I am a runner. In the physical sense—I train for and compete in ultra distance races on the regular and I wish it were socially acceptable to run everywhere I go rather than walk—and in a less literal sense in that I need to skip town as frequently as possible.

In an emotionally complex chain of events that I am only just now beginning to realize, contradictory to everything I am, I bought a house four years ago. I’m finding now that this decision was an attempt to anchor myself. I did it in my way—white girl from small town Nebraska buys a beautiful old house in North Omaha. Alone. That was no surprise, but in committing myself to this house, to Omaha, to Nebraska, places I am so desperately escaping each weekend, I’ve been in total rebellion with myself.

Let it be known, I wouldn’t consider myself a rebel. I’ve always, always been a good kid/employee/friend/partner/whatever. After I bought this house, I was promoted to management at my job. I loved my job. In contradiction to running away from things, however, I am stupid loyal. So when my boss said we need you to manage things, my loyalty said OK, I can do this. That meant more work hours, more on-call. I told myself mo money mo travel, but Biggie was right, mo money, mo problems.

I keep going and going, committed to my job and to my house and in the back of my head is this voice saying, fuck it all! Screw capitalism and social norms! Go live in a van in the forest! On bad days I think, yeah! I’m gone! But a voice deeper inside of me knows that this would be fun for maybe a month. Then I’d probably feel like a total piece of shit because the world is a shitty place and I have things to say and an able body to dedicate to some cause somewhere.

I spend a month getting my house ready to sell. The second to last week in September, I list my house and book a trip to Oregon the first week in October. I’m going to Oregon to volunteer with the National Parks Service I tell my friends, family, and clients. You’re such an inspiration, I want your life, they tell me. I shrug. If I were really that cool, I’d figure out a way to make travel and volunteering my life.

There were pretty horrible forest fires this fall in Oregon. I assume this means people will be jumping for joy to have volunteers. It actually means that everyone is so busy unless you are a volunteer firefighter, they don’t have time to deal with you. I call and email and email and call and finally, the day before I leave, Debra asks me if I’d like to collect thermographs with her in Umpqua National Forest. I have no idea what a thermograph is but fuck yeah, I’d like to do that! Deb is instantly my best friend.

I fly into Portland and get my rental car. This is supposed to be a story about rebellion so I’ll let you know that, contrary to great urging by the rental car guy, I refuse to pay for extra insurance. I want to tell him, dude, I’m so cheap I plan on sleeping in this Toyota Highlander while I live in the forest the next few days, but decide against it.

My first day in Oregon is to be spent with one of my closest childhood friends on her weed farm so that I can hang with her and her new baby. Her husband is deep in the throws of marijuana harvest. Again, I wish I could tell you I rebelled hard and smuggled a bunch of pot back, and got caught and my life were way more exciting, but it’s not, I’m not. Walking into their drying shed with workers trimming buds of 48 plants (each plant produces about 5 pounds of weed) and plants hanging from the ceiling was thrilling enough for me.

My friend reads tarot cards and her online business is booming. Her baby is beautiful and healthy. Her husband excitedly tells me about his business and my heart is so full of their happiness. We talk about the upcoming full moon—both the baby and I have a hard time sleeping with the full moon—and politics and these horrible new trends of women eating their placentas after birth and flat earthers. I tell them I’m selling my house, that I’m going to go down to part time at my job, that I don’t know what I’m going to do next. They tell me I’m an inspiration.

The next day I volunteer with Deb. She’s magnificent. We’re spending 9 hours together that day so I don’t want to step on her toes too much. We spend the first hour feeling each other out, skirting around politics until I finally tell her I guess part of the reason I’m volunteering with her is in response to a Trump presidency. Then we’re on a roll. She tells me about her first women’s march in the seventies and then marching on Washington in the nineties. We talk about being bleeding heart liberals in, my case a red state, in her case a red county. She tells me how much easier it would be to just move the 65 miles north to Eugene. I nod. I’ve thought this so many times. But instead I tell her to think how much more her voice means in a community that needs those voices of change. When I leave that evening, she hugs me and tells me I am an inspiration and to never give up the fight.

I have a two-hour drive to the coast, where I’m camping for the evening. I drive west to Humbug Mountain State Park, and on my way realize, I haven’t seen the sun set over the ocean since grad school—over three years—I’d like to get to the coast to watch the sunset. I speed. I weave through the mountains and my phone is dying and there are two radio stations that I can get in this area: Jeezy stuff or NPR. I love NPR, but when you are hauling through the mountains, chasing the sun, NPR isn’t exactly spurring you on in that race.

It’s pitch black by the time I make it to the ocean. I can hear it, smell it, see it in the full moon’s light, but I don’t see the sunset. I make camp in the back of the Highlander. I’ve nothing to do so I go to bed at 9 pm after sending my mom the I’m Alive text. Again, not a rebel.

The next morning I wake before the sun rises. I plan to have a full day of running—I want to do about twenty miles in two different parks so I need to get going. Before I’m ready to run, I walk through the campground toward the sound of the ocean. The sky is the most beautiful rainbow of pink, orange, and blue. Framed between two mountains is the moon. Instead of looking at the water then making my way back to camp to change and run, I sit down. I listen to the waves and watch the moonset and remember what my friend told me about the feminine moon eclipsing the male sun in a year that has seemed like women will fall three steps back. I have the beach all to myself and I think that it just might be an inspiring thing to love yourself enough that you’d fly halfway across the country to sit on a beach alone.

 

I've had quite the whirlwind of a last few months. If you read my last post or heard my story slam at The Sydney, you can see I'm trying to move forward and keep putting pieces together--doing my best to figure out this thing called life.

I think I'm getting closer to the life I want, however, if someone were to ask me what's new, I'd sound crazy and a bit like a hermit: I'm starting to brush my dog's teeth, I sold my house and almost everything I own, I'm learning German, and my favorite two hours of my week are spent with Middle Schoolers working on slam poetry. I'm also working really hard on affirmative self-talk, so instead of saying I sound crazy, in my head I'm telling myself that the good, the bad, the crazy are all part of my story and if I only get one life, why not go for it?

I'm brushing Yadi's teeth because I want him to live forever. I sold my house and most things in it because I want to be free to go anywhere and everywhere. I'm learning German because I want to live  in Germany. I love being a teaching artist with the Nebraska Writers Collective's Louder Than a Bomb youth poetry program because my poets are really damn cool. And talented. And they aren't afraid to tell me when my writing is crappy.

When my writing is not my best. The affirmative self-talk is not my strong suit. Scratch that. The affirmative self-talk is something I'm working on. Mostly, it's to stop thinking, oh, yeah, f-that every time I think something that makes me angry or sad or is hurtful or negative. The things that hurt are part of my story and that is beautiful. I'm surprised how often I think f-that now that I'm trying to be aware. To be clear, I think feeling, really embracing and feeling the suck of sadness and angry are important, but, as Andre 3000 says, Spaceships don't come equipped with review mirrors. My past is my story. I get to choose what happens next--if the focus is only on what's behind, how do you rise?

In embracing my story (and the crazy), things are staring to happen. My long short story "The Volunteer" which I posted a clip of earlier this year was pick up by the anthology I wrote it for. I rewrote the entire piece in less than a week for the press submission. You can find the anthology here if interested. One of my pieces of flash fiction is being anthologized and nominated for best flash of 2017. I got my eyeballs fixed. I slammed another story. I've traveled to Oregon to volunteer in the forest and chased a sunset over the Pacific ocean only to miss it and happen upon the moonset the next morning. I'm planning a trip to Costa Rica to volunteer with sloths. SLOTHS!

For 29 years. or whatever of my 29 years that I was capable of this thought, I thought that really living had to be extreme--jumping off cliffs and out of planes, coming face to face with jungle snakes, and scuba diving with sharks. For me, I think living is writing and hanging with Yads and running through forests and never stopping learning. Choose you. Choose your story. There will be shitty things and you will mess up, but if you stay true to you, the small things--story publications and sloths and a healthy dog--will fall into place and those little things will slowly start to make the big picture of who you want to become. And it's not weird at all that it's looking like the person I want to become is a writer in the German forest with a clean-tooth dog--I'm getting on that spaceship.

I recently recited this story for a story slam with the Nebraska Writers Collective and the Omaha Public Library.



I believe that deja vu is your soul’s way of telling you you’re on the right path. Unfortunately, I haven’t had deja vu since, I don’t even know, maybe high school. I’ve been happy, growing, learning, but as far as I can tell, I haven’t quite figured out where I’m going in this world.

Almost two years ago, during a great debate about free will, someone I was in love with told me that he heard some Native American tribes believed that feathers showed you your path. That your ancestors laid them to tell you where you were supposed to be. Since then I’ve seen a feather every day but maybe 5—almost 2 years. I’m an active person. I see feathers in the woods. I work downtown. I see pigeon feathers on the streets. Even on days I don’t leave my house, some down feather will poke through a pillow or blanket and surprise me. Feathers everywhere, every day. I thought maybe the feathers were attached to him. That he was part of my path.

About the same time I found out about my feathers, I purchased what I hoped would be the ultimate road trip vehicle for my price range. A Jeep Compass. In less than 2 years I’ve put over 30,000 miles on my Jeep, largely due to best friend roadtripping with my friend Karyn.

Our first road trip was down to Stillwater Oklahoma to run a 50K race that we decided to sign up for 16 days before race day. We ran out of gas on the way down there—as I said it was my first road trip in a new vehicle—and had to get rescued by a state trooper, we got lead the wrong way in the race and ran farther than the 31 miles, and Karyn got a massive case of IT band syndrome—an overuse injury caused by us signing up to run 31 miles on a whim with little training. But there were feathers every day.

Our next road trip took us to Colorado for a wedding and mountain miles. By this time the feathers were becoming a real thing for me. I was starting to believe in them. Feather! Karyn and I screech at each other every time we’d spot a feather on the trail. This road trip we found that Jeeps have this neat feature where they basically power down before they overheat. Good for not overheating bad because we were stranded on the interstate not knowing what was going on. Next a trip to Kansas City where my struts went bad then our most recent trip to Steamboat where we had to leave my mom’s car there because it died. Just know that there’s always a car problem and always feathers in my life.

I thought with my feathers all around me that I didn’t need deja vu. That the feathers were my substitute. That even though this is nothing like what I thought my life would be like and even though I couldn’t imagine my future much beyond next week, I was doing fine. I didn’t think I was floundering. I’m stable. I have a house. I have a full time job. I have money saved. I’m not floundering. Then I had a dream and I died in it. They say when you die in dreams, it means big change is coming.

So I went to a reiki healer. To cleanse my shit, maybe help me read the feathers and my own intuition rather than just going with the flow and assuming I’m fine. The reiki healer had never heard that feathers show us our path, but she did believe they are sent to us by our ancestors to tell us we are loved. On our next best friend road trip—a road trip one of my clients sent us on to help me get over the love of my life feather guy—we went to the Black Hills to run in the forests. On our way home to Nebraska, I hit a huge ass black bird and it got stuck in the grill of the Jeep and we had to pry it out with the window washer things at the gas station. That’s not how I wanted to see my feathers.

Combine me dream dying, the dead bird, a Trump presidency, a refugee crisis, and getting broken up with by someone who tells you “I love you, but with all the effort that goes into caring about a relationship and all the shit in the world and love just isn’t worth the stress ” and I really felt like this is it. Time for the ultimate last road trip. Abandon all of my things, throw my dog in the car and hit the road and run away from all of it and live in the mountains in a Jeep by the river. There. Change. Done. Even better, living in the woods gets you off the grid. I was in Colorado running through the trees when the Charlottesville protests were happening living in ignorant bliss. Trump’s America makes it even harder to come back to regular life. How bad is it that I just called Trump’s America part of regular life? If that’s the case. Yes. I’m out.

However, even though I am a runner, inside me there is still this sane, responsible, stable person trying to talk the runner into compromise. So I’m selling all of my shit before I throw my dog in the car and I’m not giving up the good fight.

I thought I’d get to end this story telling you that it’s coming—my ultimate road trip—moving across the country to do good work for good people and make a difference. I had a job interview in Washington State 2 weeks ago and wrote this piece on the plane ride there. When the hiring manager picked me up from the airport, he had a giant feather sitting on his dash. A feather! A sign! This is my path! But I didn’t get the job.

So I don’t know that this story has an end yet. I don’t know where the road is taking me next. As I was going through boxes of crap in my basement, I found pictures from my first ever best friend road trip. In the fifth grade, my friend Carrie’s parents took us to the Black Hills. I took a disposable camera and in the stack of photos from this trip, there were probably 18 pictures from the inside of fucking Cabelas. Of taxidermy wildlife. I sat on the floor of my basement this weekend looking at the photos of fake animals on fake mountains and felt damn happy that on my most recent trip to the Black Hills I climbed to the highest peak and found real life mangy ass mountain goats with beards and missing patches of fur and all up there.

You know why it doesn’t freak me out that my car keeps breaking down on these road trips? Because I come home and I take it to a mechanic and they fix it. But being a human is really hard. There’s no one to fix things or no users manual or maps. I’m floundering. I’m wandering in the woods grasping for feathers, looking for some sign that I’m doing it right. The only thing I’ve figured out so far is that it IS all worth it. My best friend in those pictures, that group of people over there who love me, all of you people I don’t know—that’s why I can’t drive into the woods and never come out. I’m not taking the paved path, the path with taxidermy wildlife either. I’m out in it and the trip isn’t over and that’s OK. There’s nothing else to do but keep moving forward.

I wrote something! Well, I've been working on writing a lot of things, but here is something newly published:

http://www.kysoflash.com/Issue8/GesellRetribution.aspx

Here are the first 5 pages of a long (53 page) short story I've been working on the last few weeks. I've submitted it to an anthology of ghost stories, so cross your fingers for me that they might want it. It's dark, creepy (I hope as that's my intention at least), set in 1974:

The Volunteer

The St. Mary’s School for Troubled Girls looked exactly as it should. Creepy as fuck. It loomed through the trees as Hazel guided her 1964 Rambler along the gravel road to the school where she would be volunteering. She drove with the windows down and let her chopped brown hair whip around her face.

St. Mary’s School for Troubled Girls got bigger and darker when she turned onto the drive and stopped at the gate. Bushes cut like elephants and horses littered the lawn and the November sun suddenly disappeared behind blackened clouds enveloping the school. How stereotypical, Hazel thought. She reached out the window to buzz the bell to the gate, but it creaked open before she could touch the button. The gate was tall—over twelve feet, she figured—and attached to a brick wall, just as tall, covered with wire that hummed quietly. Electric.

Hazel parked in the lot in front of the school, threw her backpack over her shoulder, grabbed her suitcase from the backseat with her right hand, squeezed a red stress ball in her left hand, and walked to the door. It opened before she had a chance to knock.

She entered the building and set her suitcase down so that she could put her sunglasses on her head. An old woman with sunken cheeks shuffled out from behind the door and motioned to take Hazel’s bag. “No,” Hazel told her, certain the woman wouldn’t be able to carry the suitcase anyway, “I’ll keep it. Are you in charge? My parents sent me here to volunteer for a week.” They sent me here to “volunteer” so that I realize “how good life is,” she added in her brain. 

The woman said nothing, but raised her hand, pointing a bent and gnarled finger down the hall. Hazel’s eyes followed the finger. The entire room was dark wood, almost black. Lamps hung from the walls at intervals like streetlights, barely illuminating enough space to feel lit, let alone feel like a place where Troubled Girls could grow and prosper. Hazel had no idea where the old lady was pointing, other than down the hall, but Hazel picked her suitcase back up, rolled her shoulders back, and set off.

She didn’t have to go far before reaching a door with Headmistress Davis on a plaque outside. Hazel raised her hand to knock, but the door opened before she could strike.  Again Hazel entered a room without seeing who held the door for her. Headmistress Davis stepped into view, offering her hand to Hazel. “You must be Miss Pickett.”

Hazel set her suitcase down and took the headmistress’s hand, wanting to gag at immediate touch. The hand was huge—meaty and cold and totally unfitting the average-looking woman in front of her. A flutter of warm air danced on the back of her neck and Hazel reexamined the woman in front of her.

“You may call me Headmistress Davis,” Davis said and, though she still stood only as tall as Hazel—five foot five—and was no wider than thirty seconds ago, the headmistress seemed to take up the entire room.

Hazel shivered before she could stop the spasm running up her spine. It felt like someone was breathing on her. She resisted the urge to rub her neck and, instead, crushed the stress ball with her left hand and held the headmistress’s gaze.

“You will be staying in the quarters with the high school aged girls. They’re your age chronologically, but most of them will not act it.” Headmistress Davis dropped Hazel’s hand and moved forward. Hazel backed out of the way and the headmistress exited the office still talking. “St. Mary’s has a long history of housing girls. We pride ourselves at giving these girls a decent home in Christian charity where some will learn skills to be functional in the real world. Others our best hope is to give them a place to stay and not be a burden on their parents until the state assumes responsibility for them either in jail or an asylum for adults. We do not practice any physical instruments of change like you might hear of in horror stories, but we do believe in firm discipline and structure.” The headmistress kept two steps ahead of Hazel. Even when Hazel tried to speed up and walk side by side with the woman, the pace was unreachable, like the hallway carpet was pulling the headmistress along and working against Hazel in the opposite direction. A slight pressure built in her chest. She tensed and released her grip on the stress ball and tried to keep her breath steady.

She followed the headmistress up a flight of narrow stairs. The dark wood closed in even closer than in the hall. Where were all of the girls, Hazel wondered. It was Sunday. Surely the girls weren’t in classes on the weekend too at this school? Shouldn’t there be shrill voices and laughing and, well, human noise? Even deep in the belly of the old house she could hear the wind groan outside. The pressure from her chest moved to her stomach and she felt seasick, like the stairs shifted beneath her feet and she tripped, reaching for a handrail, finding none, and landing with her palms and shins banging against the steps.

“Whoa, there.” Headmistress Davis reached to help Hazel, but the girl recoiled at the thought of the woman’s touch.

“I’m fine,” Hazel said.

“Should’ve grabbed the handrail.” The headmistress looked down her long nose at Hazel then turned and continued up the stairs.

Hazel, again, felt that warm breath across the back of her neck. There was a fucking handrail? She crawled back to stand, forced herself to swallow and push down any panic or annoyance that bubbled up from her stomach, and followed the headmistress.

Davis led her to the highest part of the house. The stairs stayed still and the handrail followed them all the way up to the attic.

“This is the biggest room in the house. Since most of our girls are high school aged, they take this room as their living quarters. You’ll stay here with them.” The headmistress opened the door and the chit chatter that spilled out sounded foreign, after only hearing the wind beat the house, even though Hazel had been listening for the sounds of girls earlier. The prater didn’t last long. As soon as the headmistress’s shadow fell past the doorframe, the girls hushed.

Hazel tipped her chin up to see over Davis’s shoulder. The room reminded her of the twisted version of the Madeline books her nanny, Rhonda, used to read her at bedtime. Rows of cots to tuck girls in at night, but the girls scattered around the room were not cute little French schoolgirls wearing yellow hats and dresses. No. These were Troubled Girls.

Two of the dozen or so girls were, clearly, very pregnant. Several of the girls looked to be showing varying degrees of mental retardation and were mixed about the room reading, playing with dolls, doing puzzles, or sitting alone. Nearest the door, there were two girls, one with sunken eyes and yellow skin and one with a long scar down her right cheek, that looked alert and took a long survey of Hazel when the Headmistress step to the side, exposing Hazel to the room. 

“Ladies,” Headmistress Davis said. “This is Miss Pickett. She is going to be volunteering with us for the next week. She’ll be staying with you. She’ll be here to help you with your studies or any of your needs. As with anyone whom you encounter, treat her as you would like to be treated and, when appropriate, share with her God’s goodness.”

The entire room of eyes took in Hazel’s person. Hazel didn’t smile. She didn’t raise a hand to wave or nod. She picked up her suitcase and took two steps into the room. Headmistress Davis slipped behind Hazel and out of the room closing the door behind her.

There was a beat of silence during which, in her mind, Hazel heard the Headmistress say volunteer again. Sarcastically. Like she thought Hazel was like these girls and belonged here longer than a week. Like Hazel was a Troubled Girl.

The two girls near the door turned back to their conversation. Some of the others went back to their playing. One of the retarded girls walked, with a limp, up to Hazel and stood in front of her. The girl wore denim overalls that were too short. Her hair hung in greasy pigtails and one side of her upper lip seemed stuck curled, exposing a snaggletooth. Her hands were ridged claws at her chest. The girl stared at Hazel.

“Hey,” Hazel said.

The girl shrieked and snorted and put one of her knotted hands over her mouth.

“Jesus, Julie. Get out of her face.” One of the girls near the door, the one with the scar, walked toward Hazel. She rubbed her forearms as she gave Hazel a slow once over.

Hazel took the girl in as well. Scars zig-zagged across the girl’s forearms like she’d stuck them through a barbed wire fence over and over, but Hazel assumed that wasn’t true. Hazel had tried pills. Rhonda found Hazel and gagged her while they waited for the ambulance. Hazel wondered if a razor would’ve worked faster.

Five things I have thought this week:

1. If you pause and ask yourself if you should or should not wear a sloth shirt, that is not a question. You should always wear a sloth shirt.

2. Why do I want to hid under the covers when Liz Lemon reaches out to stroke Peter Dinklage on the head because she thinks he is a child, but laugh my ass off when Dave Chapelle talks about raping feet?

3. Ed Sheeran must be a god to red heads everywhere, because he is even on the hip-hop station.

4. Lots of my friends posted pictures of them with their babies for Mother's Day and I took a picture of me gardening with my dog. I'm sure they love their children, but I'm going to take a moment to assume those babies where no more help gardening than Yadi was and he doesn't poo or pee in the house or wake me up at night. He does shed, though, and roll in dead things sometimes. Tit for tat, I guess.

5. I wave and give seven blessings to every car that actually stops at their stop signs and doesn't run me over. Seven blessings is from Game of Thrones, but I can only think of three blessings I'd give to someone: Health, Happiness, and Love, but three blessings sounds pathetic.

     There are four men I've never met who had great influence on me. Together, they are The Beatles. It has been pointed out to me, recently, that these men I do not know but I love, may have lead me slightly astray. "All you need is love," The Beatles told me. The argument came that life is hard and love isn't all you need. You also need food, water, shelter, support, feelings of self-worth, and the list goes on and on and on. Basically, it's not enough to love a baby to help it grow into a functioning human. It's not enough to love your friend to be a good friend--you also have to make time for them and listen. It's not enough to love your significant other--you also have to consider their feelings/thoughts/schedules. You get the picture.

     "It's easy!" The Beatles also told me. This part I agree with. Loving is easy. I think the work comes in choosing to act on that love. To listen, to make time, to consider someone else, to support, all of it. OK, I get this. I see where I was wrong. Today while I was running, though, I was thinking about self-love. Sometimes it's not easy to love yourself. And when that happens all of the other choices--self-worth, support, taking time for yourself--all of the things you might do for someone else you love fall out the window when it comes to loving you.

    I've tricked myself into believing that I am really good a self-love, because I tend to be proud of my brain and like to read and learn and improve. I've only just started to see that self-love spread outward to my body as well. In college I had a not-life-threatening-but-still-not-healthy eating disorder--I ate, but very strictly, tracked every calorie and was in a constant battle to get the calories out number as high as I could and the calories in number lower. At my worst I weight 117 pounds and had 11% body fat. Even that skinny, I didn't love my body--it was just a vehicle getting me around.

     The first two years after college I gained my Friends Fifteen, so-called because my college roommates and I were homebodies and didn't go out a ton. When they moved, I had to find new friends and go out to be social. Going out meant I had to loosen up on my calorie standards. It also meant I drank more. But I didn't care as much about the weight gain because I had friends and, especially as an introvert, making friends isn't easy after college. I'd for sure thought when my roommates moved I'd be alone forever.

     When I was running today, in a sports bra and shorts, I remembered how jealous I used to be of my aunt's confidence to run in only a sports bra. I never would've done this when I weighed twenty pounds less. The last few years, it's been a no brainer for me--why not be cooler and get a tan? Then, because I was running and thinking is what I do while I run, I realized how much I love my body. It has taken me up and down mountains, ran, biked, and swam thousands of miles and lifted hundreds of pounds.  And keeps me living. My body is truly an amazing thing.

     Then I remembered why I started running in just a sports bra. It's not because I look like a super model in it (I wish I could post you a meme here of what I wish I looked like--see Baywatch--and what I actually look like--sweaty with a lil chunk, hot mess--but I'm not tech savvy and would have no idea who to make said meme). It's because I did it to prove someone wrong. A few years ago I started seeing a guy. The first time this guy saw my stomach he said, "Huh. I thought you'd look like a personal trainer." I said, "What does that mean." "I just thought, you'd, you know, have abs," he said. The part of me that was raised by several bad-ass, independent women wanted to say, "Whoa. Who the hell do you think you are to say that to me and who do you think you are that the .001% of the female population with abs would ever hook up with you, Moobs and Muffin-top?" He totally had man boobs and a fluffy belly. A bigger part of me, told myself to be nice, you love yourself and he probably has body image issues that he's taking out on you. The Daddy Issues side of me would've made out with him anyway. It was summer. It was 100% humidity and 90 degrees. I, pissed off at being called chunky, started to run with my belly out.

     I'm not saying that I let some dude's opinion of my body dictate what I did/do. But I did choose how I let his statement affect how I see myself. Everything you experience is through your filter and yours only. You get to choose who you love and how you love about everyone around you including yourself. I hope you take any negativity and filter it back through into a fire that makes you stronger, makes your love for you better. It's not easy, but all you need to do is to choose that love. I've never posted something #wcw and I've never posted a picture of my muscles, but today I want to give a long overdue shout out to my body. I'm a hard person to deal with sometimes, but I'm going to choose to keep loving me inside and out.

My boyfriend asked me when we first started dating
what my favorite part of my body was. I said my eyebrows.
He thought that was weird. I do have killer eyebrows,
but it should be known I love my legs the most because
they take me all over the  world. 

You see tummy chunks and man shoulders. I see someone
who is strong and never says no to cake. What's life without cake?