Glow
1 shitty thing + 5 amazing things that happened to me this week
It’s always important to take the garbage out first:
A mom who is about my age and lives fairly close to me whom I have never met or encountered decided to send me a hate-filled message here on Facebook with wild untruths. Though I have been trolled so hard in so many ways by all sorts of people for 16 years that I’ve been doing this work in body image on the Internet, it’s still alarming and disarming. It wasn’t a great way to wake up.
Friday night I got invited to speak to a radical body acceptance class in Australia and thanks to the power of the internet I was able to spend an hour via Zoom with a few lovely women talking about my work. Since my stand for self-love went so internationally viral almost ten years ago now I’ve been so lucky to have fans and followers and colleagues from all over the world. They talked about the first time they saw my Hildas & how my bikini pics made one able to put one on finally at the age of 40. They asked about how I raise body positive kids and how to take a selfie and they played my favorite song right now and I talked about how important using no filters has always been to my work in a virtual world increasingly becoming fake. It filled my heart.
In the check out line at Trader Joe’s a woman grabbed my arm and said she had just listened to my podcast interview on No Shame with Rebecca Woolf and she just wanted to tell me she was a big fan and it just moved her so much. I touched her back and said thank you so much for listening to my stories.
I got an email from a group of sixth graders at a local elementary school who had decided to do their final project on body image and in their research discovered that an expert in the field lived here in Boise and reached out. At first they just wanted to interview me but quickly took a big chance to ask if I could come and talk to all 50 kids in the entire grade on my work and how to practice body liberation and I will never say no to kids. Today I shared my top ten easy tips to feel more free in your body and allow others to do the same and they watched my stand for self-love video and asked such good questions about health and how to ask for help if your self-esteem is crumbling. I was honored.
I made homemade lavender shortbread for our spring Death Cafe Boise under the giant legacy gazebo outside at Edwards Greenhouse and got to talk to a small group of strangers about such intimate things. It was sacred as always.
