my spirit animal must be an ostrich. i know that’s not a fancy spirit animal, or an elegant one, but it does seem to be mine. if everything is A-OK, buddy i can face it and do what needs to be done. but if anything gets a little bit wobbly, i just hide my head and do a bit of psychic fingers-in-the-ears ‘la la la i can’t hear anything’. and then the hiding takes on a life of its own, and i begin to feel so awful about having hidden, and having avoided people, that it just gets harder and harder to do what needs to be done. and doing what needs to be done becomes increasingly heavy, since – you know – it’s not being done.

i love the spirit of amy herzog’s ‘fit to flatter’ series, for a great many reasons. the reason that’s relevant to this post is that she says ‘here’s what IS, and here’s how to work with it.’ that’s right:  this is how i actually do look. actually. not how i wish i looked; not ‘how i’ll look when i lose 10 pounds;’ not how i used to look; not how the victoria’s secret models that i walk past every morning look (well, how they look with a lot of airbrushing and photoshopping). no. this is how i look, right now, and it is.

i’ve enjoyed the fit to flatter posts, every single one. i’ve enjoyed seeing actual photographs of real women, and how real women actually look – and they look great, they look like regular people. like me. on top of the ridiculous blight of advertising and overly skinny models, i also live in manhattan, which seems to have a greater-than-average percentage of fancy people. i am not a fancy person. i am an average-looking person, an average 51 year old who has given birth to 3 children, who has had major abdominal surgery, who has less-than-perfect posture, who can be lazy and just throw on whatever is convenient, who could certainly benefit from more exercise.

facing what actually is requires either a bit of courage, or an attitude stripped of judgment. i think it’s the stripped attitude that helps the most. step on the scale and just look. open your eyes, really just look at that number. ok, that’s what is. and open that email and just look at it – that’s it. and go ahead and open the envelope, open the mail, look at what it actually is. what’s amazing – and i do already know this – is just how powerful it feels to go ahead and do that. i always feel so righteous, like i can just keep doing it, it’s so much easier – working is always easier than not working – and from now on i’m just going to do it. i’ll adopt a new spirit animal, something that Gets. It. Done. i wonder what that would be.