firecat

If you're maybe noticing that you're older than you used to be, and are feeling sad/angry/confused/worried/frustrated that you haven't accomplished as much as you/other people in your present or past/annoyingly critical voices inside your head think you should have, and if you're maybe feeling something like "I'm not a real grownup like everyone else," and if you're maybe also feeling sad/angry/confused/worried/frustrated that your body isn't working the way it used to, and you're maybe thinking, "if that's true then how am I going to DO all those accomplishments that I/other people/voices in my head think I ought or want to do?", and maybe you're also wondering how are you going to dig out from under the accumulation of habit and procrastination and self-doubt to some sense of satisfaction in your life again, then post this same sentence in your journal.

Friends keep saying stuff like that where I can see it, and I've been feeling it for a while now too. One said it really well in a friends-locked post:

It's been hard for the last some-odd months, with my age catching up to me, not to feel that I've been a continual failure in school, work, and my personal life. ...

I've been trying so hard to hide from my friends -- most of them not very close, even if they were before -- the fact that I'm not in their league in any sense of the word. ...

Come to think of it, I don't do yard work because I'm afraid of being looked at/judged by passersby. I don't do artwork because I'm afraid of ill-judgment and meaningless or worthless praise. This has gotten as bad as it ever was in the worst years of my adolescence. Worse, because I don't have the energy or the twenty years ahead of me to think I have plenty of time yet to pull myself out of it.

It was a revelation to read this, especially the part about "as bad as it ever was in the worst years of my adolescence," because that's exactly what bugs me about the similar feelings I have—"WTF? I thought I was DONE with these feelings of self-consciousness. No one told me they would come back, dammit! I thought 'mid-life crisis' just meant you went out and got your virtual red sports car and had done with it."

When a whole bunch of my friends and acquaintances are having similar uncomfortable feelings, and especially when each one is having these feelings privately and feeling shame about it because it seems like no one else has them, I ask myself whether there's some kind of cultural pressure going on, and I ask myself whether maybe we would do better examining these tendencies and pressures together, so we can figure out where we stand, and which of the beliefs and tendencies to embrace, and which to say pbtpbtpbtpbt!!!! to.

I wonder how that could be accomplished.

Do you have those feelings? Could you use a way to talk about those feelings with other folks who struggle with them?

My Avis rental car (a Ford Taurus) continued to give me trouble throughout the trip to Wiscon and Illinois (it wouldn't start reliably - I usually had to try several times using techniques such as waiting a few seconds to turn the key the final bit, putting on the parking brake, wiggling the shift lever, or dancing on the car hood naked and howling at the moon), but I guess I must have signed up for some special when I made the reservation because I now have codes for 20 songs on iTunes. I've never bought more than 2 or 3 songs on iTunes at a time so I feel like I'm rolling in riches and bits of dead goat.

How am I supposed to know whether I want to buy a book of knitting patterns if I can't see photos of the patterns? The publishers' web sites, Amazon, and the yarn companies' web sites usually show photos of one or maybe even up to six patterns, but most of the books contain lots more patterns than that. Yes, I can go to my LYS* to look at books, but they usually don't have every book I want to look at.


*local yarn store

Big Fat Carnival #3 is up here:
http://vegankid.solidaritydesign.net/2006/06/07/big-fat-carnival-3/

There were some good posts (especially from body impolitic).

I'm glad that there IS such a thing as a Big Fat Carnival, never mind a 3d one (and the 4th is already scheduled). I sure as hell wish I'd had access to ANY critical thought about fat and body size when I was younger. And overall there was a lot of good thought and a lot of good sharing of personal experience.

However, I should not have gone in to read the posts in an emotionally vulnerable mood. I kept getting upset at subtle hatred discomfort/ambivalence about (some kinds of) fat in the posts and less subtle healthism and fat hatred/discomfort/ambivalence in some of the comments.

Things I need to remember before the next time I read a roundup of such posts:

• The concept of "fat acceptance" covers a lot of ground, some of which I find, well, not accepting enough. But everyone has to start somewhere.
• Discussions of fat, body size, body image, eating, and so forth, even when they are presented in a context of acceptance, are not always comfortable for me and don't always conform to my fairly extreme politics on the subject.
• Not all bloggers moderate the contents of their posts and fat acceptance posts sometimes attract fat-hating and healthist comments.

Last night, I started a post discussing the specific parts I found uncomfortable, but I deleted it because I thought it was unfair of me to focus on the negative. I'm still mulling over whether I should make a post along those lines.

WHINGE
WHINGE
WHINGE
WHINGE
WHINGE
WHINGE



As you were.
Nothing serious.

I get frustrated because I want to try out about half the projects but I don't even have time to read all the projects, never mind try them out. Here's one that's easy to try out:

http://www.letterfu.com/index.php

Otherwise I might be a lot more freaked out about having had to spend New Year's Eve at the emergency vet with Angus.
( elimination tmi )