Owning It

I was really excited to catch Adele last night on Saturday Night Live. Her songs have been the soundtrack to my commute back and forth from work for the past few months, and I couldn't wait to hear her live.

Adele definitely did not disappoint. She sounded as amazing live as she does coming through my car stereo speakers. What also impressed me was that she chose to wear a short dress. As a woman who sometimes feels like my breasts are the only part of my body worth flaunting, I was excited to see another plus-sized girl showing some leg. And you know what? She looked great. She was sexy without displaying six inches of cleavage, and she rocked the mic without performing some sort of overdone booty jiggle.

Self-criticism is a hard habit to break. I keep thinking that at some point, I'll run out of negative things to say and think about myself. That at some point I will truly stop caring about the way my arms look in a sleeveless shirt and how well my jeans appear to fit.

It's easy for body image to become an obsession. It starts with something small; a pair of pants fitting loosely, having someone comment that I appear to have lost weight, or even going to bed hungry. It doesn't take long before I'm counting every calorie, calculating every meal, examining each piece of food that passes in front of my lips. The problem is that it starts to feel so good. It literally and figuratively starts to feed itself into control. It's like there is this separate being that hovers over me and weights until the ultimate point of vulnerability. And then...WHAM! I'm trying on my skinny jeans every morning before work and eating little else than vegetables and peanut butter. All of this, only to come full circle within a matter of days/weeks/months.

This is my most difficult habit to break, and I think because it's so multi-faceted. There is guilt, coupled with a sense of responsibility for health, multiplied by my burning desire to be thinner, and then iced with the fact that I cannot escape my drug of choice. So here I am. In the now, and trying to just take it day by day. And today is not going so well.

There's never gonna be a moment of truth for you
While the world is watching
All you need is the thing you've forgotten
And that's to learn to live with what you are

So freak out if you wanna
And I'll still be here
Don't call me for years and when you do
Yeah, I'll still be here