Being Ideal

I was driving home the other day when I heard an advertisement for laser hair removal. The announcer, a woman, talked about how embarrassing a woman's body hair could be, especially in summer during shorts season. She finished by giving out the phone number for the laser clinic, which was something along the lines of 1-800-BE-IDEAL.

You heard it here first, girls. The hair that naturally grows anywhere but on our heads is less than ideal. I could only shake my head at this revelation until I started to remember a time when I bought into the image of the ideal woman.

Flash back 25 years ago. I was a young fitness instructor and personal trainer. I was also a competitive bodybuilder. I'd worked hard to sculpt my body and I was proud of it. It was the result of 5-6 hours a day spent in the gym in some type of workout or another. I also ate next to nothing - around 800 calories per day. A bite of a cookie was a serious transgression, as was dressing on my salad or a single French fry. Once, my coach called me and chewed me out for eating a peanut butter cup. My body and appearance was my main focus.

For these efforts, I was awarded with a size 3 figure that carried about 15 percent body fat (under 21 percent body fat is considered under fat). When I competed, my body fat was closer to 8 to 10 percent, which made me a "fat" by bodybuilding standards.

Competing involved standing on stage in a teeny bikini. It was no place for body hair. Resultantly, I spent a rather high percentage of my tiny income for waxing treatments that ripped the hair from my most intimate areas - all in the name of looking good.

If you've never had a bikini wax, I applaud you. In retrospect, I wish I could say the same. It is not a pleasant experience, even in the most skilled of hands. Still, at the time I felt it was merely the price of being attractive. 1-800-BE-IDEAL indeed.

Sadly, the bikini wax was only one painful experience in a succession of them I endured in order to meet what I believed was the expected physical ideal. I was hungry all the time - and often my stomach felt as if it was gnawing on itself, eating my body from the inside out. My workouts were so long and intense there were days I could barely move. I remember a few days I was unable to put my heels on the floor because doing so sent intense, searing pain shooting up my calves. I walked on my toes all day - very slowly. I had to have someone else drive me places because there was no way I was pressing a gas pedal, clutch, or brake.

I also did things I knew weren't in the best interest of my health. For example, I knew an 800-calorie per day diet was unhealthy, but how I looked was more important than being healthy. I knew tanning beds might someday cause skin cancer and cataracts, but tanning was part of the whole regimen body builders used to prep for competition. I knew there were side effects to the supplements my coach had me taking (some included ephedra and similar ingredients), but I took them so I would look good.

It worked. I looked fantastic. How I felt was something else altogether. I was fuzzy headed and weak. I ached from head to toe. I was cold all the time. My stomach hurt. There was a constant ringing in my ears. I had trouble sleeping. I was constantly stressed out and exhausted. It never occurred to me my appearance wasn't worth all of the discomfort I chose to endure.

Whenever I saw or talked to my mom, she expressed concern I might have an eating disorder - or at least be ripe for one. What she didn't know (sorry mom) was I was already a veteran of a college eating disorder.

The seeds were sewn the summer before my freshman year. That summer, a lot of people, knowing I was headed to college in the fall, asked me if I was going to gain the freshman 15. While I wasn't chunky, I was always a curvy teenager. It was just my natural shape - large bust and hips, small waist, but I was self-conscious about my shape and size because it didn't fit into the stick thin ideal images in media.

I attended Eastern Washington University, where I lived in the dorms. A relatively small state college at the time, EWU had only five dormitories and a single dining hall called Tawanka. The big joke on campus was that freshman women would quickly get the "Tawanka butt" from the food there. I was determined this wouldn't happen to me.

For most of my Freshman year, I ate about one meal per day, and the only meal I would eat was salad. I told everyone this was because I couldn't stand the food available at Tawanka. I also started exercising fanatically, running several miles a day, walking all over campus, taking aerobics classes, and participating in every intramural sport I could. I quickly lost weight and my size 10 frame dwindled to a 4-6. When I returned home for the summer, I received all kinds of compliments on just how fabulous I looked.

Back home, I found it difficult to hide my minimal eating habits. While I kept up the exercise, I also started eating regular meals so my family wouldn't notice anything amiss. Worried my weight would start to creep upward once again, I began purging in secret after most meals.

When I returned to campus in the fall, I realized if I actually wanted to eat a meal every now and then, I could. All I needed to do was purge afterward.

Typically, college women living in the dorms with communal bathrooms eventually get caught when they purge because it's difficult to find alone time in the bathroom. However, that year I was a resident advisor (RA), and I had a master key to every room in the dorm. I could use that key to go up to my dorm's "penthouse" - a large utility room on the top floor no one ever used. The penthouse had bathrooms the school kept locked since no one ever used them. Several times a day, I used my master key to let myself into the bathroom. Once inside, I'd lock the door behind me and purge. Then, I'd quickly clean up and head back to college life.

Ironically, as an RA one of my jobs was to provide support and resources for the girls on my floor. I can't even count how many times over the next few years I performed eating disorder interventions and referred other girls to counseling for the very same issue I was facing myself. EWU even provided the RAs training in recognizing eating disorders because they were so prevalent on campus. The cognitive dissonance that arose from this is ultimately what caused me to stop the purging and instead return to eating very few calories and exercising.

In my mind, I had "beaten" my eating disorder when in actuality, I had just transformed it to something else.

As I described in a previous post, my body finally put a halt to this by the time I was 25. Since every effort I put towards trying to stay thin failed, I eventually reached a place where I made peace with my body and appearance and started to focus on the things in life that really mattered. In the meantime, however, it was a long and miserable battle getting there.

I tortured myself in the name of being ideal because I assumed that in order to be so, it was all about appearance. While I reached these conclusions on my own, I believe I did so with societal and media assistance, something that concerns me for the generations of girls and young women coming behind me.

The messages we receive from media about how important our physical presence is are astounding and often shaming. Every day we are bombarded with media images about how we should look, smell, and feel. Even if we make a concentrated effort to avoid these images, they are everywhere - on billboards, on the Internet, on television, in magazines, in the movies, in the books we read. It's a very difficult message to avoid, and it took me nearly 40 years of my life to recognize those messages for what they are: complete and utter bullshit.

I started making a list of all the things media tells girls and women they should hide, mask, change, or eliminate altogether, and it's astounding in its scope. We're told that virtually nothing natural about us is okay, and we're encouraged to get rid of body hair, dye gray hair, undergo procedures or buy expensive products to minimize wrinkles, use multiple chemicals to eliminate our body's natural odors, eat little and exercise lots to meet a physical ideal, use makeup to enhance and change our natural skin tone, and many others. If we opt out of those things, we have clearly "given up" on ourselves.

Globally, the beauty business is a $382 billion industry. The average American female will spend $15,000 on beauty products in her lifetime, along with countless hours putting on makeup, visiting salons, and having beauty services. A Harley Street Clinic study found women spent an average of 474 days putting on makeup. Another survey noted that, on average, women accumulate the equivalent of 72 days over their lifetimes just shaving their legs. That's 45 months of time, and we haven't even discussed visiting salons and spas, shopping for cosmetics, reading about beauty, obsessing over food and exercise, or having cosmetic surgeries. That's an insane amount of time, money, and energy that could be better spent in pursuing activities that will genuinely make us happy.

We can do better than this, but in order to do so we have to block all the noise that surrounds us. Girls shouldn't have to wait until they are in their 40s (or later) to realize their value lies not in their physicality but in who they are as human beings. We shouldn't allow media or society to shame young women and girls into believing that if they don't meet a certain physical ideal, then they are clearly not enough.

While this is my story, it is not unique. I know dozens of women like me who have struggled throughout their lives for self-acceptance merely because they didn't meet a physical ideal. These are brilliant, creative, wonderful women who have much to offer in terms of passion, talent, compassion, intelligence and love. While they may have embraced these parts of themselves, many women I know still feel as if a piece of the puzzle is missing. Many successful women still feel like failures because they never managed to live up to a physical ideal foisted on them by a disingenuous media.

When we do this - buy into societal views or media stereotypes of what we should be - we give away a part of our power and strength to those who have a financial stake in keeping us feeling insecure about our looks. We spend our money and time cultivating something that doesn't really matter -- outer beauty -- at the expense of what is truly important. Although it took me nearly 40 years, I can only hope that if we all share our stories with the girls and women coming behind us, they will never have to pay the price of trying to be ideal.

On Being Enough

Occasionally, my ego gets the better of me, and I start to wonder if I am really enough. It's in those moments I worry the non-traditional paths I so often choose are just a waste of time. Still, I've always been a big believer if anything I do positively affects even one person, then it is time not wasted.

In truth, we may never learn what we're doing is helpful to others. When I was undergoing the training to become a volunteer court-appointed special advocate (CASA) for abused and neglected kids, the program coordinators noted this often. They told us we were entering a dysfunctional system where we might feel as if we were on our own, and we may never understand the impact of the work we were doing on the lives of the kids for whom we advocated.

At the time, those warnings felt unduly dire. After a few months in the trenches, however, I began to realize their truth. As a CASA, my job was to make recommendations to the court in the best interest of the children for whom I was advocating. It sounds like a simple mission, but in my two earliest cases I quickly realized how hard I'd have to fight against a difficult system. In making recommendations that were critically important to the health, well-being, and safety of the children for whom I was advocating, I came up against their parents, attorneys, and even the state/CPS.

It felt like I was on my own when I had to go into a courtroom and make those recommendations before a judge. It was a volatile situation. When the judge agreed with my recommendations, it so infuriated a dangerous person that security had to escort me out of the courtroom through the judge's chambers and out a back door to a waiting car, which then drove me via an evasive route back to my car, where I drove (with my attorney following me to ensure nobody else did) another evasive route home. For months, I watched behind me when I left the house to ensure I didn't bring the dangers associated with the work home to my family. It was a frightening and stressful period. As an added bonus, as part of my job as a CASA I had to continue to monitor and interact with the parents because I was still their children's advocate.

While I believe those recommendations were the best thing for the children involved, I never saw the impact they made. It was, I believe, because the impact was in the things that didn't happen to the children as a result of those recommendations, and it's difficult to quantify a negative. Given the opportunity to do it again, however, I would have made the same recommendations. I can only pray the children in that case wind up in a better place - but I will never really know if they did or not.

While that's an extreme case of not being able to see the (hopefully) positive effects of my work, I experience it on a less dramatic scale elsewhere, as well. I think we all do. While I sit and pound away at a keyboard, it is my hope my words will find the one person who needs to hear them and positively affect another's life. When I occasionally receive confirmation this is so, it makes me realize sharing so much of myself in writing has some value other than to just please my own passion for the written word. It means the world to me to know somewhere someone gets something out of what I write.

Then there are the times my ego gets the better of me. In those times, I find myself wondering if it's all worth it. After all, I've had to eschew what society suggests embodies success (wealth and fame) in pursuit of this passion of mine. I'm neither wealthy nor famous (I have 14 Twitter followers, so there's that). Rather, I eke out a living with my writing, and my audience is miniscule. While writing makes me happy, I sometimes wonder if it is a vanity project and if my time might not be better served if I pursued something that would render me more traditionally successful (i.e. earn me a real paycheck.)

In those times, I appeal to the universe, asking for some simple sign this is what I am meant to do. When my ego gets involved, you see, my joy of writing and the happiness I feel just being who I am don't seem to be a great measure of the value of what I do.

The universe is good at humoring my ego, however. When I ask, I receive a sign that shows me I reached the one person who needed to hear what I have to say. That person saying, "You know what? This helped!" reminds me of why -- beyond my own creative fulfillment -- I insist on being a writer.

It's also why I try to acknowledge other people when they do something that makes a difference to me. I think we all need to hear what we do doesn't go unnoticed. I believe everyone wants to know that somehow they make a difference.

Everyone has the capacity to reach that single person whose life will be better for what they are offering. Perhaps its a smile to a stranger you pass in the grocery store. Maybe it's steering a customer to a perfect product to solve a problem. Maybe it's raising beautiful and productive children. Maybe it's making your home a warm and loving place for your family and friends. The value in what you do professionally and in your personal life is in infusing it with yourself, your inspiration, your own value system, and a genuine desire to help. When you do this, you may never know the impact you have on another. However, if your interactions in this world leave even one person better off for having met you, then your time here isn't wasted.

Keep following your passions. Keep being who you are. There is great value in that, regardless of whether it brings you fame or wealth. You may never realize the impact you have on another.

A Bitter Pill

I have a love-hate relationship with pharmaceutical companies. Of course, they probably don't spend any time thinking about me, except in the vague sense of what they can do to get more of my money. To them, I am a demographic.

I read an interesting quote the other day - one that I will mangle if I try to quote it word for word, so I'm just going to summarize. It's probably best I do it this way, because I'm not even sure I remember where I came across the quote.

Anyway, the essence of the quote was this: Pharmaceutical companies aren't in the business of finding cures because cures don't create repeat customers and therefore don't create renewable income. Instead, pharmaceutical companies are in the business of treating symptoms because that is what keeps their coffers full as consumers return repeatedly for symptom relief.

I knew this somewhere in the recesses of my mind, but for some reason when I read it, something clicked. It is, of course, true.

Companies that create products where a consumer only buys one and then never needs to return to buy another probably don't do very well. The trick to a sustainable business is creating products or product lines that customers need or want to continue buying. With electronics, this is easy to do because people always desire the next generation. So even if you don't need a new tablet, chances are you'll want the latest and most capable version when it's available.

If pharmaceutical companies cured all that ails us, they wouldn't make nearly the money they do treating all our symptoms. That's really not a very good business plan when you have shareholders that demand continued growth on their investments and executives who make millions of dollars a year.

One report estimates the value of the global pharmaceutical market will exceed $1 trillion next year, given the industry's annual 5 percent growth rate. That's a lot of sick people needing a whole lot of drugs to keep symptoms at bay.

I am the typical pharmaceutical company consumer. I have a health condition that requires daily medication for the rest of my life. My condition also causes chronic pain. On any given day, I would classify my pain level as moderate. Several days out of the month, that pain level amps up to severe for various reasons. I've had this type of pain for more than 20 years. It is the background noise of my life.

I've worked with doctors over the years to find ways to manage my pain. While some prescription medications can provide temporary relief, I've never come across one that makes such a significant difference I find it worth the serious monthly cash required to keep taking it. Instead, when my pain level rises to severe, I rely on cocktails of less expensive over-the-counter medications to make it so I can at least sleep. Every once in the while, the pain is so severe I give in and visit the doctor for something stronger, although given the addictive nature of narcotic pain medications, I try to minimize this to less than once per year.

Most days, I take the one prescription medication I can't live without (my thyroid medication), and then go about my day doing the best I can.

Actually, my thyroid medication is a good case in point of part of my beef with our current medical culture. I took natural desiccated thyroid (NDT -  a prescription medication) for several years. It controlled the symptoms associated with my Hashimoto's thyroiditis relatively well. Then, in 2009, there was a shortage of NDT. It was virtually impossible to find in the United States. My doctor switched me over to a more expensive, synthetic version of thyroid medication called levothyroxine. I immediately noticed the return of all the symptoms my previous medication kept at bay.

In the meantime, my doctor had a change of heart about NDT, probably responding to a concentrated effort in the United States to raise questions about a natural medication. When the shortage cleared up, my doctor refused to re-prescribe the NDT for me, even though I felt much better on that than the synthetic stuff, which didn't seem to do anything. Ultimately, I was forced to seek an alternative resolution. Now, I am back on the NDT and my symptoms are much better. Because of the current level of prejudice against NDT, however, I had to advocate strongly for myself in order to do what I knew was best for my own condition.

Several years ago, I worked for a natural health care provider. He would often explain the true cost of taking medication, and it wasn't just monetary. One of his prime examples was this: a patient suffers from mild pain due to a mild to moderate health condition. He or she begins taking NSAIDs to cope with the pain. Those NSAIDs, in turn, cause side effects, including digestive problems, rebound headaches, and even kidney conditions. To cope with the side effects, the patient may begin taking other medications, each which has side effects of its own, as well. Ultimately, a few NSAIDs a day to control pain becomes a handful of pills to cope with the side effects of all the other pills. How is this conducive to health?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-medication. In some cases, medications are lifesavers. In others, pharmaceuticals allow people with chronic conditions to live lives free of pain or discomfort. I'm all for that. I've seen the very positive effects of certain types of medications on the health of people I love.

My concern, however, is that we're all too quick to turn to pills for whatever ails us without ever bothering to try to get to the root of the problem.

One of the roots of the problem, I am thoroughly convinced, is what we eat. So many of the products we consider "food" are made up of chemicals, genetically modified organisms, and 'foods' that our ancestors would never have dreamed of eating. In just a few generations, our species has gone from a diet of whole, natural, healthy foods to something our forebears would never even recognize as edible.

In Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over America, author Melanie Warner examines the ingredients in processed foods and discovers how much artificial stuff is in our diet. As Warner and others like her point out, processed foods represent an entirely new way for humans to eat.

Over the past century, the human diet has changed drastically, and I believe our bodies don't know what to do with the ingredients we're feeding them. In the past 100 years, we've experienced the rise of what experts term "diseases of civilization," which include diabetes, autoimmune disorders, obesity, epithelial cell cancers, and osteoporosis. These diseases were rare in non-industrialized societies but are on the rise in the Western world today.

According to the National Institutes of Health, over 23 million Americans suffer from some form of autoimmune disease, while 9 million have cancer and 22 million have heart disease. Direct health care costs for these diseases are in the billions in the United States alone, and pharmaceuticals make up a big chunk of those revenues. Being sick is big business, and our lifestyle choices - made knowingly or unknowingly - are a huge contributor.

What we eat is a lifestyle choice. Unfortunately, we often make choices that are counter to our health without ever realizing just how significant that impact may be. Part of this arises out of confusion. Every day, we read conflicting information in the news about which foods are healthy and which aren't. It's difficult for anyone other than a nutritional scholar to make heads or tails out of the piles of studies and information.

Misleading packaging and marketing of processed foods further obfuscate the issue. There is little control over the use of marketing buzzwords like "healthy" and "natural," so people may believe they're eating something healthy when they aren't. Likewise, processed food is designed specifically for the palates of Westerners, with the sweetness and salt we crave. That makes those foods very difficult to turn down, especially since processed foods are also far cheaper than the whole, natural foods our bodies need for good health.

That junk foods are as addictive as drugs and medications probably doesn't come as a surprise to many people. What may be surprising, however, is just how calculated the effort is by the food manufacturing industry to make those foods highly addictive to as many people as possible. While you can't fault the food manufacturing industry for trying to make a buck and broaden their consumer base (they have shareholders to appease, after all), it's certainly possible to draw a correlation between all that unhealthy and addictive stuff they're peddling to us as food and the declining health of the people who eat it.

While there may be no official collusion, I believe the bottom line is this: the food manufacturing industry provides products that make us ill. The pharmaceutical companies then provide us with the drugs that suppress the symptoms so we can keep eating the crap that's making us sick in the first place.

As consumers, we've trapped ourselves on a treadmill of poor health and drugs that puts us in a downward spiral. Still, you can't really blame businesses for doing what they are set up to do. Companies exist to make money for their shareholders. To do this, they must make products that are pleasing to the masses (affordable and tasty) so people buy them. If people don't buy what they offer, then there is no business, period. Food industry insiders admit this is a conundrum, making processed foods healthy and appealing to consumers. When such a dichotomy occurs, appealing to customers almost always wins.

As consumers, we make choices. Often that choice is to pick convenience over good health or to suppress symptoms without seeking a cure. Doing what we've done all along is the lowest effort choice, and getting off that treadmill can be really hard work. It's like untying a Gordian knot. Since one behavior begets a symptom that leads to another behavior that leads to yet another symptom, we must find the perfect spot in the knot so we can start untying it.

Maybe we don't want to untie it. Maybe it's too much effort or it just sounds like it wouldn't taste very good. Maybe it's too expensive. All I know is this. We can rail against the system in this country. We can rail against corporate greed, wretched excess, and how companies produce products that don't further our health or welfare (all things that are true), but the bottom line is we vote with our dollars. As consumers, we make choices that allow this to continue. We make choices that aren't good for us. We follow physician's instructions that we know in our heart won't make us healthier, but its easier to toe the line than advocate for ourselves. We take the word of people and companies with a financial stake in getting us to use their products instead of doing our own research.

I get it. I do it, too. Efforts to advocate for myself and my family often feel like I'm tilting at windmills. It can be exhausting. Popular media is abuzz with so much information (and misinformation), I sometimes feel like I'm looking for a needle in a haystack. Labels don't always tell the truth, and it's difficult to get full disclosure about any product these days.

Still, all we can do is the best we can. We can make an effort to learn. We can advocate for ourselves. We can seek other opinions. We can read labels and look up ingredients. We can demand better for ourselves and families. If enough people start to do so, perhaps we can begin to move in a healthier direction.

Is Greed the Deadliest Sin?

It's an easy trap to fall into - the desire for stuff. With very few exceptions (Mother Teresa comes to mind), we all see something shiny and spectacular occasionally and covet it with the fire of a thousand suns. In the United States, we live in a consumer culture where advertising media teaches us at an early age that acquisition of stuff confers status, solves problems, and eliminates or minimizes our personal deficiencies. It's not a static target, however. That shiny stuff we want so badly and work so hard to acquire quickly becomes outdated, and we're encouraged to toss it away and replace it with the latest upgrades lest we fall behind our peers.

Advertising plays into our insecurities, creating new fears where none existed before. Money, we're told, can solve all our problems. Having money to spend will make us more attractive, less gassy, healthier, smarter, funnier, less socially awkward, and just plain happier.

Scientists who study happiness, however, have shown that all those hedonistic pleasures money can buy ultimately don't make us any happier. Rather, when we buy something new and shiny we may experience a little spike for a short period, but ultimately adaptation sets in and we return to our baseline level of happiness. This occurs at almost all income levels as long as finances allow for humans to meet their own basic needs.

So, while you may feel a quick hit of joy when you replace your first generation iPhone with the latest shiny version, the result will be fleeting and you'll be on to the next want or desire. It's a vicious cycle, this hedonic treadmill, and it's overloading our landfills with discarded stuff that's still perfectly good.

It's easy to rationalize these acquisitions to ourselves, as well as the disposal of our old stuff. I know I've done it many times, and I'll certainly do it again. I'm on my third or fourth iPhone (although I'm currently a generation behind), and I'm not exactly driving the same car I had in college. I also live in far more square footage than I need, and my cupboards, drawers and closets are filled with things I've only used once or twice. Much of it ultimately will wind up being carted off to Goodwill or just tossed away, unused and unloved.

I've entered a "downsizing" phase in my life where I long to shed the wretched excesses of nearly 30 years of trying to keep up with the Joneses. I sometimes feel I am being buried alive in the stuff I've worked my entire adulthood to acquire. Ultimately, none of it means anything. In retrospect, it seems silly I spent my time and energy acquiring possessions when I could have used it doing things I truly loved like playing with my kids, spending time outdoors, or writing.

I learned how little stuff really mattered the hard way after having to sell many of my high-value possessions when I was downsized several years ago. As I tried to establish myself as a freelance writer after years of the security of a corporate paycheck, it was a struggle to make ends meet. I sold stuff - things I thought I loved - to keep my family's head above water. It turned out I didn't miss any of it. In fact, I felt an amazing sense of freedom as my load lightened.

I realized my possessions weren't a reflection of who I was. I'm still the same me no matter what generation iPad I own.

Often, the stories of the self-made begin with a statement such as, "I started out with nothing."

In making such a statement, they are, of course, referring to personal wealth.

We all start with nothing. We come into this world naked and dependent, knowing only the love of our parents and the sensory information provided by a vivid world outside the womb. We're not in this impoverished state for long, however. Others quickly shower us with stuff, and the media blitz to make us into consumers is in full force by the time we're toddlers. Don't believe me? Take a toddler through the cereal aisle at any grocery store and you'll see what I mean.

Children quickly learn the language of "I want," something that haunts most of us for the rest of our lives. They also learn quickly just how fast the rush of something new wears off, and they become little addicts looking for their next stuff fix.

Having nice things can be great, but I think we get it twisted. We place a high value on possessions, which leads us to the false fear that losing those things would be the worst thing in the world. This causes us to cling tightly to our stuff. We work harder to buy more while others in the world don't even meet the standard of having their most basic needs met.

When this desire to have more stuff grows out of control, it becomes greed. Greed is a condition to which all of us are susceptible. I believe it arises honestly. The greedy never intend to become so. Rather, they face insecurity at the thought of "losing everything" (money and stuff) and therefore do anything they can to gather as much wealth as possible in order to insulate themselves against hard times. Greed doesn't just arise out of insecurity, however. It also comes from set of priorities about what is important such as power, status, and social standing. It's much easier to ignore the things we need to improve on a personal level when we can distract ourself with the pursuit of glorious stuff.

While the origins of greed may be innocent, however, it's effects in the world are very real. The wealth gap in this country - and indeed around the world - is astronomical. While I've seen different numbers bandied about, a 2006 study showed the richest 2 percent owned half of the world's wealth, while the richest 10 percent controlled 85 percent. That leaves mere crumbs for the remaining 90 percent of the global population.

That so much is controlled by so few means many struggle in the most abject poverty. They can't even meet their most basic needs for food and shelter, much less acquire possessions. In the United States, greed has led to giant corporations charging astronomical prices for the basics, out of control health care costs, and more than 46 million people living in poverty. A full 22 percent of America's children live in poverty, including 38 percent of all African American kids and 35 percent of all Hispanic children. As long-term unemployment continues (currently about 5.6 million people in the US), more families slip below the poverty line.

These are disturbing trends and statistics that attest to just how much greed corrupts in our country. I grew up learning America was the greatest nation in the world. It was the land of opportunity where anyone could succeed. While success means different things to different people, economic success was implied in that basic tenet of American opportunity.

In school, I learned anyone who was willing to work hard could be successful. Yet the National Low Income Housing Coalition commissioned a study across the country to determine how many hours a week a minimum wage worker would have to earn to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent (assuming housing should be no greater than 30 percent of total income). To meet this standard, the study showed workers would have to work between 63 and 138 hours per week, depending on the state. That's a whole lot of hard work for very little opportunity.

We're living in a climate in America right now where the rich control our political process. With the deepest pockets, the wealthiest Americans, PACs, and corporations can afford to buy political action while the poorest among us are left twisting in the wind. Much of the last general election focused on entitlements and how we needed to stop spending tax dollars on the entitlements that provided a safety net for the most vulnerable among us. Once, Americans had a social contract to help our most vulnerable citizens. Now, the richest ensure they can maintain their huge corporate subsidies while pressuring politicians to eliminate entitlements for people who have so very little. Meanwhile, we're taxing the crap out of our middle class, stripping our country of our economic backbone so more people are forced to become low-wage employees with jobs that echo indentured servitude. Pardon my French, but that is incredibly fucked up.

Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of our true American dream. Once, the land of opportunity was about more than acquisition of wealth. It was about the freedom to pursue your own life, liberty, and happiness. Unfortunately, we allowed our value system to grow corrupted until each of those concepts equaled the same thing: wealth. Now, we are shackled with the results of that value system.

Systemic change takes time and tremendous effort. Looking at America's problems, it often seems hopeless with issues so huge no individual can do a darn thing to even begin to bring about change. It feels like we're caught up in a tidal wave, and all we can do is tumble about and hope we survive the surge.

Don't let the tidal wave lull you into inaction. You don't have to accept it. Economics, while clearly important, isn't the only measure of happiness. In your personal life, you can jump off the treadmill of stuff. You can focus on those moments and things that bring you joy - the love of your family, your creative pursuits, a few moments of peace in a busy day. When you're coveting that new 65" television, remind yourself the TV you have works perfectly well, and seeing every pore of a reality star's face isn't going to make you any happier.

When it comes to the rest? All anyone can do is the best they can. While America as a country seems to have forgotten its social contract, as individuals we can remember. Even if the most you can offer is a smile to a stranger or a prayer for someone in need, each of us can do what we can to make the world a better place. Donating is good, if you can afford it. So is volunteering, mentoring, or just lifting up another in any way you can. Everyone has something positive he or she can contribute. No contribution is too small, and you may never know or understand the huge impact tiny acts of kindnesses can have on others.

It's a difficult world in which we're living, but it's up to us to make it better. We can choose to rail against the inequity, or we can focus on being the change we want to see through our acts, deeds, thoughts, and words.

Learn more about Karen Frazier or visit her author website.

Girl Power!

Me, playing my flute. That's my sister Julie on the piano. I'd guess I was about 7th grade here and Julie in 10th.

When I was in fifth grade, I decided I wanted to play mallet percussion instruments (bells, xylophone, etc.) in middle school band. I already played piano, so it seemed like a natural progression. That summer, however, I received a telephone call from a man who introduced himself as the middle school band director. He got right to the point.

"I see you want to play percussion," he said.

"Yep."

"That includes drums, you know," he said.

I told him I knew.

"Girls don't play percussion," he told me. "Perhaps flute?"

That is the story of how I wound up playing the flute - an instrument that turned out to be my first love. More than 30 years later, it still brings me great joy.

With the clarity of hindsight, I can experience the above conversation with gratitude that the band director steered me towards an instrument I loved, as well as with abject horror over the sexual stereotypes I allowed to be forced on me because one man believed girls couldn't be drummers.

Many years later, as I prepared to go to college I heard a lot of comments like this: "Headed off for your  M.R.S. degree, huh?"

This was, back in the day, a comment many of us heard and had to contend with - the belief that the only reason we'd ever consider going to college was to get married. I recall the vague sense of indignation I had that so many would suggest I was going to college to meet a man, given the goals I had. Which is why it's so ironic I left college to get married to my high school boyfriend. It was the first of three marriages.

I grew up in the 70s and graduated from high school in 1984. While women were, indeed, making strides during that era, I learned to cook (which I loved) and sew (which I hated) in Home Ec class while the boys learned to build cool stuff in industrial arts. In popular media, I saw stories about girls trying to win boys and women being rescued by men. In many cases, when there was a female protagonist in books and movies or on television, her story was still centered around men and romance. Images of June Cleaver (still a strong presence on television in reruns) stood alongside Mary Richards (from the Mary Tyler Moore Show), perhaps one of the few women on television whose story lines weren't always all about men.

In spite of having parents who were very supportive of girls becoming whatever they wanted to professionally, I entered young adulthood confused and conflicted about the goals I had for myself versus what I saw in popular media portrayals and societal expectations of women.

While I can look back now and cringe at some of the choices I made that very likely resulted from some of that confusion, I also understand how remarkably young I was in my early 20s. I hadn't yet discovered that core of strength and creativity I've come to identify as self. Back then, it was just easier to make the choices I felt would make me acceptable societally instead of those that allowed me to pursue my bliss.

While it ultimately turned out my bliss included making my marriage and motherhood the center of my life, I originally didn't choose it from a position of strength. Instead, I chose it because I thought it was what I was expected to do. The problem was I always expected more from myself than just getting married and making babies, so I struggled with tremendous cognitive dissonance.

While I got married when I was 21 (and divorced for the first time when I was 23), I didn't have a baby until I was 30. During that time, between the ages of 21 and 30, I learned a lot about myself and what I truly wanted from life. By the time I was 30, I chose having a child out of an authentic desire for motherhood and not a societal expectation. I've never regretted that decision - not even for a moment.

I don't have daughters, but I have nieces. I've often wondered what types of cultural pressures they face. Certainly, you see female drummers now and I'm relatively sure girls are no longer required to take Home Ec. My nieces also have powerful role models, both within their families and in society, of strong and empowered women. 

However, it still must be rather confusing for them. While on a personal level people in our society urge women to pursue their passions and goals, we still blast them with media images that portray our expectations of young women. It's okay for a young woman to want to be a doctor, a world leader, or whatever they'd like professionally, but it seems our popular media objectifies women more now than at any point in history. Flip through a fashion magazine, and you'll see disturbing images of women in advertisements: women in bondage, women as objects, women in grossly subservient roles. Our cultural expectation for attractiveness is also at an all-time high as far as being unobtainable. The images we see of women are ridiculously thin with perfectly symmetrical faces, huge boobs, tiny waists, perfect skin, and luxuriant hair. Clothing is minuscule and heels are dangerously high. Popular media often suggests that even powerful and empowered women need to tone it down in order to be pleasing to men.

We still have to teach our daughters not to be raped instead of teaching our sons not to rape. When they are raped, media portrayals may demonize the victim while bemoaning the loss of a promising future for the young men who perpetrate the crimes. Political wars continue to rage about the most basic of all women's rights - the right to control and make choices for our own bodies. How it is that, in 2013, birth control is still an issue boggles the mind.

Our cultural messages to young women appear to me to be even more confusing than those I received when I was entering young womanhood. Be powerful, we tell them. Make your own choices. When those choices involve sexuality, however, we slut-shame them in order to let them know just how much they've let us down.

If I had a message for young women (and I do), here it is. Ignore the media. Ignore what you think society thinks you should be. Instead, pursue your own passions and joy. Do it with gusto and without apology. Empower yourself to become the best version of you that you could ever imagine, and do so without shame or regret, regardless of what someone else tells you to feel about it. It may feel risky. It may be scary. Ultimately, however, you have only one person in this world whose approval and love you need, and it's your own. Don't waste your youth trying to conform to something that makes you uncomfortable and unhappy. 

Make choices out of self-love. Chose the things that you want to do, because ultimately pursuing your own bliss will make the world a better place for the girls who follow you. Chose clothing, hair, and makeup that pleases you without a thought to whether it will please a man or not. Love your body, no matter how it looks. What you see in the media is an impossible idealization, and to compare your real magnificence with the photoshopped images and perfect bodies you see is ultimately destructive to you.

Remember, girls, we're not in competition with one another no matter what you see on the Real Housewives or America's Next Top Model. Women don't have to compete with one another to get ahead. We can support and empower each other. Instead of comparing yourself to other women, measure yourself against only one ideal: that image you hold of your most joyful, most authentic self. Support other women and girls so they can do the same. Make sure self is a standard that comes from within instead of what you observe in the world around you.

It's not antifeminist to want to be a wife and a mother. It's biological, and if that's what makes you happy, then it's perfectly fine to make that the center of your life. It's okay to love cooking. It's okay to love fashion. It's also okay to choose to stay single, to be a lesbian, to purse a career in a male-dominated field, or to generally kick ass in any way you wish. While we still have cultural "norms," there is no right or wrong way to be a girl, and there's no right or wrong way to be a woman.

So girls, do me a favor. Tune in to yourselves and ask yourself this. What is the most kick-ass version of myself I could ever imagine? What makes me happy? What do I love? Those answers don't have to stay the same for a lifetime. They don't even have to stay the same for the next ten minutes. Tuning into yourself, however, is the first step in finding who and what you truly are. 

Don't ask, "What do others want me to be?" Instead, ask, "Who do I want to be?" Then, for as long as you want to be that, make choices consistent with that vision. If and when the vision changes, make new choices. We women - all of us - have the right to choose who and what we want to be. As women, we also have the responsibility to do so for the girls coming behind us. By living authentically, courageously, joyfully, and compassionately, the next generation's girls will see examples of truly empowered women. As the number of examples of womanhood grows and the diversity of roles women take on continues to expand, we can help overcome the noise that arises in the form of cultural stereotypes and mass media.

As the mother of sons, I'd like to add one other thing. Boys and men, you need to do this too. You have just as many cultural expectations and stereotypes heaped on you as women do. You have media portrayals to ignore, as well. So while today's blog is about girl power, it doesn't negate the fact that boys and men also need to strive to be the most kick-ass versions they can of themselves without concern for how they are portrayed in media or what they believe society expects of them.

So girls and boys, it's up to you. Be the best and most authentic you possible. Doing so can change the world.

How Being Fat Set Me Free

That's me in the picture above. I was at a conference speaking, signing the two books I'd authored, and selling  the jewelry I design and create. 

I'm not just an author. I am many other things, as well. I host a radio show, write for the local newspaper, write for a national magazine, blog, write poetry, juggle numerous clients, build websites, speak frequently in public and in media, volunteer at my local museum, volunteer in the schools, donate to charity, teach flute lessons, play several instruments, cook like a whiz, parent an amazing child, have a great marriage, research the afterlife, and care for four dogs and a cat. In the past, I have volunteered as a guardian ad litem advocating for abused and neglected children, volunteered for the local crisis clinic, spent several 40+ hour weeks assisting flood victims, trained for and competed in a body building competition, run several 10Ks, performed music in front of large audiences, appeared as an expert on television, written hundreds of articles for major websites, and campaigned for third party candidates, among many other things. 

I am a mother, wife, friend, daughter, sister, aunt, volunteer, business person, artist, musician and a writer. I am many more things, as well. Some might even suggest I am quite accomplished in my own right, something I was recently assured by a woman I'd just met who was quizzing me about my life. What she actually said is this: 

"Wow! You've had a really interesting life! You're really accomplished, in spite of.....you know."

I could hear the pause where she caught herself and I watched her eyes quickly shift from left to right. Her voice trailed off in a whisper as she realized she was about to approach a taboo subject.

"In spite of?" I asked politely. "In spite of what?"

Her eyes roamed up and down my body, settling on my ample midsection and behind. She looked tortured and embarrassed.

"You know," she said again, looking like she'd rather be anywhere else than where she was at the moment.

I let her off the hook. I smiled and changed the subject.

It's a sentiment I've heard before, and probably one I'll hear again. In a society obsessed with how we look - and especially how women look - there are many aspects of a woman's appearance it isn't okay to have: fat, wrinkled, old, unattractive, gray-haired, and many others.

It's not a secret that I'm fat. I see it in the mirror. I see it when I look down. I see it in photographs and feel it in the jiggle of my arms when I wave good-bye. 

I haven't always been this way, but with Hashimoto's thyroiditis I've struggled with my weight most of my adult life. In my early 20s, I seemed to have a handle on it. I was incredibly active and ate next to nothing. I spent all my time at the gym or working out. 

One morning, I woke up feeling poorly and fuzzy headed. It was as if someone had flipped a switch. Suddenly I was chronically exhausted and constantly in pain. No matter how little I ate the weight started piling on. My doctor diagnosed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and it took me the next 20 years to receive an accurate diagnosis of Hashimoto's thyroiditis. By then, the damage was done.

By the time I was 25, I was overweight. The size I wore slowly crept up from a size 3 to a size 16, and it fluctuated between 16 and 20 for the next several years depending on whether I could manage to limp along on 800 calories per day, or if I needed to actually eat about 1,200 calories per day because I was hungry. It sucked. I was constantly hungry, in pain, and exhausted, but it was my life.

Once, for a glorious period in my early 40s, a doctor prescribed Topamax for migraine headaches. Something with the Topamax reacted with my body chemistry, and weight started dropping off quickly. Unfortunately, the Topamax also robbed me of my emotions, my creativity, and my intelligence - all of the things that made me who I was. While I loved that it made me skinny, I didn't love anything else about it. Who I was was far more important to me than how I looked, and I stopped taking the Topamax. The weight immediately reappeared. 

When I was that tiny size three in my early 20s, I would pass the mirror and cringe at what I saw. I did everything I could in my pursuit of matching an unrealistic ideal. I worked out incessantly. I ate next to nothing. I tanned. I toned. I plucked and waxed. I lightened and permed. I wore tons of make-up, body conscious clothing, and little torture device foot prisons with impossibly high heels. I had the same mind then I have now (minus a lot of life experience), but mostly what I heard from others about myself was that I was pretty. Perhaps not surprisingly, the nature of many of my relationships were superficial, based on looks and little substance. It was a lot of work for very little reward. I wasn't a very happy or accomplished person.

Today things are different. I still cringe sometimes when I look in the mirror, and I still sometimes feel the need to explain myself to others. Sometimes I also feel like I have to be better, smarter, faster, stronger, more talented than someone else half my size so people will accept me, but those are issues on which I am working. 

Sometimes I can feel the judgment of another washing over me in waves, because all they can wrap their brains around is what they see visually, instead of who I am as a human being. I often wonder if the judgment I feel is a projection - some inherent sense of self-loathing that I am not admitting to myself but projecting on another. It might be - and yet....

The things I value about myself and my life have little to do with how I look or how much I weigh. At the start of this blog, I listed my accomplishments because those are the parts of me that matter - the mother, wife, artist, author, volunteer, and friend. Those are the aspects of my life that bring me joy. In many ways being fat has set me free to be that person.

I was headed in another direction until that switch flipped in my early 20s. I spent an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to mold myself into what I felt I should be rather than being who I wanted to be. I was turning myself into an object in order to be pleasing to others - a pretty doll that sat on a shelf without an ounce of joy or an original thought.

Then the switch flipped and all of those things I was molding myself into went away. They ceased to be attainable, and suddenly I could no longer accept the superficial as a way of life. It wasn't making me happy anyway, but once the ideal of beauty to which I aspired truly became unobtainable, I was free to focus on those things that really mattered. It was, in many ways, a bucket of cold water waking me from a nightmare of my own creation. I was an intelligent woman who'd bought into something I was conditioned to believe I should be. When it became clear I could not be that, no matter how hard I tried, I was free to become what I truly desired, instead. Without the Hashimoto's, and without the weight gain, I'm not sure I ever would have gotten here from there.

I'm a generally happy person, and I believe I'm living a life of genuine joy and compassion. I also try to live a life of integrity. The person I am now wants to go back to that young girl I once was and wrap her in my arms. I want to take her chin in my hands, look deeply into her eyes, and tell her she doesn't have to do this to herself. She doesn't have to be a physically idealized version of herself because that will never be what makes her happy or fulfills her.

The switch flipped for me, however. It came in the form of an illness that changed my appearance forever, and it freed me to focus on who and what I wanted to be instead of how I looked. It was ultimately a blessing.

Even with how happy and centered I am as a human being now, however, I would be lying if I said I'm always comfortable in my own skin. My conditioning about appearance runs deep, and I'm still not a huge fan of watching myself on video or seeing myself in photographs. I recognize my own biases that lead me to judge myself and others on the basis of appearance, but I also know from my own experience that one must go a little deeper in pursuit of the real person who lies within. 

I fall into the trap sometimes, too. For example, I often hesitate over which photograph (fat or thin) to use as my "public" face on my websites, social networking, etc. It's only been recently that I've started choosing photos that are a true representation of my physical presence. It's taken me a long time to be willing to find that level of authenticity.

It's difficult to have a conversation in this country about the emotional aspects of being fat. While we can acknowledge fatness behind someone's back, we don't want to label it to their faces lest we make them uncomfortable. It's silly, really. I'd venture to guess that most fat people know we're fat. There's nothing wrong with our eyes. 

It's always interesting to me, the representation of fat people in the media. Just once I'd like to see or read a fat person's storyline on television or in a book where being fat doesn't become a major plot line. Usually it is. Just once I'd like to see a show where "he's fat, but he's happy in spite of it;" or "she's fat, but she can still get a man!" doesn't enter in somewhere. Being happy,accomplished, and in good relationships when you're fat is no more inspirational than being those things when you're thin. 

We often make assumptions, no matter how incorrect they are, about what being fat must mean emotionally. Insecurity. Poor self-esteem. Gluttony. Sloth. Loneliness. Sloppiness. Poor self-control.

I'm here to tell you this: Sometimes I do get a twinge when I look in the mirror, but none of the adjectives above describe my emotional life. I have a different set of adjectives by which I describe myself. Vibrant. Compassionate. Passionate. Joyful. Funny. Fun. Honest. In charge. Talented. Creative. Loving. This is who I am, and it is who I choose to be.

Being fat set me free. It freed me from pursuing a physical ideal. It challenged me to be a woman of substance and to find my bliss in what truly matters to me. For that, I am grateful.

Feminism and Choice

by Karen Frazier

A friend posted a link to this blog about polygamy today on Facebook, which got me thinking. I actually agree and have long agreed with all of the author's points - that to live in a truly free society, we must allow individuals to make informed choices for themselves as long as they don't infringe on the rights and freedoms of others.

It's why I am a strong supporter human rights issues such as gay marriage. As fellow humans, who are we to impose our own belief systems upon other consenting adults who may make choices to live or believe differently than we do?

Naturally, making our own choices comes with the caveat I made above - we should be free to make those choices as long as they don't infringe on the rights or freedoms of others.

In polygamy, for instance, when a teenager's parents and soon-to-be husband make the choice that she should enter into a polygamous marriage, then their choice is usurping the teen's rights and freedoms. If, however, after that teenager becomes an adult she makes a faith-based free will decision to enter into a polygamous marriage between consenting adults, that is her choice and it isn't my place to judge or legislate that choice. Period. Yet we have legislation in that country that actually infringes upon others' rights, banning them from marrying other consenting adults.

I consider myself a feminist. I don't believe women should have more rights or freedoms than our male counterparts, but I do believe we should have the same rights. I believe, for instance, that women should receive equal pay for equal work as opposed to the approximate 77 percent we make as compared to men. I believe we should be able to pursue our own artistic, creative, domestic, and professional passions without interference from others.

It's interesting, however, how often I've encountered women who, when they learn a little about me, tell me I'm not a feminist at all. Instead, they claim, I've bought into the male-dominated belief system about what women should want and need.

I suppose in some ways I can see why they might think that. You see, many of the things I enjoy and the choices I've made look like I'm living an anti-feminist lifestyle. For example, my son is the center of my life. He has been since I decided I was ready to have a child. Because I felt he needed his mother at home, I made a choice to be a stay-at-home mom who also pursued professional opportunities from the comfort of my own home. In that way, I could focus on what I really felt was important: family.

Likewise, I enjoy cooking. It brings me great joy to shop for amazing ingredients and whip up meals for my husband and son. I am happy in the kitchen, and I'm not going to lie. My feet are usually bare when I'm there. I'm not a big fan of wearing those little foot jails we call shoes.

These aren't choices I'm making out of subjugation, however. They are choices I am making with love because my family is at the heart of my life. That is my choice based on my own personal value system, which is why I'm surprised when people suggest I'm setting the feminist movement back by making those choices. I don't feel like I'm undermining a movement. I feel like I'm living in a way that brings me joy while not infringing on the rights and freedoms of anyone else.

I believe the true essence of feminism isn't about women charging out into a "man's world" to reach professional positions of power and wealth. If that's what truly inspires you, then pursue your profession with passion and without regret. Instead, true feminism comes from being your authentic self. It is about being true to yourself and making the choices that resonate most deeply with you. There is no specific way a life well-lived should look. After all, it's not about what you do. It's about making the choices that drive you to be the best version of yourself you can imagine.