The Cutprice Guignol

To round up this week of positivity (and thanks to all for your support over the past few days!), and to precede getting back to our regularly scheduled snarkgramming, I wanted to talk a little about success.

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I sat down to write my very first book when I was seven years old.

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When I was a kid, my mum (hi Mum! Pet the dog for me) helped me pull a sickie to get off school to I could go see Eoin Colfer talk at a local theatre. I still remember sitting there, hiding out deep in the stands, listening to him spin these long, involved yarns – scary, funny, utterly unique, delivered in a soft Irish brogue that could snap into various characters at will – about growing up in Ireland, about his stories, about what drove him to write. He was meant to be signing books afterwards – once the queue of people who actually had copies of his latest release had dissipated, my mum approached with a page torn out of the back of her crossword puzzle book. Even though he was only meant to be signing his books, he happily scrawled down a signature on the paper, chatting with my mother about something that I was too awestruck to take in. Because this was the man who’d written the coolest books I’d ever read in my life.

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I just wanted to say, first and foremost, thank you for all the lovely and supportive messages I got following my post yesterday – I really appreciate it, and it’s awesome to hear that the topic resonated with a lot of you.

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Hi! I’m Lou. This is me:

This is me as I am most of the time – usually dressed like I’m about to go pick up the kids (the cat) from school and then head to the gym, with stomach rolls and broad shoulders, scars on my arms and my tummy and my chest. I cut my hair myself; you can tell. If I had to pick a picture that summed up the way I look the most succinctly, it’s this one. Or one of the many of my cat aggressively trying to push my laptop off me while I’m attempting to get work done.

One of the first things that comes to mind when I hear the word “positivity”, I think of body positivity. It’s something that I’ve had a pretty strained relationship with over the years,  but, in the spirit of the week of positivity, let’s get a little of that up in here, huh?

This is my body, and with it, I have travelled to Thailand, Russia, Berlin, Paris, Andalucia, Venice, to a cheesy beach holiday with my family last year where I jumped in the ocean fully dressed with my brother and walked back through town with make-up smeared down my cheeks. This is the body that has stuck with me through a bunch of stupid, ridiculous diets, and reminded me, politely, to fucking eat, you fool, you idiot, come on now. It’s the body that my cat lunges into the cleavage off and aggressively pads on when she wants to go to sleep. It’s the body that has gained a bunch of weight and then lost a bunch of weight and then remembered that it isn’t seventeen anymore and that the number on the scale doesn’t have any say over my worth.

One day, I’m going to be able to love my body, without condition for the marks it has to meet before I earn that. I’m going to love it because there is nothing to gain from not loving it. Until then – and it’s until, not if, because I will get there – I’m going to treat my body as though I love it. Fake it till you make it – go running because you want to check in on the progress of the local swan-ducklings (I refuse to call them Goslings, for obvious reasons), not to lose weight. Body positivity: we’ve got in sorted. Well, we’re taking steps in that direction. And not counting them on our pedometer for once.

Hello! Thanks for checking in with my Blogsitivity week (yesterday’s post, far less serious and more cat-centric, is right here) – if you have a blog of you own and feel like sharing something that makes you happy, please do, and let me know so I can share it here! The causes I’ve had shared with me for today are the University of Iowa Dance Marathon, which raises money for children being treated with cancer, and Planned Parenthood, which provides reproductive and sexual healthcare. Any causes you’d like to share with me? Drop ’em in the comments, or email them to me via the form below!