Charity Sunday: Team Beans Infant Brain Tumor Fund

 

First, I am going to share the letter from Francesca's parents.

Help us fight childhood brain cancer for Beans

Today should be Francesca’s third birthday.

March 11, 2020 was the happiest day of our lives, getting to start a new exciting adventure with our first baby girl. Sadly, Beans got just nine short months on this Earth. 

We would love your support in honoring Francesca’s third birthday with a donation of $11 or more to the Team Beans Infant Brain Tumor Fund’s team in the Pan Mass Challenge. 

We try to honor her and remember her everyday. She should be running around and talking and getting ready to start school. Sadly, infant brain cancer stole that life from her that she should have gotten to live. 

We’ve set a goal of $150,000 for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute - and would love your support to hit it and help us pass $3 million raised for infant brain tumor research!

Donate here:

https://profile.pmc.org/AK0302

Regardless of the number of comments, I intend to donate $11 to the Team Beans fund.

I am sharing a snippet from the memoir/workbook that I have been trying to create for years. Writing fiction is challenging. Revealing my own vulnerabilities is difficult in a different way. I discover time and again that most people don't understand what it is to live with a brain that works differently, and most of them don't want to. 

So, why in the world would I continue putting my truth out there?

Because I believe there are still young people whose neurological and cognitive differences and reactions to trauma are being misinterpreted and/or ignored. I want them to know it isn't their fault. So, here we go with a little snippet from my maybe memoir/workbook.

I used to hate the child I was. “What a little fuckup!” I thought. “If she could have just paid attention and done things ‘right,’ I’d be much further along in life!”

I now wish I could go back in time and reveal what I know now to my younger self. I wish I could hug her and let her howl out all her rage and pain. I’ve lived close to six decades and typing these words bring tears to my eyes. The world let that child down, my adult self included. It’s later than it should be, but now I’m trying to give her the understanding she missed out on.

~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~

Free use image from Open Clipart Vectors

http://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com

Charity Sunday: The Rosacea Foundation

 

Since I'm a contrary cuss, I'm gonna scare all y'all fuckers right outta the starting gate. The ugly mug above is mine. I always look like I'm about to cut a bitch in any selfie I take. My attitude when I took this hideous picture was actually neutral. I was thinking something like, "well, fuck, I got my entire massive pumpkin head in the shot and there isn't a booger hanging out of my nose or anything, so it'll do."

When I started getting rashes over my cheeks and nose, my initial thought was "shit, I have lupus on top of all my damn endocrine problems. Figures." However, the labs revealed I don't have lupus.

My PA initially thought I was having an eczema flare-up. In fairness, this was during the height of the pandemic and I was doing telehealth visits, so she wasn't seeing my face up close and in person. Once she saw me in person, she could see right away that I had rosacea rather than eczema.

I have the type 1 presentation of rosacea, which is a persistent centralized rash and flaking skin, although sometimes I have outbreaks of pustules, which are really fun. Unlike teenage acne, there's no popping these suckers, no matter how much one may wish to because they're damn painful. 

Many people think of rosacea as being a mild rash that goes away with the application of a little cream, but sometimes it causes skin thickening and can even affect the eyes. It's a crap disease and I hate it. It makes me feel even more self-conscious than I already do, what with all the people in the world who feel like it's their duty to point out that I don't check the "hottie" boxes. Do these fuckers think I'm incapable of looking in a mirror and seeing that I'm not young, thin, or pretty? Fuck the hell off.

Just in case anyone missed it, I'm also angry. And sweary. 

It would make me super gleeful if someone found a cure for rosacea. I don't expect one in my lifetime because I did something bad in one of my other lifetimes, so I don't get to have nice stuff. But because I'd like it if someone in the future didn't have to put up with this crap, I'm donating a dollar to the National Rosacea Society for every comment I receive on this darling little post.

https://www.rosacea.org/donate

As for writing, I took part in the Sixfold.org competition in May and I wish I hadn't. It only served to remind me that my writing seriously lacks any semblance of commercial appeal, which I really don't give any fucks about most of the time. It's just that it would be nice to have something go my way for once. 

I titled the suite of poems I entered for the poetry side of the competition Secrets of the Soul. I'm thinking about giving these poems away to subscribers of my newsletter in July. 

https://bit.ly/NaughtyNetherworldNews

I guess I'll share a poem now along with a critique I received from a Sixfold participant whom I'll call Davy Wavy.

I call this ornery little gem Opposing Forces.

Opposing Forces

 

Senior and Junior are the best at spending

Money that they have saved from others

By not paying what they owe

By duping the gullible

By stealing from children’s charities

 

On New Year's Day, Senior tries to French kiss a woman not his wife

Her grimace shows that she is flustered and disgusted

She stifles a caterwaul and summons a taxi

 

As the fireworks fill the air with rockets' red glare

Junior, drunk on champagne and sporting an unflattering mustache

Tenaciously tries to please Senior with his latest half-baked idea

Senior ignores his sycophant son

As he trolls the party for a new target for his unwanted affections

Davy had this to say about the poem.

This poem is too preachy and obvious. Instead of stereotypes, why not give your two principal “characters” some human complexity? 

I dunno, Davy. Maybe because the poem was meant to be obvious. Maybe because its characters are cartoonishly awful. Maybe because this is the way I've observed them to act in real life. It isn't on me to grant human complexity to a pair of entitled fuckfaces who conduct themselves without the smallest shred of human decency.

I wonder if Davy would like this cartoonist to give their subject some "human complexity" too.

As for Senior's spawn, I can't help it if they're walking caricatures with all the nuanced humanity of the Walking Dead. 

I suppose I shouldn't be lazy, though. I really could try harder to give them some human complexity.

Oh, fuck it. It's not my job.

I like this image. It looks a little bit something like me and has my attitude too.

Davy's entitled to his opinions on my poetry. I really don't give a fuck. I'm just angry right now.

On the other hand, I thought Brittany's observations:

I don't know if it is a choice to lack punctuation in your work but I think if you could tighten it up and add some punctuation it would actually add more power to your words.

and Melissa's suggestions:

Stolen Flight is a little melodramatic in word choice (e.g. the image of the raven reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe, and the word 'soul' is used more than once). I'd try playing around with different word choices for this poem.

Were useful. I like the Poe-esque quality of the poem in question, but she's right that consulting a thesaurus for an alternative to reusing "soul" would be helpful.

I haven't even been able to make myself look at what people thought of my story entry. Sometimes it's more important to just keep going. I want to hone my craft, but I'm not going to even work on my craft if I'm convinced that everything I write is crap. 

Somewhere there's this thing called "balance." 

I think I'm more likely to be abducted by aliens than to find this elusive "balance" thing.

~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~

Image by Anja-#pray for ukraine# #helping hands# stop the war from Pixabay

"Klaatu barada nikto, Owl?"

http://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com

Charity Sunday March 2022: American Art Therapy Association

 

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

For this month's Charity Sunday I will donate $1 for every comment received to the American Art Therapy Association. https://arttherapy.org/ 

The American Art Therapy Association (AATA) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit, non-partisan, professional, and educational organization dedicated to the growth and development of the art therapy profession. Founded in 1969, the American Art Therapy Association is one of the world’s leading art therapy membership organizations.

If that's all you want to know, then feel free to skip my forthcoming blather and leave your "I Was Here" in the comments. On the other hand, if you are bored or otherwise interested in what spews forth from my cross-wired, scrambled, and otherwise askew brain, stick around. You either won't regret it or you will.

You can consider the forthcoming brain spew to be part of a WIP. It has been my goal for many years now to unleash a helpful (or not entirely helpful) autobiography/book of suggestions for developing the confidence not only to create but to unleash your creations on an unsuspecting world of people who don't understand you, don't like you, and don't care about you or your work while hoping to reach that select few who will appreciate it. 

I have started and stopped this project many times. I think I'm about ready to pull the trigger on the starting gun and let it run wild. You can read one of the potential chapters below. Or not. It's up to you.

https://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com/

Here is a link to the other posts. I didn't end up on the list because I'm a stupid asshole and forgot to put myself on there.

In my younger days, I enjoyed mind-altering drugs quite a lot. Anything that allowed me to forget my despised self and my shitty reality was a welcome companion. My party pals thought I was a bit nuts when I said that I'd rather sit in the corner drinking a six-pack by myself than hook up with a random dude for meaningless sex, but I didn't really give a rat's ass what they thought. I liked my substances, and it felt like my substances liked me. 

There are things that I'm starting to understand now that so many decades have passed between me and those days of smoke and drink and the occasional pill or hit of acid. I really hated myself and I was dying to escape the garbage reality that was my life. I wouldn't have minded if I'd literally died. 

I was self-harming, and I made a half-assed suicide attempt that landed me on the psych ward for a weekend. While on the psych ward, I received lots of compassionate help, learned that I was a wonderfully worthwhile young lady, and never touched alcohol or drugs again.

Psych! I'm just messing with you.

The truth is the staff on the psych ward psychologically abused me and I learned I couldn't trust fuckers in the mental health profession. They were more screwed-up than me while thinking they were better than me, plus they were assholes. I was right back to partying as soon as I could get out of the house and I still hated myself. 

There was a bitch of a nurse who told me I was a freak and a freak like me could never be normal.

The clown of a shrink diagnosed me as a "hysterical neurotic."

I was later diagnosed with "borderline personality disorder." Allow me to tell you what I think of the "borderline personality disorder" diagnosis. It is overwhelmingly applied to women and girls. It is the modern "hysterical neurotic." Every girl or woman branded with the "borderline personality disorder" label is struggling with unresolved trauma. 

I doubt that I would be diagnosed with "borderline personality disorder" these days, but it isn't because I've been "cured" of "borderline personality disorder." You can't be "cured" of an ailment that doesn't exist.

So, if I didn't have "borderline personality disorder" and I wasn't a "hysterical neurotic," what was going on?

I had unresolved complex PTSD. I had been misunderstood by my family from birth and abused by my schoolmates from the first day I set foot in a classroom. My mother always told me what an awful baby I was because I never slept more than two hours at a time. When I was a year and a half old, my clown of a pediatrician prescribed phenobarbital. My mother told me I was awake for three days straight after taking it. 

Granted, it was the 1960s so giving a hard drug to a toddler wasn't unheard of, but I don't care. What kind of ass clown gives phenobarbital to a toddler?

My parents came from the school of thought that if you hold a child too much or respond to them too quickly when they cry, you'll spoil them. They never beat me but were quick to whack me on the backside for the kind of mistakes that every kid makes, such as dropping a glass of water. 

From my earliest memories, I was always extremely high-strung, petrified of making a mistake. I was so anxious that I sometimes had painful muscle spasms in my neck. I vomited in secret almost every day because my anxiety made me sick to my stomach. I felt like I was bad, wrong, and a mistake.

When I was in my late thirties, a compassionate counselor diagnosed me as having type 2 bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She was incorrect and in retrospect had a case of seeing type 2 bipolar everywhere because her adopted son had the condition. However, the diagnosis seemed to make sense. 

I was on a constant emotional rollercoaster. I had a history of impulsive behavior. I had (and still have) difficulty with housekeeping. I could keep a job if I landed one that worked with my idiosyncrasies but otherwise, my work history was spotty. I enjoyed a job for a while and then got bored with it and started calling in. I would fall into severe periods of depression because I was so ashamed of my inability to be normal.

I developed type 2 diabetes at age 49, which didn't surprise me because the rest of my endocrine system is pretty much a trash fire. When I was in my early 50s, my endocrine problems plus my many years of working physically demanding jobs started catching up to me. 

By the time I was 52 years old, I could no longer work in the healthcare field. I delivered groceries for a while until I severely injured the median nerve in my left arm. For a little over a year, I delivered food for a cool little delivery-only kitchen in LoDo (Denver). Then my son and I had the opportunity to move to a house in a literal ghost town on the northeastern plains of Colorado and we took it. I applied for disability.

I had been taking a low dose of Lithium Orotate for years. I didn't want to take Lithium Carbonate because of the side effects and because the therapeutic dosage is extremely close to toxic levels of Lithium. I learned the hard way that SSRIs and I do not get along. They cause me to have psychotic reactions. So I don't take psych meds despite presenting with a major mental health condition. 

While going through the process to qualify for disability, I could not afford Lithium Orotate. I realized I don't have bipolar disorder when I experienced no mood swings without the supplement. 

In the past, my anxiety about work consumed me. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to get enough sleep, worried that I'd oversleep, worried that I'd be late, worried that I'd fuck up on the job, worried that I'd fall asleep during my shift, worried about money, and worried about everything else I was doing wrong. It was exhausting. When I no longer had to worry about punching a time clock or working a job I could finally examine certain events in my life.

I knew now that I never had bipolar disorder and the more I read about borderline personality disorder, the more I realized that it was a bullshit sexist diagnosis. I also started questioning the obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnosis. I started learning about ADHD in adults and realized that all along my family, my peers, and my teachers had scolded and shamed me for behaviors consistent with ADHD.

I never considered that I could have ADHD because my behaviors didn't fit the stereotypical disruptive boy who can't sit still model. Obviously, I wasn't a boy. I was a well-behaved girl. I was shy and quiet. I sat at the back of the class. I doodled a lot totally took notes during the teacher's lecture. I was a B student who turned in my assignments on time and totally never waited until the last minute to do them--nope, not me! 

Part of this statement is true. I turned in my assignments on time. I was a great bullshitter and could determine what teachers wanted in a paper, so I did well in classes like English and social sciences. I did well enough in biology but chemistry and physics confounded me. I had trouble with math beyond basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and I still do. If the world depended on my being able to complete a simple Sudoku puzzle, we'd all be fucked.

As an adult, I had difficulty paying attention during meetings. Office jobs weren't a good fit for me. I did better with jobs that had a physical or technological component. Since women weren't encouraged to go into fields like IT, I ended up doing a series of low-paying jobs such as bundling papers at the local newspaper for dispatch to the mountain towns, working in the cafeteria at CU Boulder, or working at an Orange Julius clone in the nearby mall. 

Eventually, I got sucked into working as a nurse's aide at the long-term care center where my mother worked, and I hated it. Working in this hell hole while pregnant led to my 119th nervous breakdown. I was an extremely troubled young woman, but I got no help. I got scolded for being a fuckup and threatened with the loss of my job.

I am now learning by trial and error how to navigate life with ADHD without taking medication. I don't do well with medications that affect my mind. I long ago got into the habit of always putting my keys in the same place. Prior to doing this, I was always misplacing my keys. Using techniques like this makes life with ADHD more manageable.

Being scolded and berated for having difficulty with focusing and time management does not help people with ADHD, and I don't think that medication is necessary in most cases. Some people swear by medication, and if you are one of those people, by all means, keep taking it. I'm not a doctor. I just know that for me, medications that mess with my brain and nervous system are a no-go. 

I don't respond well to medications or to standard methods of therapy. I don't like feeling like I'm being judged. The few times that I've engaged in what one might deem "art therapy," I've found it very helpful. On one occasion, I painted a self-portrait using only primary colors and basic shapes. I loved the Picasso-esque outcome. Like me, this portrait has a resting bitch face that never rests. After painting this picture I felt relaxed, hopeful, and, dare I say it, I felt happy. 

This is part of the reason I can't only write for submission to publications. If I'm constantly being judged I start to wither. Above all else, my writing must be right for me. Writing is the one thing that I'm consistent with. I don't really know how to do anything else; it's write or die. I'm sure that some people who read my writing wish I'd die. They'll get their wish someday, but for the moment, I'm still here, and since only the good die young, I may be around for a while.

It's time to change the way we approach mental health therapy. Most psychological conditions are maladaptive coping mechanisms rather than organic brain disorders. Conditions such as ADHD result from brains wired differently than the expected norm. These aren't "bad brains" but result in different learning styles than those of a person with a "neurotypical" brain. 

It's time to recognize and work with our differences rather than expecting everyone to conform to the same standards. Trying to fit into a mold that doesn't suit you never ends well. In the end, something has to give. Either you break the mold (please, break the mold!) or trying to conform to the mold destroys you.

~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~

Free use image from Open Clipart Vectors

The Icky, Sticky, Nit-Picky Legalese If You Please (Or Don't Please)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work is the intellectual property of Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp and Naughty Netherworld Press.

Reblogging is acceptable on platforms that allow it. Odysee’s reblog function is called repost, which makes things confusing since reposting is considered a no-no on most platforms. It’s fine to share the post using the repost function on Odysee. It is not okay to copy-paste the material into a new post.

Sharing a link to the post is acceptable.

Quoting portions of the post for educational or review purposes is acceptable if proper credit is given.

Come check out Readers Roost, the online book store featuring works by indie and small press authors. Discover your next great read at the Roost! It's the link you need when you wanna read.

https://bit.ly/ReadersRoost

Buy me a coffee

http://bit.ly/NNPCoffee

Or buy me a coffee here

http://bit.ly/NNPKOFI

Join me on Patreon!

Subscribe for as little as $1 per month.

http://bit.ly/NNPPatreon

Get the latest literary happenings and slices of life in your inbox! Now with a poem or chapter from an unpublished WIP every month. You may find yourself in possession of a fabulous rarity that would otherwise be relegated to history!

http://bit.ly/NaughtyNetherworldNews

My Misunderstood Monkey Mind #8Sunday #MFRWHooks #SnipSun #CharitySunday

 

Image by chenspec from Pixabay

My Charity Sunday post this month features a potential chapter from the autobiography/motivational book that I've intended to publish for years. Here are a few sentences to give you an idea of what you're getting into.

In my younger days, I enjoyed mind-altering drugs quite a lot. Anything that allowed me to forget my despised self and my shitty reality was a welcome companion. My party pals thought I was a bit nuts when I said that I'd rather sit in the corner drinking a six-pack by myself than hook up with a random dude for meaningless sex, but I didn't really give a rat's ass what they thought. I liked my substances, and it felt like my substances liked me. 

There are things that I'm starting to understand now that so many decades have passed between me and those days of smoke and drink and the occasional pill or hit of acid. I really hated myself and I was dying to escape the garbage reality that was my life. I wouldn't have minded if I'd literally died. 

I was self-harming, and I made a half-assed suicide attempt that landed me on the psych ward for a weekend. While on the psych ward, I received lots of compassionate help, learned that I was a wonderfully worthwhile young lady, and never touched alcohol or drugs again.

Psych! I'm just messing with you.

If you liked that crap, continue reading the rest of the post by following the link below. 

http://crazycreativescheerleadingcamp.blogspot.com/2022/03/charity-sunday-march-2022-american-art.html

Every comment I receive on the linked post translates to a buck for the American Art Therapy Association. Support independent weirdness and a great cause too!

Don't feel like you have to leave a comment on both this post and the Charity Sunday post. One or the other is fine.

~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~

Free use image from Open Clipart Vectors

Ornery Owl's mind is filled with the seeds of ideas. 

Sometimes they all blossom at once.

Hop to It

https://mfrwbookhooks.blogspot.com/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/401643826588474

http://wewriwa.blogspot.com

Come As You Are Party + Charity Sunday: Association for Size Diversity and Health

 

Free-use image from Pixabay

Content warning for brief mention of self-harm and suicide ideation

What if neither of the bodies depicted in the image above is "bad" or "wrong?"

What if they are both just bodies?

This is the concept promoted by the Association for Size Diversity and Health.

https://asdah.org/

The Association for Size Diversity and Health adheres to the principals created by Dr. Lindo Bacon in their book, Health at Every Size. 

https://bit.ly/HAESCIE

A full explanation of the HAES approach can be found here.

https://asdah.org/health-at-every-size-haes-approach/

The Health At Every Size® (HAES®) approach is a continuously evolving alternative to the weight-centered approach to treating clients and patients of all sizes. It is also a movement working to promote size-acceptance, to end weight discrimination, and to lessen the cultural obsession with weight loss and thinness. The HAES approach promotes balanced eating, life-enhancing physical activity, and respect for the diversity of body shapes and sizes.

Speaking as someone who tried to hate myself thin for 33 years to no avail, the diet approach did me more harm than good. My thyroid fried itself as I entered my teens and I developed PCOS. I have been treated shabbily for my size not only by the general public but by those who are supposed to "do no harm." 

When I was in nursing school, size-shaming was not just overlooked, it was actively encouraged. 

Even my current GP, who does not harp on weight loss and generally treats me with respect, honed in on weight as the focus for why I should increase my dosage of thyroid medication, which I am reluctant to do because too much thyroid medication causes my blood pressure to rise and my pulse to race. 

She suggested adding in another blood pressure medication, an idea which I gave a hard pass. I am already at the maximum dosage of two blood pressure medications, Irbesartan and Amlodipine. I can't take ACE inhibitors, which make me cough, or beta blockers, which exacerbate my asthma. I refuse to take a diuretic because I already have to pee all the time thanks to diabetes, another gift from my trash fire endocrine system.

Whenever the focus is placed on my weight as opposed to my overall health, I go into a shame spiral. I starve myself. I don't want to go out in public. All the hard work I've done to accept myself goes to shit as I once again start imagining cutting the adipose tissue away from my body, calling myself a worthless, fat piece of shit, and thinking that the world would be a better place if I killed myself.

I wrote about how it feels to be a large person in a world that loathes large people in the following poem, which you can read if you care to.

https://poetryofthenetherworld.blogspot.com/2020/11/i-eat-myself.html

Ragen Chastain, creator of the Dances With Fat blog, wisely observes that people don't take care of the things that they hate, and that includes their bodies. Teaching people to hate their bodies is emotional abuse, not "tough love." If shame worked, there would be no addicts, no alcoholics, no fat people, nobody with mental illness, and no smokers.

A person's size is more complex than the "calories in, calories out" model proposes. One can't determine anything about a fat person's food intake, level of physical activity, medications, or medical conditions by their size. The only thing one can determine is that the person is that size.

Even medical professionals who agree that many larger people have endocrine problems still deem it acceptable to shame these same people for their size. I can't wrap my head around that.

I told my PA that the numbers I care about are my blood pressure and my labs, including my blood glucose. I said that discussions of my size or weight are off the table. 

I am more likely to comply with treatment protocols if I'm not mired in self hate.

Emotional abuse doesn't work to mold people into what others think they ought to be.

Imagine that.

I will be donating a dollar to ASDAH for every comment on this post. 

As this post discusses a sensitive topic, I would appreciate that comments be respectful or not made at all. As someone's mother once said, if you can't say something nice, don't say anything.

My share for today is my entry for Day 25 in my perilous diary, Breaking Free from My Addiction to Validation. This journey has not been without it's setbacks. I am obviously still fighting my demons, and they win more often than I would like them to. 

Day 25

October 29, 2021

Spirit of the Universe, please set aside everything I think I know about myself, about my story, about my need for validation, and especially about you, Universe, so that I may have an open mind and a new experience with myself, with my story, with my need for validation, and with you, Universe. Please help me to see the truth. Amen.

I’m going to say something shocking.

You don’t need to “love yourself.”

If you’re like me, self-loathing is behind many of the difficulties in your life. I have trouble asserting myself and standing up for myself. It is very difficult for me to form bonds that go deeper than the superficial. I don’t trust other people and I tend to put myself last. The problem with the median nerve in my left arm stems from the fact that I kept pushing myself well beyond the warning signs that something was going wrong until one day I was in excruciating pain and could no longer work.

If you don’t stand up for yourself, people will walk all over you.

However, if you’re like me, you just can’t hang with the idea that you need to “love yourself.”

When people tell me that, it makes me cringe.

The only person who can say that without it making me cringe is Ru Paul.

Therefore, I advise you not to focus on “loving” yourself.

Accept yourself. Respect yourself.

You are as good as anyone else. Nobody deserves to be taken advantage of or treated like crap.

You don’t need to believe that you’re beautiful. I’ll never be able to think that I’m beautiful. Honestly, the idea feels kind of creepy to me. “Beautiful” has never done me any favors. It’s a lie that guys who want to get laid without caring about who they’re hurting tell.

I once saw a post on Tumblr that said something along the lines of “I don’t think my stretch marks are beautiful. They aren’t ‘tiger stripes.’ But they are human and deserve to be treated with respect.”

That is what I’m talking about.

I will never think that my too-small eyes with their skimpy eyelashes are beautiful, although I’ve always liked the color even though it’s a moss-green rather than a scintillating emerald green.

I will never think that my chipmunk-cheeked face is beautiful.

I can’t see my double chin as beautiful.

I don’t think that my gray hair is beautiful although I’ve always liked the thick texture (except that it’s a real pain in the ass to take care of) and I do like the way it looks right after I’ve applied the silver dye that I use to give it a bit of pop.

I don’t think that my big ass, chunky legs, jelly belly, or saggy boobs are beautiful.

And no, I don’t think that my stretch marks are “beautiful” or “tiger stripes.”

What I do think is that people don’t need to be “beautiful” or “fuckable” to deserve to be treated with common decency.

This old, fat broad deserves to be treated with the same levels of common decency as someone half her age and/or half her size.

You don’t need to think I’m beautiful and fuck off with “seeing the potential” in me. That shit is just creepy. Honestly, nobody wants to be made into someone’s project.

You don’t need to “love yourself” or think that you’re “beautiful” to be worthy of respect and dignity, and that includes from yourself.

I have a graphic that I use in blog posts with reasonable frequency. It says: “the pressure to be perfect is purely for profit.”

Who is benefiting from convincing people (women in particular) that they need to be a certain size or look a certain way, or they are worthless?

The beauty and diet industries have perpetuated this trash for years. They benefit from our self-loathing. They encourage it. It’s time to hit back and knock these multi-billion-dollar bullies on their asses.

Two of the items in my son’s and my recent food bank allotment were Smart Ones turkey dinners. These things were awful. There were four tiny morsels of turkey in a weird-tasting runny gravy with watery garlic-flavored mashed potatoes on the side. Aside from the fact that this isn’t enough food for an adult, it was entirely unpalatable.

I used to sink a lot of money into diet frozen dinners and shakes that left me ravenously hungry an hour later. This crap prompted binge eating because starvation does that.

The only diet you need is the Fuck It Diet.

https://bit.ly/FIDCIE

I eat many more healthy foods and binge a lot less since I stopped dieting.

This doesn’t mean that my story has a Goldilocks ending where I magically become the “just right” weight and the handsome prince comes and swoops me off my now-svelte feet and we live happily ever after. I’m still fat and there is no prince, not that I even want one. But I am healthier and feel better at the size I am. Not that this is a measure of my moral worth. As Ragen Chastain says, nobody owes it to anybody else to be what they consider “healthy.”

Spirit of the Universe, please help me to accept myself at whatever size I am and wherever I am in life. Help me to discern what I really want to focus on in life and to follow my dreams.

~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~

Fat and Ornery

Free-use image from Open Clipart Vectors on Pixabay

The Icky, Sticky, Nit-Picky Legalese If You Please (Or Don't Please)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work is the intellectual property of Naughty Netherworld Press/Poetry of the Netherworld.

Reblogging is acceptable on platforms that allow it. Odysee’s reblog function is called repost, which makes things confusing since reposting is considered a no-no on most platforms. It’s fine to share the post using the repost function on Odysee. It is not okay to copy-paste the material into a new post.

Sharing a link to the post is acceptable.

Quoting portions of the post for educational or review purposes is acceptable if proper credit is given.

Want more?

Get it here!

http://bit.ly/morennp