Finally We Like You!

I've lost fifty pounds since January.  It's not deliberate; it's not even good.  My oncologist takes an anxious tone when I step off the scale and it still makes me laugh, because like most First World women, or even people, for my entire life I've stepped off to very different sounds of disapproval.

Watching the weight struggle from this new perspective is fascinating.  I had never noticed how much of it was concentrated on the magical Cinderella reveal.  Reality TV is rife with it.  The curtains pull back....glitter falls from the rafters, the chimes tinkle.....you walk proudly out, obediently transformed and probably hungry, aaand.....Finally We Like You!

It never struck me exactly how sick the whole thing really is.  Not the weight thing.  Weight, food....right now to me they are practically meaningless to me. I've mostly lost my taste for food. I have no appetite.  I have to keep track of chemo, my other meds, the side effects of both, my Optune machine and MRIs and appointments wih onoloists and surgeons, and the intracacies of insurance paperwork.  I'm busy staying alive.  My size has little to do with that. I do know that the parading of the "improved" self for approval is codependent beggery.  I know because I've done it, on the fucking radio.  But I got more than approval.  I got several thousands of dollars that floated me for well over a year when I was fired, stretching my unemployment. At the time my younger boss had me in the cross-hairs with his oft-touted philosophy that "nodody over 40 belongs in radio".  I wasn't long for that world and I knew it, so I sold my dignity up the river on a leaky raft.  I don't regret it, because it helped me to survive.  My inhalers, which I  cannot breathe without, had gone up to three hundred dollars a month out of pocket.  I sold my dignity for air. Worse trades have been made.  And bad trades teach you a lot.  They teach you to appreciate people who actually struggle.  It was shortly after this that I  fell in love with Loretta Lynne's spoken word masterpiece  Little Red Shoes.

Cancer casts long shadows and contrasts.  But they're not all horror-movie shadows, Some are just in nice, clear black-and-white relief so you can really see the contrasts.

The contrast between fighting for your life by trying to order your chemo from an indifferent bureaucrat and agonizing over a gain of three pounds and how that will make me look is sharp and clear for me right about now. 

As is the sickness. Because the illusion is that the overeating, the over weightness, is the sickness.  The real sickness is in the crowd cheering or booing someone about their worthiness depending on a few pounds.  The real sickness is not in us.  It's in what we choose to believe about judging other people and having the right to judge other people.  That's the sickness we need to be looking at.