Lyrically Speaking

I recently purchased jeans from Universal Standard and can I tell you how excited I was to receive the jeans over the weekend. I love jeans. I have always been the kind of girl to wear jeans and a t-shirt. Jeans and a button up. Jeans and a tank top or sweater. I love jeans more than any other pant a person could wear (Including Pajama pants.)  I wore one pair of jeans for about 3-4 hours before actually going to look in the full length mirror at them. What I saw zapped the joy I have from jeans from me in an instant. The problem was not the jeans, though they were slightly big and I constantly needed to pull them up (a belt is needed, but belts around the waist are a problem for a different post.) What caught my eye was instantly the flaw in the way my body wore the jeans. The low hanging stomach on one side was nothing compared to the fact that my body hangs significantly lower on the right side of my body. I do not know when this started happening, but suddenly I was signifi...

  Last night on Facebook I posted an image the requested people answer the following question Which side of me did you meet first? I posted it with the caption “I might regret this…”   But honestly, I didn’t. It gave me some awesome reassurance, but it also gave me A LOT to think about because there were some answers I didn’t expect to see. Specifically RUDE from people I went to high school with. I figured I was pretty invisible in High School for the most part. My graduating class was over 800 students and I was only involved in one thing, the school Newspaper, but a lot of my writing was opinion and entertainment reviews. So really, not enough of anything to REALLY make a point. But I am starting to think I might have been an ass hole in High School. About 10 years ago or so a friend had mentioned that one of her friends said I was a jerk in high school because she claims I called her an asshole once. Which, me now. Yeah, I definitely will call someone an ass hole if they...

One of my biggest faults is that I can often be too forgiving of people when they emotionally or physically harm me. But I would also wager that it is one of my better traits as well. I see the good in people, even when I can’t see it in myself. I see and seek out other peoples light like a heat or sun lamp. The hope is that their warmth and light will make me shine a little brighter. As an empath, I have a hard time separating my feelings and emotions from others. It’s why I find being around people so incredibly draining. I need time away in order to sort through my own emotions, but I also need people to fully thrive.  This can be a really hard balancing act because it often leaves me open to be taken advantage of and thus I become more standoffish when meeting new people. Being around my energy comes at a price of me taking a moment to fully assess you as a person before opening myself up.  It’s what every friend I have always says.  So I thought it was really interes...

I often find it difficult to exist in the Body Positive and Fat Activist communities because I find that the people who are given the microphone or spotlight are the people who already fit into what is considered an acceptable fat.  This is not to diminish the struggles that anyone who falls on the plus-sized category but more to draw attention to the struggle that many of us who do not fit this aesthetic fall into and that while there are crusades to get brands to be more inclusive in their sizing, it seems that we area easily satisfied with a company that decides to offer up to US Size 18, because they’re including the whole 3-4 sizes of Plus into it. The sizes that are still considered “acceptable” fat.  Me (right) Age 10.   My whole life I have toted the line of “unacceptable” fat. When I was in junior high or middle school, I was shopping in women’s plus sized clothing. My options were extremely ruffled shirts and textures or the oppressive woven polyester that lined...

Five-years ago, June 22,   my father died unexpectedly and you would think that with my line of work death would be a lot easier to handle as it something constantly talked about and discussed. The reality is, nothing prepares anyone to lose a loved one and no one can tell you how grief will be handled.  My dad and I (I'm around 6) For the most part I deal with a bit of object permanence in that if something isn’t in my view every day or consistently I tend to forget it exists until something reminds me. But my body always knows. My body remembers these traumas and my body responds accordingly. I can tell you that every March I get blue around the 24 th of the month. Even if my life is going well and I am not actively in a depression, my body feels the loss of my grandmother and the ache of her absence.   And in June around the 20-25 th of the month, by body feels the loss of my father again, even if I am not actively in a state of depression and even if I don’t acti...

I haven’t quite figured out how to take certain things back and claim the ownership. Like the term, Super-Sized Big Beautiful Women (SSBBW) which apparently I am. What I should be doing:      Delete.      Block.      Move on. What I Am doing:      Allowing it to permeate my brain and simmer angrily inside me. So let me allow myself a moment to open the metaphorical vein and bleed it out because I can’t seem to shake it and I can’t seem to put in into the category of words that I have taken back and used as my own. Words like fat, chunky, or chubby. They seem to easily switch to the side of good. SSBBW, implies a lack of person to me. It’s a term used in search engines that I find to dehumanize and reduce women to objects. Objectification of fat people seems to be my biggest “trigger” in any situation where I go from feeling good, to feeling pissed off. It’s not something endearing and I liken it to the backhanded comp...

When I was 18 I moved to Bloomington Illinois to live with my Aunt. It was the first time I had ever seen so many people of color (POC) in the same place as me. I grew up in Arizona and the ethnic make-up of my childhood was more so Hispanic, Native American and white people. That’s not to say that Hispanic and Native American’s are not people of color, but I mean black people in general. There were of course, black people, but there were far less and none in any of my social circles. So moving to Illinois and working with so many POC was, for lack of a better phrase, culture shock and culture admiration for me. It’s when the white bubble I lived in truly popped. When I say cultural admiration, I mean that in the child-like wonder and excitement to learn more. Outside of history classes about slavery and civil rights, I knew very little about black culture and I wanted to know more. But I was also was very naive falling into the same cultural appropriation of wanting to touch one...

A friend of mine who is also a bigger women shared with me that she felt that in order for fat women to be able to go into the dating world, they would have to deal with some sort of fetishism to an extent. And I silently agreed with her while my inner turmoil was brewing a new batch of resentment and anger at the world and society that I have to live in. I have talked hours with other chubby girl friends about the stigma that is placed both on the larger women and the men who date them. We are an open “Oh, so that’s what you’re INTO. Got it.” As if this preference makes you less or weird. The stigma can by dramatic in the sense that I often warn people on dating profiles that I am not the Trophy girlfriend their friends will be jealous of. I no longer have time to cater to the fetishism that surrounds my body and caving to the desires of men who objectify women for their own needs and often this makes me think that I may be alone forever. I obviously understand that...