I’m tired from all that’s going on right now. (Fatigue is how fellow WP blogger Stephen Black put it.) So, I’m stopping along the way. I have come to a resting space on the side of my path and I’m going to sit here for a while. I’ll sit, rest and reflect.
Image from needpix.com
My journey (and this blog) was supposed to be about exploring what the second half of life looks like. All was going well until the pandemic hit. In the five months since then I’ve been traveling in circles from fear to anxiety to boredom and back. While the country has largely reopened, I’ve been spinning in my own high risk Phase I. So, I’m going to stop. I’ve been so busy worrying about everything (including my sanity) that I haven’t thought to use my confinement to consider how substantially life is impacted by the coronavirus. I’m going to quiet myself and contemplate. It’ll be my Phase II. What better time to examine my motivations, convictions and intentions than now?
Am I seeing everything differently now than I did pre-pandemic; my community, my relationships, myself?
Is my fear of death from COVID-19 overblown because of the trauma I’ve experienced from losing dear ones to disease?
Does that fear run counter to my belief system?
Did I appreciate my pre-pandemic life by fully participating or was I mostly observing as I’m forced to do now?
Will I act more intentionally within our global community after this time of solitude, once a vaccine is developed and I move along again?
Image by John Hain from Pixabay
I’ll sit here with these questions for a while. I don’t need immediate answers. It’s enough for me to ask and think about them. I’m grateful that I can! The effect to this blog will probably be less humor and some posts might be reflective fiction, poetry or entries from my gratitude journal. I’m hoping that sitting with challenging questions might provide some spiritual growth and maturity. I wonder what Phase III will look like.
You might be planning on heading out soon, ushered out by the reopening. Maybe you’ve already been out, enjoying the weather in parks or on a beach. I can’t join you. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in a higher risk group. I’m of a certain age (I’ve already admitted it so no need to say it again) and I have very high blood pressure. My BMI says I’m at risk and should be ashamed of myself. Although I don’t now, I smoked for way longer than I should have. (“You smoked cigarettes, Kat?!” “Um, yeah, those too.”)
I can’t go out with the rest of you. I have to wait for a vaccine. I don’t judge or begrudge you your decision to go out but I’m hoping that I don’t become envious and resentful. I’m hoping that I don’t look out the window and see my neighbors gathering in the common area and decide to do something stupid. I’m hoping that I don’t become so angry at what’s going on in this crazy country that I go and join the protests. Covid-19 will kill me. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to entertain myself, by myself and maintain my mental health. We’ll see…In the meantime, here’s some of the things I’ve been up to since March 13, 2020.
I put together my pandemic kit
I’m keeping a pandemic journal to keep track of the endless daysMy roommate and I are growing vegetablesOf course, lots and lots and lots of cookingOccasional distance visits with the grandbabies which are scary for a couple of reasons
I really don’t mind staying here. Over the years, I’ve squeezed every bit out of life possible including trips to national parks in the US and beautiful beaches all over the world. I haven’t missed much. I have a nice home and the resources for food to keep my BMI exactly where it is. So hopefully I’ll see you later.
I told people I was having a simple medical procedure today. I was vague for a couple of reasons. If I’d called it a test I’d be risking being asked for specifics. Procedure sounds serious and personal, requiring a bit of indelicacy to press for details. Details were the last thing I wanted to talk about. This isn’t the kind of test I had as a young woman. Those were often tied to issues of sexuality and/or fertility. This is a different time and a different test. I’m uncomfortably close to the age where I’ll mark life passages by my medical record.
As I sit here in the waiting room, I listen to the nurse give each patient the same information as we check in at fifteen-minute intervals. I have enough time before the test to wonder what health care would look like if our system wasn’t for profit. I understand that because of the costs of resources there would always be expenses involved. But what would it look like in a Utopian culture? Would nurses hold our hands? Would there be space for empathy by the practitioners and dignity for the patients? I think about this as a nurse younger than I am calls me “dear” while peering at a monitor. She asks me the same questions their office has asked me four times since they scheduled this appointment. I realize I’m in a bad mood. It’s because I’m about to be charged my entire insurance deductible for the privilege of having someone look up my butt.
I am now awake from the anesthesia. Thirty minutes of blessed unconsciousness. The older woman to my left wobbles as she struggles to get dressed behind a curtain. I’m glad I brought flip-flops to replace my heels for the walk out. The African-American man to my right laughs loudly like a comedian on stage, while recounting an improbable anesthesia dream about being on Leave It to Beaver. Later, he speaks softly and tenderly to his wife behind his curtain. Each of us here in the recovery room attempts in our own way to deal with the reality of this stressful test. We use these thin, narrow curtains as shields to hide our vulnerability. Right now, having by backside exposed and vulnerable seems like a metaphor for my life in 2018 America.
The title of this post is the verbatim text I received from a loved one when I suggested to her that overall health is more important than being thin. What was I thinking? This person is young, female and lives in Manhattan. Every woman she comes into contact with is either skinny and/or obsessed with her weight.
Did I really think she’d listen to a middle-aged woman from the land of grits n’ gravy?
Besides, we all know our culture in general likes it thin. No matter where we look, big or small, still or streaming, paper or digital, the images underscore that truth. The message is always the same; desirable women are thin. The only overweight woman we see are talking about their weight in shame or are being shamed for their weight, like the TV commercial for a diabetes med that is rife with larger women. Apparently, those fatties bought their disease for the price of a candy bar. Every once in a while there will be a portrayal in the media of a heavier woman who valiantly overcomes her weight to live a happy life. But the point is always that being over 120 pounds is unhappy and more than likely unhealthy. Have you noticed that on the rare occasion that a heavier female is highlighted on a TV show as happy with herself, at some point down the line she loses weight?.(Hello Jennifer Hudson, Oprah Winfrey, Rosanne, I’m looking at you.)
Did you see the TLC show, Fat and Back, in January? It was about the painfully skinny British correspondent Katie Hopkins who gained and then lost over forty pounds to prove that “fat” people lack discipline. Granted she admitted to gaining a deeper insight into weight issues after the experience yet at the end of the day, she came away still feeling superior for being underweight. The program was fascinating in an uncomfortable way to me. (Click on the above for more info on Katie and the show. Let me know what you think.)
I worry about how young woman in this country fare in all this. They have to negotiate the landmine ridden landscape of body image. C’mon, those of us females brought up in this culture live the body dysmorphic disorder story: we are bombarded with the message that thin is best from childhood and when we get to the angst filled adolescence ages, our self-esteem is inextricably tied to how we think we stack up to the physical ideal. Coming to sexual maturity when you already have a distorted body image is a recipe for long-term agony. And it’s not just a psychological problem. How can we tell a teenage girl it’s her imagination that boys aren’t asking her out and other girls are being mean to her because she’s packing extra pounds, when we know it’s not her imagination? By the time young women reach their twenties there are two groups; one group obsesses over being overweight and feels miserable and the other, of which my loved one is a member, obsesses over staying skinny and feels relived yet constantly fearful. Both groups spend an inordinate amount of valuable time thinking about how much they weigh and that’s sad. Vinita Nair of CBS This Morning did an excellent piece last month on the ideal body image as it is manifested in models and how that affects what young women see in themselves. Nair states that there is a “push to regulate appearance and size in magazines” but juxtaposes that with stats on eating disorders. She also asks the question, “what size is realistic?” Good question. Realistic for who, where and at what stage in their lives?
I’m not thin and I’m not a kid anymore. I’m also not naïve. I know that its human nature to make assumptions based on how a person presents physically. So I know that we older women don’t get to leave the problem behind once we reach a certain age. For a long time I wondered why I wasn’t getting any hits on the old folks dating sites. It finally dawned on me that even the few older men who want older women want beautiful and skinny older women. Also, I talked in my last post about losing my primary care doctor. She admonished me at every visit about my weight and sternly ticked off the health problems my extra poundage would cause. I always felt that I was being finger-wagged by a skinny woman. My new doctor didn’t mention my weight once at my first appointment. Instead of fat shaming me, she talked to me about the medical issues I already have, like high blood pressure, and how my weight factors into addressing them.She is not as thin as the other doctor but she isn’t overweight either. Interestingly, she is African-American and I wonder how much cultural factors play into ideal weight perception.
wikimedia
In this society the prevalent standard of beauty is of a Caucasian. The blond, blue-eyed, thin women were the cream of the crop for a long time.
Blond and blue-eyed is not naturally achievable in some ethnic groups
and neither is being rail thin.
After all this thinking about it, I’ve decided to leave my skinny-and-loving-it girl alone because she’s just calling it the way most people in this country see it. And, full disclosure, I’m on a diet right now. I’m using one of the many fitness apps designed to remind me of what my ideal body should look like . I tell everyone I’m doing it for my health.
Stop Along The Way 