Or, in my case, '95. In any event, it's Father's Day, 2010...a perfect summer evening, low 70s with a light breeze, and I'm sitting on the porch with my coffee after a busy, awesome weekend with my family. Kickass, right?
You'd think that after a certain number of years...decades...you'd start to accept who you are, what you look like, and focus on the stuff that really matters (for example, everything I just mentioned, above). HOWEVER...some of us have some nasty old habits that simply don't wanna go away. And here's the regrettable situation in which I currently find myself: JEALOUS of the 25-year-old version of myself that was adept at starvation and an expert in "purging."
You read that correctly. I didn't type that by mistake. Seriously fucked up, innit?
And yet, there's this little piece of me - no, that's a lie...it's a bigger piece than I even want to admit to myself - that genuinely thinks, "wouldn't it be nice if I could have that kind of will power again, and be THAT skinny again?"
Really. I hate admitting it, but I'm going to. And I'm going to do it here, because then I have to own up to how genuinely fucked up it is that I think this way.
Now, anyone with a half an ounce of sanity knows that "will power" is really not the phrase for this. It's really not will power that propels a person to avoid family functions for fear of food (check out my alliterative skills, btw)...or, if forced to join in the fun, to eat the most tasteless and boring items available when surrounded by delicious stuff. It's not "strength" that drives a person to secretly barf 8 times a day in order to negate the fact that food was consumed. So I'm well aware that my old habits are nothing to admire or look back upon wistfully. If I'm being honest, those were some shit times.
Nonetheless, the price you pay for stopping that level of insanity is a normal body. And today is one of those days - I hate to admit there are many these days - when that simply won't do. If I'm not skinny anymore, and if my cheeks aren't sunken, then I'm an average size. Somewhere along the way, this became unacceptable.
But WHY????
I see people all around me, every single day, who are just beautiful. Some of them are smaller than I am, some of them are bigger. Some of them are pretty much just like me. I judge none of them the way I judge myself. I don't view them with the hatred and loathing I apply to myself. I don't think they're disgusting, I don't think they should stop eating for 6 months, I don't calculate the number of pounds they should immediately drop in order to be "acceptable."
No, I save ALL that good shit for myself. Every day. All day.
Dudes, here's one thing I DO want to quit. I don't know when it'll happen, or if it will. Maybe it's a lofty enough goal to try to decrease the amount of time I spend thinking these thoughts about myself. I've never NOT done it, and now that I'm getting a little older and my body is changing in the normal ways that bodies do over time, these thoughts are getting louder again. Shit. Not cool. This is one thing I will be happy to quit, if only I can.
So, I got back on the exercise routine gingerly last night (insert 'woot' here), and when I walk/run/whatever outside, I almost always have to set it to music. One thing about me and my music: every single second of every song is associated with some sort of memory, person, event, feeling, era-in-my-life...This is both a blessing and a curse. A song comes on, and I find myself mentally and emotionally submerged - almost completely - in whatever was going on in my life at the time I first heard that song. Sometimes this is fantastic, and sometimes it's a little like drowning...it's like having your insides instantly transported to another time and place while your body is still doing laps around the block.
For instance: when I listen to Waylon Jennings, I'm back in early 2006, when I first started dating my husband (this time around). When I hear Wings, it's 1975 again and I'm a little girl at my grandparents' house, staying up late to watch Hockey Night in Canada with my Aunt Lynne. OR...it's November of 2000, and I'm trying to drive home in a blizzard that made national news. I got 5 city blocks in FIVE HOURS...and the only CD in my truck was Wings: Greatest Hits. Now, I love Wings. But after 5 hours of one CD, even the truck had had enough: the digital readout on the car radio read "HOT" and spit the CD right out.
Jeff Buckley's Grace generally gets skipped on the iPod because it brings me back to a really dark time, one of the few times in my life I really never enjoy revisiting. Belle & Sebastian's Books EP: the most beautiful boyfriend I had, and also the most disappointing. Any song by my friend Michael Oliver and his band Go, Dog. Go! brings me back to one of the happiest times in my life, and it also makes me a little wistful for those days. The Cardigans' First Band on the Moon is a stay in Los Angeles in the mid-90s, whereas their Long Gone Before Daylight record is a fun time and a really sweet boyfriend in the mid-"aughts."
Anyway, you see where I'm going with this. I could literally go on for hours.
I don't really have a point. It's just that I've noticed something while engaging in this whole exercise thing: it's always like hopping into a time machine, Bill & Ted style: with each song change, I'm back in the time traveling phone booth and whisked off to some different era. One lap around our block and I've already visited several places, spanning a number of years. It's almost a workout in itself.
So now let me leave you with Carol Medina's Secret Fantasy, arguably one of the cheesiest songs ever recorded. I mean, listen to it! But...all I think about when I hear it is being 23, 24 years old, going out at night with my then-boyfriend and - gasp! - dancing. Oh, and it also reminds me of when I first "met" one of my many movie boyfriends - this time, it was Jeremy Northam in The Net. ha! How's that for totally fucking random?
Anyway, oddly enough, 1995 was one of the absolute darkest years in my life, marked by a descent into the hell of eating disorders and all the stuff that comes with that. But Carol Medina, Heart, "the fuckin' Eagles, man"...all the cornball music I listened to back then only brings me back to the good stuff from those days. And there was quite a lot, when I bothered to open my eyes and check it out. I don't know what the deal is with that, or why that music doesn't bother me the way I think it should. All I know is, I'm happy about that, and when this silly shit came on my iPod last night, I had to listen to it twice.
