Change your rhetoric, change your reality.

Sex sells, right? In life it’s all about being sexy. If you’re sexy, everyone wants to be you or be with you. Maybe, just maybe, being close to you means they’re sexy too. Being sexy brings a magnetic pull that turns you into the center of attention and, if you know what you’re doing, can help you on your way to success. And before you get all worked-up out there, I don’t mean by trading sexual favors. I mean that, you know, sexiness and confidence go hand in hand. Confident people go places.

If you’re not sexy, well, you better pray you’re funny. It’s the only other option. I remember this old Sex and the City episode (S04E01 – The Agony and the ‘Ex’-tacy) where the girls go to an engagement party and Miranda turns her single life woes into a comedy routine to fit in. All the women around her were laughing their hearts out at all the jokes she was making about her own misery. The truth is she was being hilarious! I don’t remember exactly how the jokes went, but they made light of something that was clearly affecting her. She took her personal insecurities about her romantic life – or lack thereof – and turned them into a joke. To help her cope, and to possibly help her compensate for the lack of self-confidence she was feeling towards this area of her life.

Back to real life. Lately I’ve been paying attention to the words I use to talk about myself. The way I speak about myself hasn’t changed a lot over the past decade or so, and it’s been at par with the way I feel about my physical appearance. Very much like in a previous post, I’ve called myself FAT, a cow, a FAT cow, a pig, a walrus, a whale, and many other things. Always in a light, funny tone. Always as a joke. Funny, right? Not so much.

I could enter here into a long and boring discourse about all the psychological ramifications of this rhetoric. Never fear, I won’t. What I will tell you is this, this stops now. I’m never going to feel sexy/beautiful/happy with/proud of my body, REGARDLESS of the size and shape, if I keep bashing it that way. Nobody will be able to see me as sexy/beautiful/happy/proud if I don’t see it myself. Furthermore, my reality will never change as long as I keep declaring it negative, stagnant, and absolute. I don’t want to be the girl who makes self-deprecating jokes at all the parties. I want to be the sexy hottie everyone wants to be with.

And last but not least, all this negativity is hurtful to cows. The name-calling portion of this life has now come to an end.

MA