Since I was about 23, I’ve carried around a pair of red denim shorts. They only fit me at my thinnest, my thinnest being mostly drug and starvation induced. Needless to say, they are a kind of metric I always come back to by which I define my body, its acceptance in society, and ultimately, let’s be real, my worth as a human being.
I’ve been talking a lot with my therapist about these shorts and about my body and about my weight. And how I’ve gained weight recently, and how these very important shorts don’t really fit anymore. I’d love to go on here and talk about how I eat predominantly healthy, how I workout 3-4 times a week, and how I’m a mostly active person, but that’s me just trying to plea with you that “I swear I didn’t mean to gain weight.” which is honestly the antithesis of what I’m wanting to convey - which is that bodies gain weight, and that is that.
Our weight fluctuates because we fluctuate through time and space, through myriad environments, circumstances, and situations.
I’ve been running on the hamster wheel of thinness my entire life. I’ve starved, drugged, Whole 30’d, cleansed, binged, puked, meth’d, vegan’d, meat’d, read this and read that all in an attempt to rid the weight “for good!” - but it always comes back! I’m always so consumed with filling my mind with what I should be doing I never even have room to listen to my own body - which, spoiler, is the real metric I should be using!
It would later turn out, the only way to get off the hamster wheel of thinness is honestly, just to step off. It is that simple, and that hard. But once your off you can really tune in the important thing(s), which are yourself and body.
I got rid of those of skinny jeans (shorts) once and for all. I no longer want a pair of shorts from my early 20’s telling me how I’m doing in life. I put them in the donation bin in the laundry room of my apartment. It was honestly the most anticlimactic event of my entire life. Where I thought there would be tears, a short eulogy of sorts, and hard pressed feelings - there was nothing. Truly. I guess that means I really am just over being on that wheel, and I really have just stepped off by realizing my innate power and worth cannot depend upon a piece of fabric fitting me or not.
I was letting a small collection of stitched material define how I feel about myself, my body, and my worth for over a decade. If you’re not an absurdist already, then put that in your pipe and smoke it. This, now that I’ve arrived here, at this mindset, having parted ways with those shorts, is all so fucking coo coo. It seems so nuts to me right now that that was a thing I was doing, and for so long! Our bodies naturally gain and (sometimes) lose weight. Especially when we move, or are stressed, or are just naturally progressing towards our demise. This is no big fucking deal. It’s life. It’s reality. It’s God. It’s me, and it’s you. And it’s nothing at all.
Clothes were made to fit us, not the other way around, and I guess what I’m saying is, I will continue getting rid of the clothes that don’t fit me. All of them. I’m buying ones that do. I’ll maybe even keep an array of sizes on hand since my weight does fluctuate so often. But I am 100% done torturing myself over a piece of fabric that perhaps some enslaved human made in some country far away, that I hardly think of or even care about because I’m so consumed with fitting into the fucking pants in the first place!
Life is absurd and joyous, and terrible.
Those shorts are a reminder of that, and now I am letting them go so they may exist on another body who hopefully loves them. And should they ever become to small for that body, I hope they pass them along to another, and so on, and so forth. The shorts will live on, but they will be free of my consciousness - and don’t you see that that is the most precious thing we have? Our attention, and our being, and the fact we are even here is so rare and wonderful, how dare we let other imaginary rules and stigmas make us feel less than? ABSURD.
Go live your life, give the beach whatever body ya have, carry some fat, or work it all off, but be alive, stay glorious - and to hell with the rest.
Cheers.