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| picture from ignitelight.tumblr.com |
This is a picture that I've had on my desktop for ages. I've been wanting to write about it, there's so much I'm always wanting to write about, a constant dialogue I want to type out when I'm near a computer but creating time to do this is hard for me right now. Excuses excuses, from the little I've read of Outliers Malcolm Gladwell would tell me that I need to find the time, like 10,000 hours of time and then I will have mastered it. Ah, life gets in my way. But this picture I got from a site that I look at pretty much daily. I love to check in and see the pretty pictures, which seem to be anglophile heavy landscape wise, gorgeous pictures of green green mountains with lovely little cottages tucked into between them. Maybe I thought they're anglophile heavy because during the summer they were posting so many pics of women in hunter boots, looking impossibly stylish in rubber boots. They have great pictures of beaches, thoughtful quotes, stylish white kitchens, slender woman looking impossibly chic, it's an envy/inspiration heavy site for me. Except for pictures of England and Scotland's cliffs, which make my heart beat faster just looking at them online, because I fear my children leaping like lemmings off of them. Not because my children have no sense so much as my brain likes to torture me. Now this photo above showed up about a month or so ago and when I saw it I thought - 1. cute top, because I'm a sucker for heathered grey anything 2. interesting jewelry because that's a rather uncrunchy take on crystal jewelry, I like the simplicity of it 3. she has nice clavicles and what appears to be nice hair (the hair envy never ends for me) and 4. and what I really honed in on, she would be a good stick. I don't have to do many peripheral sticks on my patients because most of them have PICC lines or central lines but occasionally I do have to and I always get a bit nervous unless someone has a vein that is this obvious and easy. She doesn't even have a tourniquet on but you can see the vein clearly in her antecubital space, it would be a ridiculously easy or good stick. Angelina Jolie, Sarah Jessica Parker and Madonna all three of them are also very good sticks because they've got prominent veins all over their arms and hands. In nursing school a guy in my class that I first auscultated a blood pressure on had antecubital veins so good I could see them pulsate. Young men are in demand for bone marrow donations because it is so easy to harvest peripheral stem cells from their antecubital (a/c for short) veins. But when I clicked on the picture to see it better I saw all these other people that had reposted this picture and I can't tell you how many of them were people, I'm assuming young women, coveting her thinness (thinspiration, ameliaslowlydisappearing, keeplovethin, iwanttobetheskinniest, thinisthenewperfect, gracefullydisappearing) that's just a sampling. I felt sad seeing that, for those girls and for myself because although that wasn't what was entering my mind when I looked at the photo God knows I've been in that place before. And still am whenever I see someone with impossibly slender legs or the tiniest of stomachs. I mean I thought that she had nice clavicles but I didn't covet them, my clavicles are pretty prominent and my chest is pretty bony. If I need anything shot in heart, a la Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction (which isn't likely given I don't really even drink much anymore) no one would have a problem finding my intercostal spaces). But my chest is thin from age, from the chest up I've lost my youthful plumpness but from the chest down things aren't so bony. It makes me sad that so many of us women are expending so much fucking energy fighting with our bodies. If I had channeled that energy towards anything else, school, writing, medicine, anything positive, well it would easily exceed ten thousand hours and I'd have something to show for it.
1 comment:
I so relate to this with the time poorly spent regrets. but we/i/you could only have done what we did with our time with the information we had at the time. that's what gives you the force, the will, the strength to do what you're doing now—the nursing, the mothering, the triathalonning. i look at those thinspiration sites too out of morbid curiosity and want to throttle those girls for throwing their lives down the toilet. their health, their potential. none of that shit matters as much as finding self-acceptance. they are so confused. but anything i'd say would fall on deaf, denying, hostile ears. so i don't comment. they don't want our two cents. anyway i read this article on one of the paleo sites that got me feeling much more accepting of my below the waist unboniness. http://huntgatherlove.com/category/tags/fat esp. the part that begins with the sentence, "Human women are unusual in the first place..." i think what I'm learning is that most if not all of the self-hatred I foist upon myself is borne out of contextualizing with such a narrow focus, so i'm paying attention to that. like, biology and men (real men!) value softness and curves on a woman. but the media, esp. fashion industry (narrow context) values bony. so expand the context and it gets a little harder to shovel all that self-loathing in. anyway, that's my novella comment for what it's worth! lots of love. e
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