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| August 2016 |
I'm not quite forty yet, I have exactly one month to go. I'm getting a wee head start. Want to join me on my journey?
When approaching a perceived milestone, you can't help but reflect on your past ones. At 16, my parents threw me a big party at Genie's restaurant (now defunct) and I was wearing a pin-striped suit from Le Chateau along with green contacts. The Blue Jays won the 1992 world series and we shouted from the car on the way home.
At 21, I got dumped by my first serious boyfriend. He did this by not showing up to my 21 birthday party. I then proceeded to fail out of teacher's college. Ok, not a great memory, but I am SO glad I didn't become a teacher. Lemonade, right?
When I turned 30, I was in the best shape of my life. I'd been going to the gym regularly, been married for a year, was singing and touring a great deal, liked my job...I was really very happy. I thought I couldn't be any happier. I may never again be this 'type' of happy and so blindly in love, but I do look back on this time so fondly.
Within the last ten years, life became a little less predictable. Now I find myself a good deal plumper (everyone has their fat moniker of choice, mine is plump), single, unsuccessfully dating (12 first dates thus far in 2016 with no seconds) and looking at forty slowly approaching me while my biological clock quickly sprints away. I am still happy though. I am an artist, have great careers (three!), fewer but truer friends, I own property (well it technically doesn't exist yet, but I still own 700 sq ft conceptually), a feline best bud (Coco!), and have an overall quality of life that I am grateful to. From the outside, my life may appear a bit glamorous to some.
I operate fairly autonomously being an only child with no one who really affects my day-to-day operations. My parents are healthy and live on the other side of the city from me, so we do text and see each other a few times a month. Some days pass where I don't text anyone and barely leave Coco's side. We alternate between looking out the window together and napping. If I want to do something, I usually do it alone and I've come to love this. I now prefer going to movies alone, so when I did have a partner last year, I struggled to find a way to say that I'd rather go alone (I never found one and we had fairly opposite movie tastes, so that was fun).
So what do I plan to accomplish within my year of forty? Well, I'd like to focus on my health, for all the right reasons and also as a continued social experiment. Having grown up being slim for my whole life, save the last 8 years, I am still slim on the inside. Meaning, I have very high self confidence even though now, my body type is lumped into an undesirable category by North American standards. I suppose it's the exact opposite of 'fat kid syndrome'; we are all in a battle to reconcile our inner and outer selves.
So stay tuned for some musings on forty, fat, fabulous-ity, dating and likely some other stuff sprinkled in for good measure. Please feel free to comment and offer your perspectives, gimme all the interactions!
