Growing Pains

This blog is founded on an idea of 'self-sufficiency'.  Generally, I have focussed on emotional self-sufficiency (and the illusions I have of this being something attainable), but I also meant it quite literally - as in, growing-ones-own-food.  For environmental, lifestyle, and something akin to 'spiritual' reasons, hubby and I have always planned that someday we will be semi self-sufficient.

I come here today to announce to you all - this will not be taking place.  As you will learn, the dream is over and reality is being accepted.  To follow is a full history of how this has occurred.

It all began, I suppose, with The Good Life.

Husband and I grew up with re-runs of the quaint 1970s fantasy, then returned to it together whilst in the initial throws of 'in-love'.  It subsequently became part of what I term 'the mythology' of our romance.  I believe a relationship has two dimensions - the reality, and the mythology.  The reality includes the day-to-day living and loving; the life we make together, the things we say and do that build up to form the nature of our lived love-affair over the years.  The mythology is like the founding myth of any religion - it is the great story of why, the crucial circumstances surrounding how it all came about.  Ours includes the sleepless nights of obsessive conversation, the alliterative text messages, the poem I wrote on our 'Autumnal Romance' (so much deeper and more perfect than the common-place Spring setting), the books and jokes we shared (with the one person who finally TRULY understood them)... and, The Good Life.

Yes, we like to believe we ARE the Goods.  After all, we, like them, are a damn-cute couple, who love and tease each other in the most gorgeous ways possible.  Most importantly, we, like them, are hyper-idealistic, ranty, political semi-hippies.  What could be more perfect than to embrace our love for one another - and our love for the planet - by living the ultimate down-to-earth lifestyle?  I, like Tom Good, have never been a great fan of the 'day job'.  And who could not agree that it is a ridiculous system to spend most of my waking hours working to pay for life's necessities, when all I really want to do is potter around at home - where I could be directly creating those life necessities for myself.

We were realistic.  Unlike the Goods, we do not yet own a house; and, unlike the Goods, we will have children to keep.  We are also both of us blessed-and-cursed with the incurable 'travel bug', and must be able to afford the occasional flight to somewhere entirely foreign.  Oh, and, yes, we also like to entertain, and have been in the habit of merrily whipping out the credit card in the name of good times with friends.  But aside from these minor details (the cracks are already showing, aren't they?) we were ready to forgo some luxuries and make a plan that worked for us.  Husband would continue in his career - which, unlike Tom Good, he is actually passionate about - and once we could afford it, I would justify and pay for my indefinite absence from paid employment by growing the majority of our food.

Dear reader, we are just about in that required affordability position.  There is really no reason we can't pay for a house, and future-children's needs (and perhaps even those flights and parties) on husband's salary.  Therefore, there is no further reason we can't take up the plan... well... NOW.

No reason except, of course, the fatal flaw in the plan - that I have absolutely no talent for growing things!

Despite all my fond fantasies of myself as a natural, nurturing earth-mother, instinctively in-tune with the web-of-life of which we are all a part, I am in reality a black-thumb.  Despite my shelves of beautiful books and magazines on all things gardening and all my attempts at research and a scientific understanding, I have not learnt anything of use.  I am simply not meant to grow things.

On my facebook page are arty photographs of my few successes.  But what are not included are the failures - and they hugely outnumber the wins.  I show the few green, sprouting seedlings, not the numerous sowings that never make it that far; I show the pretty new buds, not the dying flowers that never bear fruit; I show the vibrant new trees we have proudly selected, not the dry, sad twigs they become.

And now at last I have come to accept the truth for myself - were we to put our plan into action, we would starve to death.

Self-sufficiency of the type I imagined is not in my future.  While I will still attempt to keep a garden of some description, it will be purely decorative and never truly functional.  And I am having to take on board the inevitable side-effect - my life of continued wage-slavery.  Frighteningly, I am now able to write this piece and accept these truths because I am actually beginning to be okay with this.  Grubby notions of 'ambition', 'fulfillment at work' and 'career' are becoming less poisonous and indeed increasingly attractive to me.  I am even starting to enjoy it.

Am I entirely lost, or is this transformation simply realistic?  Perhaps the one thing I am adept at growing is my own mental development.

A confession, and a memory

So... where the hell had I been?!

It is hard to believe that I had not posted for so very long - more than a year!  Yet it is true.  So what happened?

For one thing, I notice that my last post had been just before I began my current job.  Hardly a coincidence; daily under-appreciation is not exactly inspirational.

But the main reason that anything I wrote felt false and inadequate, or simply too personal to share, is that I have committed what I consider to be one of the worst sins of all - I had out-sourced my self-esteem.

I could not be sassy or witty or clever, because I did not feel sassy or witty or clever.  I could not write about self-sufficiency, because emotionally, I was no longer self-sufficient.  I could not write about self-image, because I had lost my image of myself.  For an astonishingly long time, I no longer knew who I was.

But time has passed and somewhere along the way I found myself again.  After many tears, many hours of boring my friends, even more hours of pouring my heart out in my diary, and far too many words sent to the person in question, I have come out the other side.

And who am I?  I am who I always was, but with a loss, and a gain.  Lost to me is the notion of myself from a decade ago, the image of the "utterly irresistible" little sex-goddess that I had held close - even when it threatened my marriage, and even though really, it detracted from the grown-up woman I was now living the life of.  That little temptress no longer exists, and I have been forced to acknowledge it.  Lost to me too is the ability to look up to this person as a father-figure-lover (always intermingled, and always perfectly natural); to sit in awe of his wisdom, and to be petted and adored in return.  But gained is the chance to be a real woman - to at last truly take charge of myself and my sexuality - this time from within myself.

I once believed that he had taught me to believe in myself, but all I had learned was to believe in his opinion of me.  From now on, I will believe in myself for my own sake and for my own purpose.

And, I will write on my blog!  I will post the pieces that have lain in wait for too long.  Next time... my not-so-green thumb.  I advertise this now as a promise... to myself.


But before I go, indulge me please in a moment of nostalgia.  And nostalgia it is, now that I understand that I can never go back, and now that I accept that going back is not what nostalgia is for anyway.


Eleven years ago, life gave me a romance.  It felt like a dream, even at the time.  It took place in Scotland, amongst the rolling countryside surrounding Balmoral Castle, during a cool, misty summer.  For two perfect days around two perfect nights, I was given a fairytale.  A soft-spoken, sensual, older man flew me to his side to indulge us both in a time of pure pleasure.  We talked, we dined, we listened to Frank Sinatra, we bathed together, and we made love.  He escorted me from beautiful scene to beautiful scene: drinking sloe gin to a private view of unspoilt hills; kissing by a rambling stream; smoking and drinking and eventually making it to bed in our lodge by the loch.  For these days, and the further scattered days and nights I was granted back in London, I was always at his command, and it was always my pleasure to follow his charming lead.  I discovered that I could, if I chose, be a perfect fairytale princess to a perfect fairytale prince.

This I have had, and nothing can take that away from me.  And now this memory can take nothing from the life I have today.

Loving myself... TODAY!

I have many more ranty things to post, but I thought I'd start here again with something positive.  It does unfortunately again deal with the issue of FAT.  I hope that someday - someday very soon in fact - I will stop even thinking about my size and just LIVE MY LIFE.  But, for the moment, I still have a few issues to deal with and a few things to tell this superficial society of ours before I can drop the subject.

So... positive.  Over the last couple of years I have been getting healthy.  At present, my vital signs are all in the 'normal' range, my doctors describe me as healthy, and I feel GREAT.  I have plenty of energy, I eat well, sleep well, and get plenty of exercise.  I have learnt to limit my indulgence of the tasty things my body doesn't need to rare times and small quantities.  I am still improving this, but I'm pretty damn pleased with my current equilibrium.  I achieved this state very slowly and naturally.  I never went on a 'diet', I never paid a cent to a weight-loss company.  I did this on my own and I did it in a way that allowed me to just continue my life and relationships along the entire journey.  It is not the only way to get healthy, but it's the way I did it and I'm proud of what I've achieved.

My BMI has reduced from where it was, but it is still high.  But that doesn't matter.  I am now a firm advocate of the 'Health at Every Size' approach and intend to follow this life-affirming path into the future (or 'going forward' as we say now - grrr.)  Embracing good-health has not only given me the direct benefits of a healthier body, but it has also offered me a wonderful antedote to the fat-haters.  Because if anyone tries to tell me I should lose weight for my health, I know they are wrong.  They can no longer claim that as their excuse for 'worrying about me'.  All they have left is the truth - that they want me to lose weight for their own aesthetic tastes.  And to that attitude I have always been immune.  You want to tell me how to live my life for your own superficial reasons?  Well, you know exactly where you can shove that idea. :)

But, well, I'm not quite, not 100%, happy with my new situation.  I had sort of hoped that by getting healthy I would also achieve my ideal figure.  And that has not really occurred.  So this is the final hurdle I must overcome - my disappointment with my healthy body's appearance.  (The final personal hurdle that is, there are still many things society needs to fix, never fear!)  For a completely together and mentally-healthy future, I must accept that this is the body I am to live with.  This, NOW, is my healthy weight, my healthy body, and so I must learn to love it.

So, to 'put it out there' as they say, I offer these affirmations of my reality.

I will never be slim because:

- I am already healthy.
- I am content with my current balance of indulgence to nutrition, and activity to laziness.  My lifestyle works for me emotionally and socially as well as physically.
- Cream and butter make things taste better, they are therefore necessary occasional indulgences.
- A pork roast with crackling and all the trimmings is one of the most spectacular inventions of all time.  I refuse to live a life that entirely rejects spectacular inventions.
- Running is unpleasant.  It is bad for your joints, sweat-inducing and therefore inconvenient, and mostly unnecessary.  Also, it is unpleasant.
- Counting calories is one of the most boring activities on the planet.
- Reading and researching and writing and talking are all best enjoyed sitting on a comfortable sofa.  And they are all best enjoyed often.
- Wine is delicious and induces important conversations.
- My husband loves my body just the way it is, and my husband is by far the best person on the planet, and the one I most often want to be naked with.
- People who don't like fat people are superficial morons.  I don't like superficial morons.

And being fat forever is just fine, because:

- Healthy fat people may live longer than healthy slim people.
- Fat-hating is disgusting and needs to be stamped out.  This can only be achieved by fabulous fat-people being fat and fabulous.
- I personally find too many curves far sexier than too few, including on my own body.
- People who spend all day thinking and talking about their bodies are dull and unpleasant. People who enjoy life are fun. I want to be around fun people, and be a fun person myself.

- Fat fashion is fun.  Being part of the sassy, self-loving, fat-gang is fun.
- Self-loving fat people can step off the constantly-worrying-about-body-size treadmill, and just BE.
- Fat people are the best people to cuddle.