Your Jiggly Floppy Body is Funny—Laughter Helps

So you’ve wrecked your body.  You’re never going to look like Angelina Jolie naked.  So what?

Seriously, so what?  You were never going to be as smart as Stephen Hawking, as athletic as Lance Armstrong, as famous as Neil Armstrong, or as kind as Mother Teresa, either.  You managed to let all that go somehow.

It’s time to let go of the dream of the perfect body.  Our media is very intensely bent on the idea that you should hate your imperfect body and keep spending lots of money to try to be less flawed.  Allowing our media to control your self-image is not going to serve you well, though.

Because you will not be able to regain perfection.  Stretch marks are forever.  Surgery has side-effects, risks of scarring, and creates its own weird things (who doesn’t love a vagina that stretches up to your belly button after a tummy tuck, really?  I want one of those!)  You are older than those models and your youth is never coming back either.

That’s the bad news.  The good news is that no one cares but you.  Or if they do, they’re judgmental shallow people who should also go on the list of things that aren’t serving you.

Wouldn’t it be better to just embrace your body as it is, good and bad?  It’s all you.  Your body shows the history of your life, the adventures it has had.  It shows the battles you’ve lost with food, and now the battles you’ve won.  It’s yours.

Own it.

I really enjoy making fun of myself.  I called myself “skinny-fat” because although I looked little in clothes, I had all this saggy skin and lack of muscle tone.  My friends and I referred to my belly as “my situation.”  I’d be in the dressing room with a friend and we’d agree “that doesn’t work with the situation.”

My favorite was the day I realized that my situation had some unique properties in water.  When soaking in the tub, fatty bits float.  Our boobs drift up towards the top of the water.  But my belly situation was comprised of loose skin with less fat in it.  It didn’t actually float.  What it did was turn into silly putty.  I could squish it into configurations and it would stay there.

The next time my best friend and I were in a hot tub, she made a smiley face in my belly skin.  We laughed until we were purple.  We horrified the other people in the tub with us.  But it was healing for me.  It is good to joke about the jiggly bits.

It’s like farting during sex.  What are you going to do, burst into tears and run from the room, never to have sex again?  No.  You laugh about it and move on.  What are you going to do about being squishy and flawed?  Curl up in a ball and die?  Save every penny you ever earn for surgeries and potions?  Nah.  Embrace it and live your life.

Live your life well, and the jiggly bits will be just another thread in the rich tapestry you weave for yourself.