Look at your side bar. Do it right now. What is trending? Let me guess… it is something stupid. Were the royal baby holiday photos retouched? OMG, Kim tweeted a picture of herself petting a puppy! Well, I have to admit that I do like one thing trending on my page. It is a whole lot of Carrie Fisher shutting down body shamers.
Maybe the best quote ever comes from her, “Youth and beauty are not accomplishments, they’re the temporary happy byproducts of time and/or DNA. Don’t hold your breath for either.”
The thing that I like about Ms. Fisher is that she knows that the game is rigged, so she refuses to play. What exactly would happen if she spent the last 30+ years killing herself trying to defy time and gravity just in case someone wanted to hire her to squeeze into a gold bikini that she wore at age 20? I’ll tell you what. She would be judged just as harshly.
“She has had work done.”
“Why won’t she dress her age?”
“She is trying too hard.”
Carrie isn’t playing societies little game, and people call her crazy for it. So, I’m just going to leave a little list right here. This is a list of things that society finds to be acceptable now, or in the past.
Putting hot wax on your skin and ripping it off to get rid of hair
Buying fake hair to put on elsewhere
Removing your eyebrows
Painting them back on
Sucking fat out of your thighs
Taking sacks that are supposed to simulate fat and putting them in your chest
Paralyzing nerves in your face.
Cutting off parts of your face
Using chemicals to darken the skin without use of the sun
Using cream to lighten the dark spots on your skin
Spanx
I’m sure anyone could add dozens more. Still, tomorrow is New Year’s Day and the number one resolution is likely to be appearance related. I worked at a gym for ten years, which is long enough to know that gyms will be full Jan.1st and empty by Valentine’s day. If you say that you are going strictly for your health, I will try my best to believe you. I’m not getting on a high horse because I have somehow learned how to give zero *&%$s. I wish that I still fit into my wedding dress. Only Miss Clairol knows my true number of greys. Aging bothers me sometimes, but the alternative is the knife or death, and neither appeal to me.
So, we spent all this time trying to be pleasing to the eyes of others. What now? Well, we have a few choices. We can get smarter. There is always room for that, and it is pretty easy to do. Read a book. Take a class. Talk to someone who knows something that you don’t. We can go have experiences. Travel? Jump out of perfectly good planes? Try exotic foods? I would suggest adding, “developing a wicked sense of humor,” but that one is mine. You can’t have it. Whatever you decide, there is something very important that I would like you to keep in mind.
You have a lifetime of, “swimsuit season is coming,” so you better be interesting.