Curvy by Tianna Jordening

Curvy

By: Tianna Jordening

I am a curvy girl. I always have been and always will be, but that has not always been easy for me to accept. I started thinking about this more since a good friend of mine posted a really sweet passage on Instagram saying you should not feel ashamed of a body that has helped to flatten the curve by staying home. Even with this encouragement, I found myself wondering that if my body had helped to flatten the curve, then why couldn’t the curve reciprocate a little by flattening my body. But this is a pandemic, not some sort of quid pro quo, and we’re all doing our best to do right by our local and global communities. There are doctors and nurses out there risking their lives to help those battling the virus. Parents are educating their children at home, some for the first time and others are facing a new definition of what it means to “homeschool”. Students are keeping up their studies and sacrificing milestones like graduations, and professionals are working hard to keep up normality in uncertain times. Friends and neighbors are coming together to support one another in times of need. And I am single handedly taking care of my little town market’s supply of Ben and Jerry’s. We all have to do our part.

Even still, staying positive these days can be a bit of a feat. Admittedly, against my best efforts, it is even harder to stay body positive. Sometimes, I find myself sitting around feeling all of this too-muchness (like it’s a bad thing and not just a thing). Even taking a walk, sometimes I just feel the full weight of my body, and it is hard to refocus on the amazing things that are happening around us every day.

My mom told me that this pandemic is really just a correction. She said it was like Mother Earth said enough was enough. She was sick of us fighting with each other and destroying our home, so she sent us all to our rooms. Don’t touch each other! Don’t even look at each other! This is a time out, and we’ll talk about it more when everyone has calmed down. There are many lessons to be learned from this pandemic, and some people will get the correction while others might not.

Primarily, covid has helped me to see that I know absolutely nothing. If someone had tried to tell me around new year that I would not finish out my college career in Arizona, the whole world would shut down indefinitely, and there would be a shortage of alcohol and toilet paper there is no way I would have believed them. Sometimes, I think of all the times before this pandemic when I was so blissfully oblivious to what was bulldozing toward us with envy. But, there was another lesson to be gleaned. It is one that I have been grappling with some time and will probably have to revisit several times before it sticks. This is a good body, a healthy body, and it is one that I should be thankful for because health comes in all shapes and sizes. Things will change. Bodies change, but that is okay. In fact, that can be one of the beautiful parts of life, and if at first, we cannot see that it is beautiful, we can start by seeing that it just is. Though painful, it seems that as the silly humans we are, we have to swing from one extreme to the other before we can eventually find some balance. Globally, we are staring at the ground from the top of the swing, but only because we were once flying too close to the sun. Soon enough, our feet will find the ground, and we’ll find ourselves at a new normal. It’s a bit scary, yes, but I think in the long run it will be a better normal.