A public Service Announcement:
Tis the season to gather with people we haven’t seen in a long time.
I come from a generation that judges a person’s—particularly a woman’s—worthiness, success, and overall value by her body, her face, and how much older she looks than when she was, you know, 22. How much she does not look her actual age.
Look at her! She doesn’t look 50! How fantastic!
(How bizarre is that? It’s like praising someone for not looking as though she lives in Toronto. When she lives in Toronto.)
In conversation this morning, my friend mentioned the man next to her at a gathering saying someone at their table had “let herself go.”
My friend felt he might not understand that some of us struggle with our bodies and faces and metabolically weird phases of life. Some of us don’t struggle at all but do become older, the way living organisms do.
Maybe he needed gentle reminding, she thought.
Here is my gentle reminder:
Fuck off. Merry Christmas and all that, but fuck off with all our judgements about how someone else looks, how they would look if they cared about themselves or were more disciplined or motivated, if they were less lazy, less unwilling to flog themselves into submission, less affected by their genes and biology.
Fuck off with thinking we have the right to comment from half way down the table or AT ALL.
And even if you don’t move your mean mouth, even if you’re thinking it, you are filling the air around you with criticism. That’s the energy you’re contributing to the gathering in this moment.
We have “let ourselves go” in the ways that matter if we’re commenting negatively on anyone else’s singularly beautiful body, finding its way through time and love and all the human challenges we meet.
Everyone at the table is a miracle. Even you, the one making the horrible comments—you’re a miracle. So I’m here to offer you a gift of love—shut the fuck up with this kind of criticism. It doesn’t belong at a holiday table or any other kind of table. We can all do better than this. The world needs us to do better than this right now.
♥️