Recently, I went to a Thai restaurant to have lunch. I’d been to this particular restaurant several times in the past, however, this was the first time I had seen this particular waitress. As she was taking me to an available table, she exclaimed quite shockingly, “Wow, you are sooo skinny!” I’m going to assume that because English wasn’t her first language (it was quite obvious), that she didn’t realize using the term skinny has a negative connotation. And using it with strangers can come across as off-putting and rude. However, while taking all of that into consideration, and assuming she had no intentions of being rude to a paying customer, I simply smiled and said, “Yes, that’s true.”

You see, this has been happening my entire life. I am really very, very naturally thin. I basically have been the same size my entire teenage, young adult, and now middle-aged adult life. I cannot tell you the countless times I´d been teased growing up because of my weight. As a child I was called Olive Oyl…remember her? :-) I was also a cheerleader from age 7-18 and of course those skimpy cheerleader uniforms just accentuated my skinniness even more. All of the other cheerleaders had curves by then, and I was still “straight up and down” as they used to say back when I was young. My mother even thought that after I had a baby, I would do as she did, and gain a lot of weight. She, too, had been thin as a child and as an adult before she had children. However, after I had my child, I snapped right back to the exact same size I had always been.

I guess people who know me and have known me my whole life aren’t really fazed by how thin I am. They don’t even notice. And quite frankly, most times, neither do I. But, in today’s society of enhanced body parts, my lack thereof, may seem strange to some people. And the fact that I embrace how I am, and don’t strive to look like what society deems is “perfect” at whatever given moment may also be a factor. I am naturally the way I am. And that suits me perfectly.

The quote above is Shakespeare´s Sonnet 130, and it is mainly discussing people’s perception of what beauty is. What is our standard of beauty? Why are we always striving to fit a standard that is ever-changing, and is quite frankly a hollow template that cannot possibly contain all of the greatness we are? This lady (the Dark Lady, she’s called) that the person in the poem is describing has none of the attributes that make a woman “beautiful”, and yet he is deeply in love with her. He basically is putting his middle-finger up to society and it’s bogus beauty standards.

I’m not putting my middle finger up to society in this blog post…lol…but I do want to stress that we should all be comfortable the way we are. If you want to change something for you, that’s great, but don’t try and fit into society’s fickle perception of who you should be at any given time. When those thoughts start creeping in…that’s when you get those middle fingers ready!!! ;-)

Thank you for stopping by….XOXO!