This post is EXTREMELY personal for me.  

Growing up, we weren’t the most fortunate family (Common for a lot of families in my community) , we didn’t have much money meaning not so much food/clothes etc. I was an outcast because of how I looked, but whatever. Who wasn’t? There were a lot of things I was self conscious about. My weight wasn’t one of them until I was constantly told about it. “Do you have an eating disorder?”, “Are you anorexic?”, “You probably can still fit in the kids section.”, “How do you even have sex? You’re so small!”. People NEED to understand. Besides these comments just being stupid and annoying, It’s actually just as harmful to the person who’s skinny, as it is to the person who is over weight to be told these things.

They are negative. If the person does not pride themselves on how small they are, don’t unwelcomely start telling them how unhealthy and underweight they are. Those are not positive words!  

Someone close to me, their mother actually told me she would be upset if she found out I had an eating disorder. What a way to turn a positive into a negative. I was upset because I have normal eating habits. I am not sick, and for someone to act as if I look sickly or like I have an unhealthy disorder of some type is a horrible feeling. It’s turned me into a meaner person. When someone says something about my weight now, I don’t just keep quiet like I did as a kid. I tell them to watch what they say, and not in a nice way. Once you’ve been hearing the same negativity constantly and just about daily through out your whole life, you get sick of it.

Just as an over weight person would starve themselves to lose weight because of this shaming, I have actually tried to over eat. Of course it didn’t work, it only made me sick. A lot of people don’t realize how big of a deal this is. I’m sure someone’s reading and thinking “boo hoo, the skinny girl is getting teased for being skinny? Big deal.” But it is, if being skinny is made into something that is disgusting and unnattractive.  

I do feel for over weight people because I know what is like to feel bad about your body and weight. I realize it’s different but still the same in many ways. Honestly, a skinny person is more likely to get shamed to their face than an over weight person is just because it’s more acceptable to tell someone they are “way too skinny” than to call someone way too fat. That’s the actual truth. And while an underweight person may or may not be facing the same challenges as someone who’s overweight, the mental damage is the same. I can assure you. 

I do realize that when people do say negative things to underweight people it’s often because they are jealous. I had a heart to heart conversation with an old co worker because she laughed at me eating a big slice of pizza and it actually enfuriated me that someone would laugh at me while I ate. She had often commented whenever I ate or if she didn’t see me eat especially, and at some point I told her to shut up. She explained that she had self esteem issues and was unhappy with her weight and that made me understand. But it doesn’t make her right to take out her inner issues on someone else who actually is dealing with the same thing. 

I am just now accepting myself at months away from 22 weighing only 2 pounds more than I did in middle school. I can never get to 100 lbs. Though, I am in a relationship with someone who practically worships my body and it’s great. There’s someone for everyone, and that’s the real honest truth. Shaming is shaming, so keep your words to yourself.

dadgan:

me: I should go to sleep

me to me: 200,000 words isn’t that long

Let’s not lie to ourselves – MySpace was great in its prime. Of course, I’m talking 2008-2013. This was the most customizable time for social media accounts.  Not to mention, the music cliques, blogging cliques, even web designing photoshop cliques. 

I was only 13 during the MySpace/social media boom. (Let’s not forget about the fact that YouTube made it’s way around the same time). There was so much potential for talented people around this time. Now, you’ve got instagram, twitter and still YouTube but, there’s so much competition these days with everything being made so easy for everyone. Anyone with the latest iPhone, a gym membership, and a decent following can easily rep a retail brand. YouTube is so established already that it’s hard to make room for new vloggers.

Thats a post for a different time. Despite the three times I was hacked on various email accounts, courtesy of MySpace, I really must thank tom for opening my eyes. 

I first started as a MySpace layout site. That was a lot of fun. I even got pretty popular at one point with hobbsthecat.com, until my host retired and I simply decided to wrap up the web designing after letting it rule my life for about two years. I even used my sims obsession to make my own series on YouTube. At some point I stumbled upon the magical world of… blogging. That’s what I’m going to call it, it was a different time back then, I’m embarrassed of what I used to write about but hey, I was only 14.  

Anyways, I wrote about seven stories. One of them even had 4 sequels and I even wrote a few movie reviews on my MySpace blog. I loved it. I was dedicated to it, and it constantly came to my mind like wild fire.  why didn’t I go with it? I was just starting high school and real life boys were finally interested in me. It’s easy to get distracted by life and think you’re doing the mature thing, when really you’re just doing what everyone else is doing.

So that was it, two years of blogging given up by boys and school counsellors telling me I needed a practical plan for after high school, the odds were against me. After having a love/hate with community college, graduating from Marinello schools of hell and working for eyelash cults, I finally realized this was not my full potential. Although the money is above average, it just does not feel right. Literally, a month ago I remembered all of the stories I had written and wanted to go back and read them. I was excited because it would all feel new to me since I hadn’t seen them in 5 years or so.

Though, I ran into some problems. Alike many other young webdesigner/bloggers I had about 10 gmail accounts (maybe more) and I could not possibly remember old email accounts or passwords. I knew was obsessed with sea horses and purple at that time, but that didn’t help me. I knew I would be so upset if I couldn’t retrieve all of that work I had done and I wondered why all of a sudden it was so important to me. 

I was dragged to the movie theatre that night at 11:00 p.m. by my boyfriend and his friends. I wasn’t going to be distracted this time, I desperately continued login attempts during Baywatch. Not even Zac Efrons abs could tear me away.

Unsuccessful, I finally emailed MySpace and they got back to me fairly quickly, only to tell me to fill out a retrieval form but I couldn’t because I didn’t know my email adress for the account and it was just a big mess. I finally was able to send the form, requested my blogs then waited a week. I emailed them again and then a complete list of my blogs were emailed to me in a Microsoft excel document the following day. So, it is possible to recover old accounts. Thanks, MySpace.

It’s weird to say, but I have never been so happy to read anything before. I binged on my own writings for two weeks. Reading at work in between clients, in the car, staying up late to read before going to sleep.  Like totally geeking out on reading. That week I realized I am going to write. My whole life clicked for me in that moment, and I have never been so sure about something my whole life (It was seriously so dramatic lol). It was a revelation. This is the reason I was so iffy on literally everything I had ever tried to do in life.

If you enjoy something, and you notice it’s something you often find yourself doing your whole life, please accept your gift. You will never be happy working that 9-5 you hate but don’t necessarily hate the money you make there. Don’t be scared to do what you love.