The other night my husband was pondering his physical circle of influence, like where he walks the dog, places he interacts with basically. He wanted to clean up litter (angry that doing so on the freeway can get you arrested) in our neighborhood and possibly around his work. He considered the people he interacts with regularly, too. Co-workers, myself, neighbors or other people walking their dogs. This concept had never been made so plain to me before. I always appreciate his grand scheme ideas, but don’t always get or follow them. Or I’m that ugly voice of reason telling him that he can’t do it on the freeway. It’s no fun being that voice, but someone has to be it or we’d lose everything in the name of bail monies! Ha!

Last night we went to see the new film “Contagion” for the $4.50 Tuesday deal our local place has. I will say that the film is good, convincing, effective, horrifying…it’s good, I’ll stick with that! And it made me consider what/how/where/who I touch or come in contact with. Since I’m already fairly germaphobic, this just sent me right into a tizzy! Usually though, my toughest germ-zones are public restrooms or food places that don’t follow the safety laws. I have no trouble shaking someone’s hands or hugging my pals or what have you…but this film made me rethink it all! They quoted a statistic in the movie, something about how we touch our faces 3,000 times a day! Yikes! This freaked me out and I will probably obsess on that awhile. Ha-ha! But seriously folks, it made me think about what I influence on a daily basis. This has significantly changed for me ever since selling the cafe, but I almost think my human interaction (as well as sheer mileage) has increased!

I was chatting with a very good friend on FB the other night and we were talking about “The Man” and all of that sort of thing (“Damn the man! Save the empire!”), and I think I have come to some sort of chill head space around our current social situation. And I said to her, “I try not to dwell too much, but everything is so fucked up everywhere. All we can do, all I think I can do, is to have as much of a positive influence on myself and those around me.” I really liked the sound of that, as vain as that may seem. What about our influence on ourselves and others? What do we think and say to ourselves and how does that affect us on a daily basis? What about others? I mean, I can remember things said to me and around me at age 4 and 5 that still mess with my head. I didn’t choose to be influenced by that, it just stuck in my subconscious or whatever and I’m stuck with it until I can address and process it out I guess.

Because things are fucked up everywhere, we can only do what we can actually do. Ya know? Does that even make sense? It’s late when I’m writing this and so I’m not sure. But fuck it, I’m going with this…

Why not try to begin by influencing yourself in positive ways. You can branch out and try to influence your loved ones and co-workers and postal workers and so on. Why not? It doesn’t hurt! I mean, I forget myself sometimes and I really noticed when I started to pay closer attention to this stuff. And I feel so fabulous right now I can’t even tell you! I’m not drinking or anything, I’m just, like, I dunno…awesome? Can I just be awesome? That’s weird sounding, but it’s how I’m feeling at the moment. I like this feeling and want to perpetuate and infect it into everyone I know, in the best possible way! Ha-ha!

You ever hear someone laugh in a restaurant and their laugh makes you laugh? THAT!!! I want to do that to the people of the world, yo! Again, why not? I cannot think of a reason why I shouldn’t at least try. It’s like that whole random acts of kindness thing, or paying it forward. It makes total and complete sense to me. Perhaps it’s my grandma’s influence over the years (she was an RN), but most of my family has been service people. I’m damn proud of that, too! I often apply to jobs with something in my cover letter like this: I get a real kick out of helping people in nearly any arena. Customer service is a life philosophy for me and not just a career choice. I just believe in treating people with respect and a dose of humor and trying to help those who could use it! That could be why I have had so many spells of unemployment in recent years, but maybe not. It’s honest. Honesty is powerful! It can scare people. It can help people. It can hurt people. I get it, I do, but it’s also important. If you are not first honest with yourself, how can you be honest with others or expect  them to be honest with you?

Ever hear of fake it until you make it or some variation? That’s kind of what I recommend. I chose to stop lying to myself years ago and felt better about myself. I then stopped lying to my loved ones and eventually everyone. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. I no longer say something looks nice on someone if I honestly don’t believe that it does. Seems trivial, but you try it out and get back to me! Ha-ha! And while part of me can be very negative and untrusting or protective of myself and others, there is always a little nugget of sunshine in there that seems to grow brighter as I trust in myself and in the truth. I have seen the power it has on me and its influence on my friends and strangers. It was easy to gauge in the cafe of course because people came to me. Now that I’m a free agent, I go out into the world in an active way. It’s much more difficult to see a change in people if you just happened upon them in some scenario. But sometimes I catch it! I can see it! Sometimes, I swear it’s true, just seeing a fat redheaded lady with a giant hot pink flower in her hair is enough to see a change in a person.

Yeah, it’s cheesy! Fuck it! By being happy I can make or help others be happy, so why the hell not?! You can do it, too! If you wanna…this isn’t like a mandatory thing. Ha-ha! By not actively hating myself or my body, I can go about the world with confidence and see how people respond to that. It’s shocking! And it’s just good for my mental health. I first saw body acceptance and fat liberation and purely political, but I’ve come to see it as down right therapeutic, too! I couldn’t as for more! <3

“God, it took me forever to be able to wear something without sleeves, but when I started, I really threw myself into tank tops, tube tops, spaghetti straps and halter tops. I’m not sure at what point I stopped wearing 3/4 length sleeves in the summer (with long jeans I might add)…. in North Carolina. I know it was before I knew anything about fat acceptance, but damnit, I wanted to just be able to wear clothing like everyone else! I think when we moved to an apartment with a pool and my (then) 4 year old son insisted on going up every single day that the pool was open and I had to dust off that bathing suit I got more comfortable with my body even before I knew that that was a thing. Yeah. Speaking of my son.. I am constantly aware of and grateful for the fact that I discovered body acceptance before I had a chance to rub off any body hate onto him. When he finally asked me why I was fat (and he and daddy weren’t) I just said “because my body is really good at storing energy!” and “everyone’s body is different- isn’t it awesome that people come in all shapes and sizes?” This is from my son’s first day of school.

Lovely picture & dress, Heather! Thank you so much for sharing this with us all here. I love your ability to rock magenta hair, too! Ha-ha! Just proves that we (fats) can do anything. We can be mothers/fathers/aunts/uncles/etc…and still lead happy and healthy lives, too! Woo!

I am taking submissions from anyone who wants to exercise their right to Bare Arms for future Tank Top Tuesday posts! Email your pics here: notblueatall@notblueatall.com, please include the name you’d like in the post, a blog or etsy shop you wanna plug, your thoughts on bare arms or other fatty philosophies. It does not have to be in a tank top, so long as your arms are bare. Have fun with it!

Also, feel free to still treat comments as TMI topic/discussion/venting area! Feel free to ask TMI questions or just vent/rant about your own stuff. I love it! We all do! =0)

**Friend of the blog Erylin, has a clothing swap coming up in Kansas city mo. we will be having one on September 25th at the north Kansas city library right off of armour and I-35. (if you need more info leave a reply and we will connect you somehow). **

You know when you get a new bra, how it’s suppose to just fit the last row of tabs? It’s sort of tight/snug, but not unbearably so, so you just deal. Well, that is how it was for me at least. But the last time I bought a pack of bra extenders I found out the hard way that they simply don’t (or very rarely) come in a row of five like my actual bras do. Having just purchased four new bras and not wanting to just deal with the initial tightness of them, I decided to take matters into my own hands…literally!

I took a pair of scissors and snatched the two broken bras from my trash can and cut the hooks and tabs out of them. You can see in the first photo here that one side is all tabs and the other is a row of hooks. I wasn’t sure at first how I’d go about attaching them, but I just went ahead and dove in head first! I simple flipped the hooks under the tabs and sewed them (I do have a machine, though I’m not fully skilled at using it yet) on the opposite side (facing the appropriate way so that they could be used of course). I couldn’t manage to sew a straight-across line with all of the hardware in there, so instead I went in short bursts between each hook:

You can see on the beige one (’cause I used black thread) where my stitches are. I made one black and one beige since that is what I had on-hand and pretty much all I wear. And they worked like a fucking charm, I tell ya! Perfection! They fit, I don’t even notice them when they’re on and best of all my new bras fit spectacularly! It took me all of five or so minutes and didn’t cost me a dime! I love stuff like this.

Do you have a cheap and simple DIY projects you’d like to share? Hit me up! I’d love to post about it here and try it for myself, too! notblueatall@notblueatall.com

Hey everyone! How are you? How was your weekend? I had a bit of a long one. Whew! Can’t believe it’s only Tuesday actually, but I’m feeling good.

Today’s Tank Top Tuesday submission comes from yours truly! I hadn’t received a submission from a reader in awhile and the last couple were from my very generous friends. So I wanted to jump back into the fray with you all, sleeveless and proud! Okay, no, that’s not entirely true. By the time this picture was taken I was proud, but most of the evening I felt terribly self conscious. I even grabbed a matching cardigan “in case I got cold” which is ridiculous as it was very hot that day. We had some friends over for dinner and I wanted to look cute, but…Nicole gave me this dress. Isn’t it lovely? I adore it! It’s not something I would ever buy for myself, but would fawn over in it the store only to walk away from it. Isn’t it strange how I was fine being sleeveless several different days last week (more tops from Nicole! Thank you gurl!!!) yet this dress put me right on edge?! My husband was very kind and encouraging, even when I threatened to change about four times. I think that’s the key though, to getting over this hump? Repetition! Because I was fine in the sleeveless tops I wore that week, but the dress? Why did it freak me out so? By the end of the night I couldn’t have cared less about my damned arms, but at the start I was beside myself with “OMZ! They will see my armz!”  And I am so sick of that! Why should I have to worry about how my bare arms make someone else feel? I’m done!

Okay, and then I see pics of myself like this and I think, “Wow! I look younger than I feel! Ha-ha!” Just sayin’! The dress is from Old Navy, but no clue as to when she bought it. It’s a 4x and is roomy up top, I may take it in a tad so it won’t pook out on the sides as much. but I love the colors! The accent looks red, but it’s a coral color trim. Lovely!

I am taking submissions from anyone who wants to exercise their right to Bare Arms for future Tank Top Tuesday posts! Email your pics here: notblueatall@notblueatall.com, please include the name you’d like in the post, a blog or etsy shop you wanna plug, your thoughts on bare arms or other fatty philosophies. It does not have to be in a tank top, so long as your arms are bare. Have fun with it!

Also, feel free to still treat comments as TMI topic/discussion/venting area! Feel free to ask TMI questions or just vent/rant about your own stuff. I love it! We all do! =0)

**Friend of the blog Erylin, has a clothing swap coming up in Kansas city mo. we will be having one on September 25th at the north Kansas city library right off of armour and I-35. (if you need more info leave a reply and we will connect you somehow). **

“This show has taught me that there is a common thread that runs through all of our pain and all of our suffering. And that is unworthiness. Not feeling worthy enough to own the life you were created for. Even people who believe they deserve to be happy and have nice things, often don’t feel worthy once they have them. There is a difference, you know, between thinking you deserve to be happy and knowing that you are worthy of happiness.”

“We often block our own blessings because we don’t feel inherently good enough or smart enough or pretty enough or worthy enough…

This show has taught me that you are worthy because you are born and because you are here. You’re being here, you’re being alive, makes worthiness your birthright. You alone are enough.”

“We are all looking for validation. Every person you will ever meet, shares that common desire. They wanna know, do you see me? Do you hear me? Does what I say mean anything to you? …Try it with your husband, your wife, your boss, your friends, validate them: I see you, I hear you. And what you say, matters to me.” Oprah Winfrey (Her very last episode)

The above quotes weighed heavily upon me and stayed in my thoughts for a few days after the fact. I just watched her last three episodes last week. I’d saved them and put off watching for some reason. Good stuff, honestly! I was surprised. I’ve never followed Oprah closely. I’ve admired and respected her from a distance. You probably know why, too. That she is self & fat hating. But I do think she has begun to see the error of that thinking as time goes on. But this concept of unworthiness? That struck me! Like a bolt of non-lethal lightening!

Worthiness. We see that as something attainable, somehow. Yet just living makes us all worthy! I love that! You are enough! Just as you are! I wanna shout these phrases from rooftops, y’all! I feel like it’s something that shouldn’t be a secret. For all I have been through in my lifetime, all that I have seen and been a witness to, all that I work for and toward…To know that I am still worthy? That is meaningful to me. I feel more grounded by the thought of that. It connects us to each other. It connects us, I hope, to our planet. I feel more a part of the universe itself, it’s limitlessness humbling and comforting me.

And it also terrifies me. To grow up feeling the need to prove myself worthy is a difficult thing to shake. I still catch myself trying. I hear myself say things to prove what I say or believe or just know. As much as I try to focus on the energy I bring with me where ever I go, I still find that I am that poor kid. Maybe now more than ever because I understand things I never did before. I have a different perspective than I could have had back then. My defenses may never leave me, but perhaps one day I will stop feeling the need to prove myself to anyone…even to myself.

This is where fat liberation connects to worthiness. Fat liberation (I know many of you prefer or have only heard acceptance, it’s the same thing really, but I prefer liberation), gave me the permission I needed to live my life now. To just accept and love and enjoy myself and my life. It gave me hope and cause and reason and passion. What am I saying, it gave me…it still gives me these things!!! It fuels my fires, baby! Ha-ha! Fat liberation gave me a new prescription in my spectacles that allows me to see beyond the mass-fed bullshit! And I love that!

And I am worthy. And you are worthy. And why can’t we just take that with us everywhere? (Where is my worthiness backpack?) I want to. I want to take it and share it with everyone I know! This should be part of the UN or something, I dunno. But it’s so important! This is amazing! This is a universal communication:

Do you see me? Do you hear me? Does what I say mean anything to you?

Think about that awhile. Think about actively using it. I want to. I will try to.  I have said such things to my friends, but I wonder how that feels to hear it? I mean, without some sort of prompt? I guess it could come off as strange or pushy, maybe…well, I won’t stop. It’s such a powerfully positive thing! I had no idea such a simple concept/word could affect us all so strongly. But it does and I feel better for knowing it!

Happy Friday to you. Thank you for reading. Thank you for seeing me and hearing me and letting me know when something I say means something to you. You make me feel worthy. You are worthy, too! <3