Instead of writing a blog last week like a good girl, I smoked 5 cigarettes and spent a lot of time in bed fretting over romance and how all my troubles might be related to the extra layer of fat on my butt.
I was reminded of the character Bridget Jones, the heroine of the modern fairytale “Bridget Jones’ Diary”, by Helen Fielding. This character is the silly, charming, life-of-the-party with an insatiable appetite for love, as well as all the other treats the world has to offer. If you’re not familiar with the book or the movie, it is simply the story of a 30 something writer who doesn’t have all her shit together looking for love in all the wrong places and somehow she finds it! Waist size be damned!!!
I loved this book as a prepubescent girl swimming in her own awkwardness. I was delighted that someone like Bridget in all her perceived failures could find love, which as we know, is all a 13 year old girl is worried about.
Now, I’m more like her than I’d ever thought I would be. Bridget famously begins each diary entry with a cigarette count, drink count and weigh in. One of which I’ve done here.
I think about Bridget as I drag myself from the iron grip of my bed and force one lead foot in front of the other for a much overdue run. How much of what I do is for the secret part of myself that is a naive romantic like Ms. Jones? How much of the work that I put into my body is for someone else; man or woman? Which days out of the week do I choose not to smoke or eat like crap because I don’t want to, and how many of those days do I not smoke because I can hear the chorus of house wives in my head telling me “it’s unattractive for a lady.”
The further up the hill I climb, the more tired I become, the more tired the more quiet my mind is. I begin to release the resentment I’ve been tossing about in my head over this book character, becoming less and less mad that she now seems like a damsel in distress wearing a feminists clothes.
I think about how much work I have put into my body and how at the beginning it was much easier to motivate myself to work hard because of what other people, including the elusive romantic partner, might think of me. Yet as I continue to work, learn, adapt, and climb up this fucking hill for the two hundredth time, the motivation is coming from somewhere else completely. Somewhere untouched by the outside world.
So as I reach the top again, and look out onto Hollywood, and the sun is setting, and my skin feels cool, and I’m glad that I took care of the body, that I’m the only rightful owner of, and I run home; I pass a man who is smiling at me, and it’s Jared Leto (because this is Hollywood), and I think to myself “oh my God, Jared Leto just smiled at me; I am totes doing this again tomorrow.”