Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: bitterness

Ever more bitter, rarely more sweet

When you’re in a situation that feels hopeless, it’s hard not to become bitter. There is a commentor on one of the blogs I read who is oozing in negativity. Having read about her situation, it’s understandable. Unfortunately, she’s at the place where she feels like she can do nothing about it but constantly complain.

I’ve been there. I am currently there re: my family. It’s funny because the medical trauma I recently went through* has been a boon in many ways. It feels weird to say especially because it included me dying twice But, it’s the truth. I realized a lot about myself during that time. Most of it good, some of it…sobering.

On the good tip: I fucking love my body. Decades of body issues disappeared in a flash. That’s not exactly true. They were already starting to mitigate with the help of Taiji, but when I left the hospital, you could not say shit to me about my body or my face. Not that my parents didn’t try, believe you me. They wanted to go there with my weight, which I had shut down decades ago. I explicitly told them they could not bring up my weight. Of course they moaned and groaned about it because ‘they were just worried about my health’. Uh huh. That’s straight-up bullshit, by the way.

When I was anorexic and my junior counselors in college told my mom, she had nothing to say. N-O-T-H-I-N-G. No words of concern or encouragement. The only thing she had to say was that she was jealous my waist was smaller than hers. So, health concerns? Hell, naw. That wasn’t it at all. It was purely weight and how I looked. She put me on my first diet when I was seven, saying I would have a beautiful face if I lost weight.

When I look at pics of me as a teenager, I was chunky yes, but I wasn’t grotesque as I was made to feel by my mother. I was thick in part because I have dense muscles, but I was fine. My mom monitoring every morsel that went into my mouth gave me a complex that lasted decades.

Taiji started making me feel at ease in my body. Then it helped me walk away from a minor car accident with only a big bruise on my stomach from the seatbelt. Or maybe the air bag popping. Other than that, I walked away without a scratch. I couldn’t say the same for my car, sadly.

That’s when I started to realize that my body was a wondrous machine. After waking up from my medical coma (walking pneumonia, two cardiac arrests, stroke), I was in awe how my body had taken a beating and kept on ticking. I don’t think  can overemphasize how bleak the prognosis was.


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Stuck in a rut

I like to read advice columns and my favorite is Ask A Manager because I really like Alison, the woman who writes the column. She’s pragmatic, but also compassionate. And she’s a rabble-rouser who used to go to protests naked to protest animal abuse. She thinks unions are great, especially now when employees have more power than they have in a long time. The commentariat is thoughtful and erudite, looking at things from many different angles. In fact, I’d say it’s one of the best commentariats on the internet. That said, I can often tell who is saying a comment without even looking at the username if it’s a regular. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not a good thing, either.

It’s just a thing. It makes sense, too, because most of us have pretty consistent beliefs that we express over and over again. Say something about family to me and you’ll hear three or four well-worn spiels about family dysfunction. Mention Dark Souls to me and get an earful about three or four topics–one being how magicks is NOT the easy way , no matter what the onebros say.

It makes sense, really, Most people has a core that doesn’t change easily. And online, especially, you want to give context for your points. That’s why people repeat their stories, me included. That’s why I get bored with–well, everything after some time. Websites, especially. Because the feel of them rarely change. I started following politics in 2008 because of Obama. It was also when I started using social media, also because of politics. I used to visit a few progressive websites, but I noticed that I got impatient with them after a year or so. It was because the content never changed nor did the commentary. Which is both the strong point and the weak point of the internet.  It’s a great place to discuss issues, but it’s not a great place for changing hearts and minds. When I used to visit progressive websites, the point was to get moral support and to bolster my own beliefs. Granted, many organizations in real life are also like that, but at least when you have in-person discussions, there’s a give and take that doesn’t happen as easily online. I don’t think it’s outrageous to say that it’s better to have an in-depth discussion in person rather than online.

It does happen in general, too, though. We are creature of habits. We’re going to do/say/think the same thing on the regs. I mean, if I’m a staunch progressive, I’m not going to suddenly think guns, sexual restriction and gender binaries are great things, am I? That’s just not how we work.


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