Less is More, life without the fake fix

Dear BFDiary,

I’m a young woman whose starved herself through struggles between slim and sexy. You pick up enough Seventeen and Cosmo Girl magazines as a preteen and you find yourself ingesting all kinds of crap. When I got to college and realized that some people thought I was small and it wasn’t a good thing, as in it wasn’t the sexy thing to be for a black girl, my self-image brow-beating started all over again. In a college town 10 minutes away from the middle of nowhere with no dependable black stylists in sight, a chick had to depend on her curves to do what her budget wouldn’t allow in the way of fabulous clothes, routine mani/pedis, and awesome tresses fried, dyed, and blow-dried into perfection.

Now if you know me or if you’ve read more than a couple blog posts, you know that I’m not totally absorbed in my looks (I have a brain, I use it, I’m proud of it). You also know that I’m real, and a girly-girl. I’m also a sista, and looking good no matter what the cost (yikes, it hurts but its so true) is pretty much inscribed in our DNA. So, take these words for the greater meaning at hand, which I’m getting to soon.

I’ve done yo-yo dieting, one major “lifestyle change” at 16 that I still don’t think my parents realize did more harm than good (no 125 lb. girl should have to calorie-count between third and fourth period), and spiritual fasts like lent that truly brought me closer to God (on my 5^th consecutive day without chocolate and magazines I had no choice but to pray if I wanted to make it to day 6 with my sanity). All these experiences were active moments of self-denial, miserable means to achieve a greater, longer-lasting end. If I wanted to drop 10 pounds, I needed to drop the snickers. If I wanted to hear from God more clearly, I needed to stop listening to the Weezy and R. Kelly that somehow got on my iPod.

My fasting and even my crazy diets taught me an important lesson about the power in resistance. Every second of our lives someone or some ad is telling us one more thing we need to be happy, to be whole, to be better. No ad talks about being better, by having less. Being better, by not consuming. Being better, by resisting.

A recent incident that my bestie brought to my attention got me thinking about how us strong black femmes can be tricked into thinking that we’re weak. How women who are astronauts and mothers and CEOs and executive directors and teachers and department chairs and presidents and scholars and students all while managing to look as good as we do and be so many things to so many people can be tricked into thinking that in spite of all that, we just won’t be right without that fix. A fix could be the new bag and booties we can’t afford (guilty), the momentary pleasure of letting someone get too close too soon (guilty), or the 5th, 6^th, and 7^th chips ahoy cookie (guilty, guilty, and guilty).

Can you imagine conning and tempting Oprah with $100? It’d never work. Can you imagine tempting a strong woman of God with a man not worth the ground he walks on? Works all the time.

If I can survive cramps through an 8-hr work day and manage not to give everybody attitude, if I can put up dry wall and insulation in heels, if I can burp the baby with one hand and prepare dinner with the other, if I can be on the Dean’s List and be the head of two student orgs, if I can party in Paris and chill at the church picnic, if I can dazzle my boss and my colleagues, if I can do all this and still wake up the next morning to do it all again, I am phenomenal.

When we put it like that, ladies, we realize no short-term guilty pleasure can begin to really satisfy us. Our contentment comes from within