The Measuring Tape Debacle

One of the things I keep finding out is that I already contain the majority of answers that I'm looking for and I just wish I could somehow make that magically appear at my upper arms instead of having to do the work to get them back. I already know that if you exercise your muscle tone changes, you aren't nearly as sore, you feel better stress-wise and you are less likely to be surly and prod people's egos with your middle finger.

http://www.soulscode.com/the-edible-woman/

I'm watching my body age. My soup-kitchen buddy, Kim, and I were talking about how the definition of young keeps changing and how it used to be easy to tell someone's age and now it is not so easy. And it's weird because I don't want my youth back. It's been a long struggle uphill to get to 44 and I feel like I'm sitting on a pinnacle somewhere in the Andes and looking around going *whew*... ok... what's next? Except that I know, for me, that I'm probably at the foothill instead of the peak.

One thing that has become very apparent to me lately is that the truth about whales isn't just a story about what my abusers did to me -- it's a story about one singular abuser -- me. It's about what I did to SueAnn. And all of the self-help books in the world could probably congregate in the middle of the city and be put to a slow fiery death and I would still have to go look in that mirror eventually.

I had a dream the night before last to measure myself. So I got up the next morning, got showered and dressed and went after the measuring tape. Guess what? I picked out this little dinky Bank of America measuring tape that I picked up somewhere and it stopped at 40 inches... so I got around my chest and it stopped about 5 inches (or 6) shy of actually being able to measure anything. I started laughing. Well, what the hell else are you supposed to do but laugh? Then I hollered for my husband to get the camera... we'll take a picture for the blog. Ha, ha... look at this, I can't get the measuring tape around me! He took the first picture and I looked at my face. I couldn't do it... the look of pain on my face is too humiliating to post. These people are supposed to be getting to know me, I don't want to scare them off in the second post! Take another one. Same look. Take a third... now it just looks like a passport photo.

In the end, I couldn't post it. I didn't want you to see the sadness in my eyes.