Two interesting things happened to this blog in the last two months.  The first is that I somehow got myself locked out, the second is that somehow, my idle blog manage to rack up the hits without me even being there.  I don't know how that happened, but I am grateful.  First and most importantly, my most heartfelt thanks go out to all of you who have read, followed, kept tabs on, commented on and checked in on this blog over time.  It means a lot that people are still reading.
Over time, I've come to realise that this blog, and the format of the host site, just isn't really doing it for me, so I've moved on.  I'm still writing and blogging, but in a new space.  I've gone through a lot of changes this year, and I think this is reflected in my new work, where I have a much greater sense of coherence and direction.  Please feel free to pop over to the new site and follow me over there.  I'd love to see you on the other side!
Thanks always!
Melia.
Come find me at Notes From a Little Mouse!

A Much Needed Word on Weight...

Post New Years, post Christmas, post turkey and bacon and a whole hell of a lot of candy, I will say this: I'm feeling pretty damn good about my body right now.  Not what you'd expect a woman to say after the gluttonous hedonism of the holiday season, but it's the truth.  The reason is that I've decided that I'm just not going to care anymore.  Not to say that I'm going to forgo showers and tumble down the street with my hair a frazzled greasy puff.  I've just decided I'm going to give myself a break.  I'm going to stop beating on myself over my weight.
     It's the most horribly tired cliche, that of the woman ever obsessing over her size, and it is something that is, and probably always has been, a serious social problem.  Girls don't just wake up one day and decide that they are fat.  They don't look in the mirror one morning and come to the conclusion that their arms are a little too loose, or that their stomach is too wide, their thighs to bumpy, arse to big, whatever, etc, and on and on.  No, they don't decide they are big overnight: they are not hardwired to suddenly start crying in the bathroom at the age of fourteen.  Genetics don't cause them to fear people watching them eat nor do they create the notion that a girl's body is simply not good enough.  Girl's don't come to this idea on their own.  Someone has to tell them.  And oh, how we tell them in so very many ways.
     For a girl, it's over before she even gets to the age of five.  Her dolls are slim, her heroines are slim, the women on the covers of the magazines she witnesses as she waits for her mother in the hair salon, are sickeningly thin.  Though she cannot yet read, she can see the way that 'fat' is singled out every time in the articles.  She cannot not see it.  Excess 'fat' on celebrities is all too often circled in red and blown up in bold.  She doesn't question her own body, not yet, but already she has an expectation of what her body should grow up to look like.  How can she not break down when she draws near puberty and realises that she is striving to grow into an impossible ideal?  The duckling fails to grow into a swan, and being less than swan is unsatisfying for we have been programmed since childhood to believe that anything less than swan is 'ugly'.  Her torment is encoded from the first doll gifted to her; symmetric of face, with an impossibly tiny waist.

When I grow up... note the disproportionate waist of the doll on the right.