I feel like I’ve been to the moon and back. The last 4 days have been a mind and heart-bending trip. Catharsis is an incredible thing. It has the power to burn through pain and reveal the soul. via Wikipedia I’ve made a shift. A shift is like a decision except it isn’t only an intellectual choice. It’s also emotional and paradigm changing. Here it is: I’m a Body Love Activist. This work/transformation is so huge for me, that I will have to share it. And in sharing it, I will end up climbing on soap-boxes, ranting on occasion, and constantly revisiting the message so I might as well sign on to be an activist. I’m late to this party. There are incredible women out there who have been blazing this trail for a while. (Yes. They’re all women. Isn’t that curious?) I’d like to share some websites and resources I discovered online on Friday when I was desperately searching for someone who could help me through the pain. Not someone who could “fix” me – someone who understood and could help me move out of the shame and self-loathing. The first, Golda Poretsky, HHC of Body Love Wellness. I downloaded her ebook, Stop Dieting Now, and purchased her Body Love Meditations. I did the Gratitude Meditation this morning and it was delicious. I also read through most of her
It has been a rough morning. Very rough. Downright icky and painful. My usual mode of operation – to ignore it and hope it will go away and, if it doesn’t, to pretend it isn’t there – completely failed me. The truth is I have been failing me for quite awhile now. Because I’m a bully. I bully and torture myself pretty much continuously. It’s made me strong like steel. I can bully myself and, at the same time, ignore the bully (pretend the bully who is me doesn’t exist) for incredibly long periods of time. Years. But it never stops. And the facade came crashing down this morning. And, I’ve been crying a lot. You may be thinking. “Whoa, there Kirsten. This sounds personal. What does this have to do with performance and shining and sharing your creativity with the world? Get back on track kiddo and leave me out of this.” My answer: This has everything to do with shining and sharing my creativity with the world. It has everything to do with what holds me back from doing that in the way I want to do it. And I decided to share it here because I’m guessing that there are other performers and creatives out there who may find themselves in the same place at times. Maybe not on this particular topic: body drama. But, whatever their
Many of my posts are spontaneous. I think of something I want to write about, I happen to have access to the tools I need and I write. I was planning on writing something else today about my disintegrated organization and priority system and the re-imagining of a new system, but that excitement will have to wait. I’ve written about my body image issues before. Links to those posts are here: Body Image, Eating and Creativity Perfection is Death This is another one of those, but different
I read a horrible story yesterday and the sadness and ickiness and anger it generated is sticking with me for some reason. It was a story about a young woman who I went to college with. She was beautiful, lots of fun and, I thought, a little eccentric – but exciting. She was fun to hang around with. I remember walking downtown with her to get some TCBY and she carried a parasol – not an umbrella – a parasol. Her name was Margaret Trigg and she died in Bellevue in 2004. Here’s her story: The Perfect Margaret Trigg: The performance artist and sitcom actress would do anything to be a star, including making herself her own lethal science project. The story frightens me because is wakes up that part of me that can only be called self-loathing. It brings up a lot of anger about the industry that is “showbiz”. And it reminds me why I gave up on my acting career when I was 29. I couldn’t handle it. The industry took something I loved and turned it into a commodities market in which I felt I had no place
I have been brewing this post for quite awhile and, frankly, I’ve been avoiding it. I want to say from the get-go that this will probably not be the only post on this topic because there is so much to explore. I also want to tell you that I am not an expert on eating disorders or body dysmorphia, but I am experienced. I’m experienced because I live with a skewed body image every day. I’m experienced because I have used food all my life as a substance to stuff down my feelings, desires and self-expression. I think any form of creative expression is an act of exposure
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