Girls Club, “…each minute we spend lending ourselves, our time or talents or energy or thoughts to something that we really want little or nothing to do with is time is stolen from the things that really do matter to us. Each minute spent with the parts of our life that we want to be free from is a minute that we are not at peace….a minute that is spent feeling miserable instead of joyful.”
28. 20+ Cute And Funny Puns By Arseniic. Part of me feels like I’m too smart and too grown up to laugh at these, and the other part is laughing her thunderpants right off.
33. 48, written by Christine Mason Miller on our shared birthday, in which she says,
For now, while I’m able, I’m going to keep creating, feeling, living, crying, laughing, breathing deep breaths and being of service in whatever way I can. I will continue opening up my home to those I love. I will keep on trying to create the best I can create, whatever that means.
Today, I am turning 48 years old. Today, I am in awe of everything my first 47 years have given me. Today, I’m here to do one thing: LIVE.
34. Company is Coming. This is funny because it’s true. Anyone who is hosting Thanksgiving this year understands how it feels, the particular way you can lose your mind getting the house ready when you have people coming over.
37. This quote from Arundhati Roy’s War Talk, which seems especially timely.
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
38. Horse Head Squirrel Feeder. This is the best, a great gift idea.
