Heck of a hiatus

I excel at defining myself by the things that I am not.

I am not thin. I am not straight. I am not married. I am not into fashion and shoes.

All these label-y, judgy definitions do, of course, is give my inner critic a great big shame boner, which she (yes, she) walks around showing off like it's a carnival prize. Check it out. Look at how little I let her think of herself!

Instead of saying I am not thin, I can acknowledge that I have never been thin, so it's not like I'm really missing anything. I mean, I was one of the kids in Sears trying on those horrid, stiff, blue-black "Husky" jeans for my parents' approval. I do not wish to be thin. Sure, I wouldn't mind being the 'thinner fat' that I was 10 years ago, but I've been through a hell of a lot in the past decade. I took out some a lot of those feelings on food, as I've done my entire life. If surviving my 30s and everything they included -- living on my own for the first time in 11 years; the deaths of my paternal grandparents; two layoffs; elevated levels of worry, fear, and anxiety related to unemployment -- means I have a couple more chins, it's hardly the end of the world. When my ass unclenches -- that is, as things begin to improve with my freelance writing and artistic careers, and I find my way to a better apartment, among other pursuits like therapy and massage -- I will probably be able to loosen my death grip on this Snickers bar. And this bag of chips. Okay, and this ham.

The point of saying all of that is because I started to berate myself for not blogging since December. Shame Boner reminded me that I don't post a lot of pictures to Instagram, I tend to forget I have a Pinterest account, and I often have no idea what to tweet. Rather than letting those truly insignificant things roll of my wet feathers like so much oil, I marinate in guilt, as though the world is waiting for me to get better at social. Like I'm letting people down because I wasn't entirely sure until fairly recently what Tumblr is all about.

I've sort of solved my "say interesting things about myself online" problem: I've finished, for the time being anyway, a website where you can find out all kinds of neato things about me, including my background, links to published essays, and information about the spoken word CD I recorded with my dad. Eventually that site and this blog should roughly be in the same place. I'll soon be working with a tech savvy wizard friend to secure a domain name that will become a household name, land me a job as a writer on The Ellen Show, and result in an invitation to one of Oprah's gospel brunches.

Oh look. It's a budding self-confidence boner. Shh! Don't scare it away.