By the Way, I am Painting

This summer I am taking 2 painting classes at our community arts program connected with our university. I have loved getting back in to oil paint, which I have not touched since the late 60's, oh the smell, a trip down memory lane. I am also taking water color. I take one class right after the other. I am coming to think that oil is it-- of course, there is a storage problem with oil paintings, they have to dry, not quickly like either water color or acrylic. It's an issue.

Today Obesity is Classified as a Disease

 I find that, like all things covered in shame and guilt, trainers I have known are coming out with their prejudices-- fat people are lazy. I am angry. The years of steeling my body shame to get the exercise I needed, to put a suit on that and get in the pool, to overcome the prejudices of the "trained world" to use the equipment I needed to use, getting fitter and fitter but still fat, it all comes rushing back to me today with the careless opinions of people who are hired to help people like me achieve their goals.  I struggled over and over so many years until I chose a medical solution which is another difficult decision. It doesn't really make things easier after a point, but people will call it an easy way out. It isn't. There is no easy way out.  I want to flame and I hate flaming so I will put it here. I won't still be around when the crossfitters lose their knees, shoulders and backs, and I hear, even their kidneys sometimes, but I also won't be going to the local hospital for training where trainers express this ignorant, and maybe just youthful prejudice.

I sat in the waiting room of a psychologists office waiting for my very young son who was getting therapy in advance of losing his very young cousin who was like a sister. I sat across from a woman so thin she looked harsh, and I was having mean judgmental thoughts about her thinness. (I came to the same office to deal with my fatness.) We chatted, a local OBGYN had cut her intestine during a cesarean or a hysterectomy and her thinness was a life threatening illness from that catastrophic event in her life. I learned some of my lesson then. I do not know where she is now, or if she even survived, but I thank  her for the lesson.

We are all one life threatening injury  or illness away from disability and having to live on the meager means of poverty. Sometimes kids who have grown up middle class and have known nothing else, moved from middle class with their parents to middle class themselves and can make the choices of healthful eating and constant exercise have no empathy for those who can't. I have noticed the same thing with health insurance, people who have always had it in their youth and in their adulthood have little or no empathy for those who do not or cannot get it.  Oops, oh well, takes one thing to stir up the shit in my brain!

I feel better now.