I had knee surgery on Jan 9th and hoped I’d be recovered enough to come back to my life by Jan 15, but something still isn’t quite right and I am currently unable to drive, walk, or even stand up at all.
I’ve managed to put together a setup in my bed so that I can draw and I am putting little bits of time into in-progress commissions (and personal art, and sad poetry), but pain, stress, and random bouts of weakness and fatigue limit my “active” time to just a couple of hours a night. Right now it seems that, in addition to the New Knee Thing (which is also a Screaming Back Thing), all of my existing ailments are flaring up as well, plus maybe a couple of new ones, idk.
I’ve had to tell the ttrpg group that was my sole in-person social interaction every month that I can’t make it to meetups until I can walk again. There’s nowhere in my current bedroom for Seb or Dad to sit comfortably (and lbr I’m not great company right now), and Dog Logistics means that Boo-Boo has to stay upstairs with Seb. I’ve basically been sitting alone in this room for a week, and will be sitting alone in this room for the foreseeable future.
I am having a really, really bad time.
Anyway. I’m gonna go back to staring listlessly out the window like a sickly Victorian child.
i can’t be the only one who’s just straight-up … bored with women hating themselves. my mom keeps lamenting to me how upset she is about her gray hair. my friend stares at her laugh lines every day in agony. my sister loses sleep over the horrible unbearable thought of looking fat. and every time these women i love open up to me, i can’t help but think … then stop staring at yourself? stop drowning yourself, narcissus, and just fucking live your life instead of sitting in front of a mirror obeying cosmetic corporations’ lies. just stop it. this is getting ridiculous. you’re too smart to be falling for this bullshit. “oh no but these men who hate women told me that if i’m ugly i’m worthless!” girl if you actually believe that then good luck. but i am getting worse at being supportive of people whose nonsense worldviews keep them trapped in pain. stop looking at yourself start fucking living i am pleading you deserve to be happy and it is stupid that you disagree
[This isn’t directed at you, lowkey!]
“You should love who you are!” Yes!
“–You idiot!” No.
Related to anti-bullying songs, good sentiment, bad execution. “Just quit fucking around and love who you are because you are being SO tiresome” just adds another person to the list of “people who hate who I am” because as with all things, “just say you’re beautiful and move on” is unhelpful to the point of being hurtful.
(And look at you, contributing to the problem by berating women in your life for caring about gray hair and laugh lines and body shape, implying ‘yeah those are ugly but you shouldn’t care.’ Cmon now.)
The way people feel about themselves is complicated, and the way people socialized as women feel about themselves is extra complicated. Messages about how women should hate themselves are EVERYWHERE, they’re literally unavoidable, if you have to buy food–even online– you will be bombarded with messages about how much the way you look sucks. Planet Fitness sponsors the NYE countdown in Times Square every year. They hand out a free hat to everyone there and every shot of the crowd is full of them. You weren’t even there to think about being fat, you just wanted to observe the passage of time, but there it is again.
“But those ASSHOLES are LYING to you” yeah they are. But take it from me, replacing feelings of inadequacy with feelings of furious contempt is not like, healthy, or safe.
You SHOULD look in the mirror and love who you are. But that’s a process, okay, and it’s a LONG process, and it’s a hard one, and it’s infinitely harder if the person you’re blaming for your feelings is yourself (“stop drowning yourself Narcissus”).
You look fine. Who told you you didn’t look fine? CORPORATIONS no, try again. MEN uh-uh, we’re not doing that. Someone close to you, possibly several someones but usually not more than two or three, told you repeatedly at a formative age that you needed to change who you were in order to be accepted. By society yeah, but, even if they never said it aloud, by *them,* too.
And let’s be real if we’re talking about people socialized as women who are currently reading this, it’s probably your mom (or mom-adjacent lady like an aunt or grandmother).
(There are obviously exceptions, but it will always be someone close to you.)
I came across two ladies once, I don’t remember the context, who were complaining that their “arms were fat.” They were okay with the shape of the rest of them but the ARMS, oh no. I asked them, “who told you your arms were fat?” And when they started to say “they just are” I said again, “who TOLD you that?”
“My mom,” said one. “Yeah, mom and Nana,” said another. “Starting when I was about ten.” These women were way older than me at the time, middle aged, and they’d spent decades fully believing that they were imperfect because Nana said so. I’m not gonna “and everyone clapped” and say i changed those women’s lives in an instant, but we had a good conversation after that about which people growing up had been the most vocal and influential to them when it came to beauty standards.
You can think about that too. “Who in my life told me this part of me was ugly?” Someone you loved, someone you trusted, and someone who loved *you* and was probably just trying to help. Sometimes it’s as obvious as “we’ve gotta get you to the salon to wax your eyebrows,” but just as often it’s “you’ve gotta put on sunscreen, or you’ll end up looking all melted (as in wrinkled, not cancerous) like your Aunt Terry and me.”
“Put your face lotion on like this, so you don’t give yourself a saggy neck.”
“If you wear your skirt like this it’ll make you look slimmer.”
“Oh, a gray hair! Pull it out and make a wish :)”
Find that person’s voice in your mind and put a big ribbon on them that says “#1 person who ain’t know shit and should shut the fuck up.”
Replace “I look bad” and “I shouldn’t think about looking bad” with “it was wrong for mom to tell me I looked bad. She thought she was being helpful but she was wrong.”
I know, that doesn’t get you all the way from “I look terrible” to “I look great.” It’s not a little hopscotch jump from one to the other, it’s the Grand Canyon. You can get across, but it’s gonna be a hike, and it’s gonna take time. There are even signs that say not to attempt it in one day.
But start there. “I’m going to stop caring about what my mother wanted me to look like.” Say it to yourself, say it out loud, say it to your shitty friend who told you they were “bored” with your deep-seated and difficult to heal self-image issues.
It is only step ONE on a really long walk. But you’ll get there.
In the 2000s/2010s there was a trend of popular songs about bullying and how you shouldn’t do it (for various reasons ranging from ‘it’s mean’ to 'because I’ll kick your ass’ to 'because I’m actually AWESOME’ to 'because I will come back to school with a weapon’), which is a really good sentiment– bullying isn’t kind and should not be encouraged!
That made it really difficult for me to express the opinion that those songs fucking sucked though
Today was supposed to be my big comeback day, the day when I can finally get back to commission work. Instead I’m just laying here, angrily.
All of the things in this room that were supposed to help keep me distracted from pain and stress are either broken or just missing. I’m so irritated and upset that I’m not good company and don’t want to hang out with anybody so again, laying here, angrily.
(WiFi isn’t strong enough rn to cast anything to the tv so I can’t watch videos unless I want to do it on my chest.)
ALT
ALT
