Red Cedar

If you read this blog regularly you will note that my posting has dropped way off in the last few months. There are a lot of little reasons this has happened, but in the main it boils down to two things:

1. Work is kicking my ass these days, and
2. I have been so self-hating recently that my self-confidence has been kicked into total submission.

It’s reason number two I need to talk about here.

In the couple of years approaching forty I told myself that I wasn’t going to be one of those women who became distressed by my age/appearance/self just because of a date on the calendar. Somehow (I thought) despite the fact I live in a society which has pretty much only taught me self-loathing, I am going to transcend that by the time I hit my official “middle age” and just enjoy myself the way I am. As evidence of this, at 37 I allowed my hair to go undyed and now sport a head of “prematurely” silver-grey hair which was intended to signal that “hey, I’m okay with getting older.” Except it turns out that I’m not. I am not okay with getting older.

But let’s backtrack here and be terrifically honest — I’ve never been okay with my age/body/self-expression in a total sense, and the turning forty thing has just added another dimension to run that set of bad feelings through.

And strangely, it started with getting back into shape.

I started walking to work every day in March, which is also when I cut wheat out of my diet in an effort to control a sinus problem. In the beginning I was doing the walking and Pilates in an effort to get myself in good hiking shape for a trip I’m doing in a couple of weeks. (Walking 6-10 km a day has definitely done that by the way.) But after about a month I started weighing myself, hoping that one of the side benefits of the walking/no-wheat would mean that (as in the past) I would lose weight pretty effortlessly. I put new batteries in my digital scale and then the daily weighing began. Despite losing a few pounds in the beginning, the losses stalled out pretty quickly and brought me to the realization that my body-metabolism truly has changed with age.

I am now “that age when your metabolism changes and you can no longer lose weight” that my mother always warned me about — and if I wasn’t already feeling forty, this has sunk into a whole new level.

I should have known I was going down a bad road when I stopped looking at myself in the mirror – something that periodically happens in the cycle of “I’m not good enough”.  On a good day I don’t love what I see in the mirror, on a bad day I can’t look at myself at all.

And yes, I know that I can’t actually tell what I look like (and have never been able to) because my inner-view is so distorted. Occasionally I run across a picture of myself from high school and realize all over that I wasn’t actually fat in high school despite being encouraged to diet non-stop by my mother and feeling like I was, in fact, a whale. This is a very depressing thing to realize because it means that I have truly not enjoyed huge parts of my life because I believed that I was fat and therefore unlovable/unworthy.  It also means that even after all these years I make fat=awful as opposed to just one of many possible physical states of being.

The worst part though? I know I am not alone. I know that a great number of women, if not the majority of women in our culture experience these thoughts and feelings. And how could it be otherwise? Women in this society are devalued for all but their looks, raised to a narrowly defined set of roles, and are bombarded daily  by a media which prizes only certain ages and only certain expressions of womanhood. And we’re the supposedly “liberated” women of the world!

What really worries me is that if I don’t get these feelings under control now, at forty (fast becoming one more invisible woman) , then I could easily spend the next forty years of my life mired in these feelings. I’m not getting any younger after all, and I’m probably not getting any thinner/prettier either. What I don’t like now will only become magnified (as I have seen happen in other older women I know) unless I put an end to the negative self-talk, the comparing myself to other women, the constant apologizing, the refusal to enjoy my body and my life because I feel I don’t deserve what I have.

So – being the project person that I am –  I’ve decided this summer is going to be my “summer of self-awareness” – a concentrated ten-week period where I find ways of “seeing” myself more accurately and becoming aware of my own truth by filtering out the negative voices.

Each week I will assign myself an exercise that involves doing something for myself or for other women  (a full list of which will be posted by the end of this week) and I am going to write about it here. I would love it if there were other folks who wanted to engage in this work, or even just contribute here in the form of positive comments!

(Already I’m balking at hitting send. Do I really want to announce to the world that I have poor self-esteem related to my gender, body image and age?)

Oh well. Here we go!

This map comprises 1250 kilometres of road trip that Brian and I took over three and a half days. We started with Kamloops only because I had a meeting there Thursday night, and after that we visited or drove through (in order):

• Princeton
• Coalmont
• Tulameen
• Bankier/Osprey Lake (camped overnight)
• Hedley via the Old Hedley Road
• Keremeos (breakfast & bought asparagus and apples for canning)
• Penticton
• Summerland
• Bankier again, this time via the other half of the Princeton-Summerland Road
• Princeton (again – we ate at the most unfriendly restaurant ever)
• Manning Park/Lightning Lake (camped overnight)
• Hope (breakfast)
• and then back home to East Vancouver

Despite the fact that the driving was rough in some places (we explored a bunch of logging roads) I have to say that this was one of the most fun and relaxing trips we’ve taken in ages. We’ve discovered that the back of my car is long enough to sleep in with the seats folded down so no tent/worry about rain – and we headed out with little in the way of a set agenda after Kamloops which allowed us to decide what we were doing as we went.

This trip started out as a way to check out some potential placer mining claims that we thought might also be good hunting grounds, but as we discovered those claims were way too far out in the bush to consider, we found ourselves circling back around Princeton-Summerland Road to check out some real estate we’ve been vaguely interested in for awhile. The large piece composed of mostly wetland – which we really have wanted for months – is still up for sale and still too expensive. That didn’t stop us from checking it out again and walking the length of it. However, there are a couple other potentials up there at the moment – one which is a cheap lake-lot at Link Lake (not right on the lake, across the road from it), and one involving a share in a land co-op. As always when returning from these land-jaunts, B and I are now busy researching these possibilities with an eye to heading back up that way as time permits to give it a further look over.

We have been sometimes-looking for recreational property for the last couple of years. This has involved scoping realtor websites, driving to the occasional property, and checking out areas of the province we think might make good get-away zones for our activities. So far our list of wants includes a property that is roughly 4 hours from the city (not more than 5), close to or backing onto crown land, private (no subdivisions in the wilderness), and with good access to water for swimming in (creek/river or lake nearby). In short, we’re not particularly picky, but we have some parameters because we know how we would use such a place. Our biggest problem/parameter however, the one which is keeping us from owning anything at the moment, is cost. That is, BC real estate seems ridiculously valued, particularly land in the south-west quadrant of the province.

In the area we are currently looking, there are probably 100 properties for sale, plus a new development of 5-acre lots going in – and very few of them are on the market for less than $300,000. A lot that is priced lower usually has some major flaw (like the one we wanted to purchase – which is 34 acres, 90% of which is wetland or steep/unusable slope – selling for $170,000) or nothing more than bare, unserviced land exposed to the road. Even then, it isn’t possible to find anything for less than $150,000.

Which to a city-dweller in the most expensive real estate city doesn’t sound like much, except we are talking about areas where there are few to no jobs, no municipal services, and where the properties being sold are clearly for secondary use, not primary residences. Having looked now for a couple of years, I am pretty sure I’m not the only one feeling this way as many of the properties seem to sit year-after-year with nary a change in price (though real estate agents seem get get thrown over with fair frequency).

Now, I recognize that a recreational property is simply a nice thing to have and not a necessity – and I am not complaining about not being able to afford a luxury item. But the whole situation has gotten me curious – who is the market for the $350,00 recreational property? These aren’t exactly properties for the uber-rich after all, but at the same time very few Vancouverites can come up with that kind of money particularly given the very high cost of the city these days (not to mention the pricey nature of all the interior cities where actual work and decent wages exist). I know Bob Rennie and other urban developers have been peddling the myth that a whole new crop of retirees are just aching to downsize their homes, buy their kids condos and perhaps get themselves a vacation property – but the fact that many people are working longer than ever leads me to question whether or not the older retiree really is hankering to settle down in communities with limited medical services and long driving distances.

In any case, recreational real estate in BC seems to be in the same state as residential real estate in Vancouver – the prices are too high for what’s being offered, no one is particularly keen to pay those prices (or simply can’t pay them) but the sellers seem to think if they just hold on a bit longer they will get the price they want, and so – stalemate. I expect the whole thing isn’t going to hold for much longer in the city or the hinterlands because at some point people *need* to unload their real estate and start moving down the price ladder in an effort to do so.

All I know is that we have an amount we are willing to borrow for this endeavor and once a property drops into that range – we are interested. As I mentioned above there are two places which are possibilities at the moment and I am hopeful that by the end of the summer there will be a few more. Or that one of these ones (like the co-op) works out to be the right thing.

In the meantime, the road trips are fun and always interesting – more of those in the near future most definitely!

A few weeks ago I read a blog post titled “All or nothing thinking will always (eventually) get you nothing” which was about how that particular axiom relates so well to diet and exercise approaches. How we set ourselves up to quit from the very beginning when we demand only unbroken training streaks or obsessive adherence to the latest eating plan. Just this morning I found myself thinking that since I didn’t go to the gym yesterday and I couldn’t go today for my regular pilates workout, there was no point going for the rest of the week because I’d already lost two gym workouts. Which makes no sense, of course, if the overall goal is fitness. But if the overall goal is finding excuses, well then we’re all capable of waiting for another day to get started or re-started.

A bit before I read that article I saw a fitness instructor to get some postural advice. Since I’ve been walking a lot (6-12 km 4 days per week  since the beginning of April and from March to April  6 km per day 3 days per week) I wanted to make sure I wasn’t  compounding any posture or gait problems that might have been held over from breaking my ankle in 2002. For the most part it turns out that my posture is fine, but I have a weak core which causes my pelvis to tip forward. This was something I had already discovered in pilates classes. Another thing that my trainer pointed out to me is that I didn’t move my arms when I walked, which she told me might account for my very weak shoulders (my shoulder girdle never being activated for days at a time).

She gave me a bunch of exercises and we also focused on how to incorporate some better practices into walking on the treadmill (like swinging my arms – how novel!)   At the time the exercises seemed very do-able when we discussed them, but because of lots of overtime and work stresses these days I am having a hard time getting to the gym. Instead, I am making sure I walk to work every single day and home 1-2 days per week because if that’s all I do alongside my regular running around I’ve gotten at least 8 km of walking into my day and that’s better than nothing.

Since that’s all I’ve been doing, plus pilates twice a week – I have focused on bringing the gym exercises into my walking. That is, I concentrate for bursts on swinging my arms, drawing my pelvis into a neutral position, drawing in my core, pulling my shoulders back and holding my chin level. And although that sounds all very simple, it does two things 1) intensifies my walking by a factor of five and 2) allows me to work on my core and other problem areas outside of the gym and during what has become a routine commute.

Guess what? It turns out that without doing anything else, after a month of this concentration, I have stronger shoulders (as evidenced by greater ability to do push-ups and planks without dying) and my pelvic adjustment into neutral (that is into proper posture) feels small and natural rather than large and difficult to hold. And I’ve noticed that overall I am more attentive to my core and that I am unconsciously making adjustments into better posture all the time.

Point being? These are changes that have taken more intention than effort, and even these incremental adjustments have lead to real fitness and health outcomes which I intend to build on.

Just this morning I found myself balking at taking the stairs at work because I knew I couldn’t make it up all 16 flights. Which is silly because even taking them two flights and then hopping the elevator is better than nothing right? So I took them four flights despite my critical voice, and hope that by next week it will be six, then eight, then fifteen – because I will work them incrementally into my routine.

If four days a week I walked 6 to 12 kilometres and focused on good posture and gait for at least some of that time, plus took the stairs up and down 15 flights once or twice a day – not to mention two pilates classes per week – I would imagine that over time I would get into pretty good shape. None of those things is particularly dramatic, but I’m confident that I can keep working my way up to good fitness by simply altering my small practices one movement at a time.