Hollywood
There is a scene in Thunderheart where Maggie Eagle Bear tells Raymond "I think your dad was calling you a chubby boy." I always felt like it cast light on a cultural difference: Native cultures don't judge body fat in the same toxic way that White American culture does.
According to oral tradition, my late father was part Cherokee. After he left the military, where he had to remain fit to keep his job, he put on so much weight that some relatives teased him that he looked like he was ready to deliver twins.
He ignored it and let it roll off him like water off a duck.
Late in life, he was diagnosed with colon cancer after losing like a third of his body weight. Had he not been so overweight to start with, he wouldn't have survived this health crisis.
When they went in to surgically remove the tumor, they thought it would take two hours. It took more like six.
The good news is that the tumor didn't just invasively plow through a bunch of organs. They said they peeled the extensive tumor off of the outside of multiple vital organs and the doctors claimed it was the fat that protected him from a worse fate.
After it was over, my dad once said to me that he had always known that someday he would need those fat reserves.
In my twenties, well before I was diagnosed with CF, I was quite heavy and I made the conscious decision at some point to not cave to social pressure to count calories and try to starve myself to a socially acceptable weight. I decided to put my health first.
This is one of many factors that helped save my life and I can attribute this resistance to such social pressure to my father and his Native heritage.
By all accounts, I was quite beautiful in my youth but I lived when I should have died in part because I was able to resist social pressure to cater to social standards of conventional beauty at all costs.
There is a long historical tradition of armed forces having a close association with cutting edge medical care. So it should be no surprise that the American military has an excellent medical system.
I'm a former military wife and I am still alive because of that as well. I was diagnosed with atypical CF at Travis Air Force Base, which has a very large hospital that serves military members in eight western states and also is a teaching hospital associated with UC-Davis Medical Center.
But well before that, I got excellent care my whole life as a military dependent that helped me live long enough to get that diagnosis at Travis. And that care included niceties like cosmetic surgical standards baked into other procedures.
As just one example, I had a large mole removed from my neck and biopsied for cancer and the scar is invisible. It always was more or less invisible but I used to be able to feel where the sutures had been and I can no longer find that. So it may have more or less disappeared completely. (It is just below my ear, so I used to feel for it. It's in a place difficult for me to get an actual look at.)
The woman I left my baby with the day I got that outpatient surgery showed me her scar on her upper arm from a similar procedure. It was large and highly visible and no care had been taken to minimize the scar for cosmetic reasons.
Beauty is important to me but I no longer post selfies to the internet. Maybe someday I will again but I don't at the moment.
I cannot currently manage to take selfies that are at all attractive. When I try, they look vastly worse than what I actually see in the mirror.
I don't know why that is. I live in an old building with poor lighting. Maybe the lighting is terrible. I have a really cheap phone as my "camera." Maybe the camera sucks. I'm out of practice because I haven't done this in years.
I feel okay about how I look most of the time. These days, my biggest pain point in that regard is people on the internet wanting photos or whatever and I can't deliver.
Total strangers I run into on the street still tell me I'm pretty. I overall like how I look, all things considered, though I loathe the belly bloat that still hasn't fully resolved. I loathe it both as a health symptom and as a point of ugliness.
Other women seem to have a much harder time than I have with telling the world "You can take your beauty standards and shove them up your ass. My health comes first." I strongly suspect I have that luxury because I was very attractive at one time, I know a lot about clothes and photography and so on and my self esteem is just not tied to such superficial imagery.
I remember talking on an email list about using a lot of peroxide and someone had a cow about "It will turn your hair ORANGE!"
It turns my hair blonde and I look good as a blonde, so I absolutely did not care nor think about such things. But with her having a fit, I tried to get better about giving people little warnings about things like that.
But I don't really get it because what CF does to you is so horrible that if it turned my hair green with purple polka dots I have trouble imagining I would find that to be too high a price to pay for getting better and no longer being tortured by my condition like I once was. And I can only guess that some combo of less in the way of savvy about how to make yourself passably attractive and also how to handle social crap makes it an excessive burden to bear for other people.
I've arranged my life where my health comes first. Among other things, I work from home and so I no longer have to meet a work dress code. But I also realize not everyone can do that and even if you can it takes time to arrange it, so I'm not trying to be dismissive of the concerns of other people. I just feel like it's solvable and I find their extremely strongly negative reactions simply baffling.
At some point, I was following a couple of women on twitter who both had very serious medical conditions and both regularly posted gorgeous photos of themselves all made up. Without makeup, they looked really awful.
One day, I decided to unfollow them because I felt this was a really unhealthy thing for me to be exposed to. I no longer wear makeup, jewelry etc and I don't have to get all dolled up to engage with the internet. I can do it as a faceless entity.
It was at that point that I wrote up the following policy for my twitter account explaining why I was not using my face as the icon: Hello, Twitter
In my day to day life, me wearing no makeup, no jewelry, no high heels etc is not some kind of problem. It neither interferes with me doing things I want to do nor does it get me flak from people around me.
That's not to say I have never experienced social friction over it, but it's not currently any kind of an issue.
I love nice things and I hope to someday be healthy enough and wealthy enough to dress better than I do these days, though I don't expect to ever again wear makeup, jewelry, etc.
I'm not against people dressing nice or even getting cosmetic surgery, whether that's reconstructive or just self enhancement they desire. I'm also not against the fashion industry doing its thing.
I just wish that beauty were not some kind of gun to the heads of most women. I think it's an excessive burden for a great many women and for women with serious health problems it can be a thing actively helping to keep them sick and preventing them from recovering.
The irony is I look better than I used to because I have been able to resist such pressures. I have grown healthier and that has led to me looking better than I used to, though I'm also older and will never again be as pretty as I was in my twenties.
According to oral tradition, my late father was part Cherokee. After he left the military, where he had to remain fit to keep his job, he put on so much weight that some relatives teased him that he looked like he was ready to deliver twins.
He ignored it and let it roll off him like water off a duck.
Late in life, he was diagnosed with colon cancer after losing like a third of his body weight. Had he not been so overweight to start with, he wouldn't have survived this health crisis.
When they went in to surgically remove the tumor, they thought it would take two hours. It took more like six.
The good news is that the tumor didn't just invasively plow through a bunch of organs. They said they peeled the extensive tumor off of the outside of multiple vital organs and the doctors claimed it was the fat that protected him from a worse fate.
After it was over, my dad once said to me that he had always known that someday he would need those fat reserves.
In my twenties, well before I was diagnosed with CF, I was quite heavy and I made the conscious decision at some point to not cave to social pressure to count calories and try to starve myself to a socially acceptable weight. I decided to put my health first.
This is one of many factors that helped save my life and I can attribute this resistance to such social pressure to my father and his Native heritage.
By all accounts, I was quite beautiful in my youth but I lived when I should have died in part because I was able to resist social pressure to cater to social standards of conventional beauty at all costs.
There is a long historical tradition of armed forces having a close association with cutting edge medical care. So it should be no surprise that the American military has an excellent medical system.
I'm a former military wife and I am still alive because of that as well. I was diagnosed with atypical CF at Travis Air Force Base, which has a very large hospital that serves military members in eight western states and also is a teaching hospital associated with UC-Davis Medical Center.
But well before that, I got excellent care my whole life as a military dependent that helped me live long enough to get that diagnosis at Travis. And that care included niceties like cosmetic surgical standards baked into other procedures.
As just one example, I had a large mole removed from my neck and biopsied for cancer and the scar is invisible. It always was more or less invisible but I used to be able to feel where the sutures had been and I can no longer find that. So it may have more or less disappeared completely. (It is just below my ear, so I used to feel for it. It's in a place difficult for me to get an actual look at.)
The woman I left my baby with the day I got that outpatient surgery showed me her scar on her upper arm from a similar procedure. It was large and highly visible and no care had been taken to minimize the scar for cosmetic reasons.
Beauty is important to me but I no longer post selfies to the internet. Maybe someday I will again but I don't at the moment.
I cannot currently manage to take selfies that are at all attractive. When I try, they look vastly worse than what I actually see in the mirror.
I don't know why that is. I live in an old building with poor lighting. Maybe the lighting is terrible. I have a really cheap phone as my "camera." Maybe the camera sucks. I'm out of practice because I haven't done this in years.
I feel okay about how I look most of the time. These days, my biggest pain point in that regard is people on the internet wanting photos or whatever and I can't deliver.
Total strangers I run into on the street still tell me I'm pretty. I overall like how I look, all things considered, though I loathe the belly bloat that still hasn't fully resolved. I loathe it both as a health symptom and as a point of ugliness.
Other women seem to have a much harder time than I have with telling the world "You can take your beauty standards and shove them up your ass. My health comes first." I strongly suspect I have that luxury because I was very attractive at one time, I know a lot about clothes and photography and so on and my self esteem is just not tied to such superficial imagery.
I remember talking on an email list about using a lot of peroxide and someone had a cow about "It will turn your hair ORANGE!"
It turns my hair blonde and I look good as a blonde, so I absolutely did not care nor think about such things. But with her having a fit, I tried to get better about giving people little warnings about things like that.
But I don't really get it because what CF does to you is so horrible that if it turned my hair green with purple polka dots I have trouble imagining I would find that to be too high a price to pay for getting better and no longer being tortured by my condition like I once was. And I can only guess that some combo of less in the way of savvy about how to make yourself passably attractive and also how to handle social crap makes it an excessive burden to bear for other people.
I've arranged my life where my health comes first. Among other things, I work from home and so I no longer have to meet a work dress code. But I also realize not everyone can do that and even if you can it takes time to arrange it, so I'm not trying to be dismissive of the concerns of other people. I just feel like it's solvable and I find their extremely strongly negative reactions simply baffling.
At some point, I was following a couple of women on twitter who both had very serious medical conditions and both regularly posted gorgeous photos of themselves all made up. Without makeup, they looked really awful.
One day, I decided to unfollow them because I felt this was a really unhealthy thing for me to be exposed to. I no longer wear makeup, jewelry etc and I don't have to get all dolled up to engage with the internet. I can do it as a faceless entity.
It was at that point that I wrote up the following policy for my twitter account explaining why I was not using my face as the icon: Hello, Twitter
In my day to day life, me wearing no makeup, no jewelry, no high heels etc is not some kind of problem. It neither interferes with me doing things I want to do nor does it get me flak from people around me.
That's not to say I have never experienced social friction over it, but it's not currently any kind of an issue.
I love nice things and I hope to someday be healthy enough and wealthy enough to dress better than I do these days, though I don't expect to ever again wear makeup, jewelry, etc.
I'm not against people dressing nice or even getting cosmetic surgery, whether that's reconstructive or just self enhancement they desire. I'm also not against the fashion industry doing its thing.
I just wish that beauty were not some kind of gun to the heads of most women. I think it's an excessive burden for a great many women and for women with serious health problems it can be a thing actively helping to keep them sick and preventing them from recovering.
The irony is I look better than I used to because I have been able to resist such pressures. I have grown healthier and that has led to me looking better than I used to, though I'm also older and will never again be as pretty as I was in my twenties.
Hollywood
