Category Everything is Terrible

Tyrant on Five Acres

“The authoritarian stands ready to punish and everyone under his thumb tiptoes around—getting weaker and sicker in the process. What does a person do when she knows that the authoritarian in her life is always ready to speak and act like an authoritarian? She flinches. She keeps her distance. She makes wide circles. She keeps her mouth shut. Sometimes, to make sure that she isn’t wrong in her assessment and unfairly judging the authoritarian, she tests him by saying something provocative or by breaking a cardinal rule—which of course provokes the authoritarian’s wrath. So, she goes back to hiding, not testing those waters again very soon.”

Eric R. Maisel, Ph.D.

It’s important to think carefully about the long-term implications of owning an animal so large it needs to be stored on someone else’s property and what it means if your relationship with this property owner ever sours. I took this into consideration…not at all, because my brain was ablaze with the joyous chemical storm of a lifelong dream within reach. A horse of my own.

At the time, I didn’t really have a reason to consider it. I was going to be boarding Navani at the same barn with my friend, who had repeatedly assured me that this was “one of the good ones” and everyone there seemed to agree. “We’re like a family,” I heard over and over again. And for a while, it felt like that was true, especially in the year before I had a horse there. People seemed to like and respect one another. Laughter rang down the barn aisle.

The atmosphere always changed subtly when the barn owner came around. It quietened. Doubtlessly science has an instrument sensitive enough to detect an otherwise invisible collective puckering of sphincters. Or I’m projecting? I was definitely intimidated by her at first, and she knew it because she commented on it, frequently. It amused her. Whether that change in energy was real or imagined, something inside me went on high alert whenever she was in proximity. 

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The Bald Truth

Hair loss feels like such a petty, shallow, vain thing to care about, much less obsess over, until it happens to you, and then it feels like a completely reasonable sinkhole into which to fling endless resources. I’ve struggled with thinning hair since my teens, so I had it just long enough to understand its social value before it started to slide down the drain. 

Losing my hair felt like the death knell to my femininity. I often feel like I’m failing at performing being a woman in the WASP-aspirational way I was raised and which society has reinforced. I’m short, thick, rectangular, and even at my heaviest, never had much in the way of land assets. Even when the fashion-minded talk about the rectangular build and how it can look good in anything, they’re talking about the tall, sleek, uber-fit rectangles, your Gwyneths and Tildas. My measurements fit the rectangle standard but looking good in the way society deems acceptable in any clothes eludes me. So instead, I tend to refer to my body as potato-shaped. I’ve mostly come to terms with it; my frame is my frame and no amount of wishing will make it otherwise. I should know, having spent an inordinate amount of time as a child wishing that someday I could go to school and unzip my body and Cindy Crawford would step out and wouldn’t that show my bullies? Somehow? The grand unzippening never happened, so here I am, a sturdy potato. It’s just…I don’t see a lot of odes to the seductive qualities of the potato.  And that’s fine; my husband finds me attractive and being largely invisible to other men makes my life easier and safer. But sometimes it’d be nice to see an ode, you know? A “Damn! That potato could get it.”  Losing the hair on my potato made it feel like there was nothing good about my appearance at all, that every day onward would be a deeper descent into cave trolldom.

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On Competitiveness, Body Image, and Learning to Look at My Own Paper

 

I laid in the tub in two inches of barely tepid water, audible sounds of regret escaping my mouth. “Can you see? Has it turned grey?” In that moment, I was experiencing the inevitable result of being a competitive person without a suitable outlet or a marketable focus. If I choose to enter a competition, I want to win. I have always wanted to win. I have no aptitude for (or interest in, let’s be real) team sports and I’ve reached an age when no one forces your peer group to stand in a line to see who is the best speller, so other petty competitions have borne the brunt of my laser focus. The pettiest things. Could I keep the #1 spot on the friend leaderboards for every song of a popular dance-based videogame? Win the all-important bar karaoke night Halloween costume contest? Can I do a little more? Go a little further? Could I do everything I cared about just a bit better than everyone else? Better than my previous best? And if not, why not? What was wrong with me? 

It is inevitable because my need to win and be the best is too strong that eventually I would go too far. It was probable, given the state of my body and American society’s general feelings about the overweight, that going too far would involve inflicting pain on my body related to a weight loss competition.

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