It is late. I am exhausted.
I’m astonished at the responses my self-portrait post generated. I seem to have touched a nerve. I appreciate all the comments! I’m also very grateful that I was featured in the first issue of The Big Fat Carnival, which was posted on February 8. I’m in section two: Body Image and Self Image.
Work is going well. I’m still adjusting. I have (mostly) not made art, journaled by hand, knitted, or cleaned the house in the past month. I can’t keep up with my blogroll. I haven’t called my parents in weeks; the three-hour time difference means it’s nearly midnight by the time I’m home and done with dinner and able to call on a weeknight. (How can it be mid-February already?!) However, I have been reading, working out, and getting rest. I do hope to find pockets of time for the other fun stuff.
My job often requires I work at a project on the weekend. Mostly this is fun. I just need to streamline my time management. Tomorrow Husband and I will get up early and go to Half Moon Bay State Beach to help on an environmental project. This will take the majority of the day. And I really need to dig out my desk so I can see the surface of it.
Meanwhile, I leave you with this:
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
–Zora Neale Hurston
Kathryn, thank you for the update, the quote and your picture the other day. I didn’t leave a comment, yet your post stayed with me. In fact I thought of you when I was in the shower last night! As a short and heavy woman who has found the kind of love Hurston describes, I know thin is not the answer to all the troubles of life. Yet I worry about my seeming inability over the course of the years to care for myself well. I wonder about the anger that has been padded and soothed with food, which feels not merely personal but collective. Are women’s bodies responding as a collective feminine energy to the injury humanity has done to the Earth? This was something I talked about in Jungian Analysis; it still works on and in me.
Again, thank you for your self-portrait and your story.
It’s so wonderful and strange to read your blog, Kathryn. Sometimes it’s like looking at a mirror of my own experience! Please know that you are not alone in your somewhat overwhelmed state and that there are many of us out here feeling the same way. Hopefully we’ll all manage our hectic lives and those pockets of fun. In the meantime, thanks again for sharing your story with all of us. I always check your site when I’m online – always interested to see where you are in your life and what you have to say. You’re a goddess, my dear!
BFC looks very cool.
Also I meant to comment on the tub photo (which made me say “THAT looks familiar!”) but I had been hoping to reply by doing the same. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to do my own version (yet). So I’ll just say that you’re inspiring and leave it at that for today 🙂
Hope you’re taking the camera tomorrow 🙂
. . . ditto on those legs looking familiar! You sound busy . . . but happy. Hang in there, kiddo!