There’s an Elephant in The Room

I am either having a mid-life crisis or just one of my usual nervous breakdowns or maybe both.  It’s been really ugly. I’ve been really ugly. I know the usual nervous breakdown part started with the holidays but the middle-aged crisis started because of Madonna. In my younger days, Madonna set the bar for me. She was a SEXY, FIT, BADASS! I never cared much for her music but my latent “I want to kiss a girl and I will like it” tendencies loved everything about her. In my eyes, she was the kind of woman who could “Strike a Pose” and give a bunch of guys an immediate boner.

Any hard…times, in my younger days, it was instilled in the core of my being that looks were everything and that you could never be too thin and blah, blah barf. Yeah, sometimes… Any 0ver-sharing and parental issues… Madonna set the bar for me. I actually met her when I was a concierge. She was a guest at the hotel where I worked for a few months while on location filming. She was a badass, she acted like a badass and she was beautiful. Her chiseled body was ridiculous! I was in awe and inadequate. I would smoke my Marlboro’s, starve and cry over Madonna longing to be like the Material Girl. She exuded confidence and a “I don’t have to tell you not to f*ck with me, I DARE you to”!

Several years later, the Marlboro’s were gone and I had become a new iteration, a different version of myself, physically anyway. I was now a marathoner, a spin instructor and a more chiseled athletic woman. Still defining myself by my body as a measurement of self-esteem, I felt powerful, sexy, confident (aka false ego) and had the “I know you probably want to get some of this but you can’t F*ck with me” attitude. I rolled like this for a number of years until….that thing happened.

That thing was a series of events in a very dark and terrifying season of my life. The blessing in it was I had to find a new way to define myself and ultimately I learned I am just who I am and not what my body looks like or my chronological age.

Any un-ultimately and unlearning…here I am and Madonna is again defining how I feel about myself. How is it possible Madonna is now looking old to me? How is it possible she is less than handful of years older than me? How is it possible the woman who could slay men and women with her dominatrix-like, power, oozing, vexing sensuality mixed with danger doesn’t look sexy to me anymore? Why is it that I would no longer want to make-out with Madonna?

Why? Because I am, yet again, letting my outsides define who I am and not only am I doing it to myself, I am doing to other woman around my age. Looking at others and myself through the lens of our society that makes it really hard for a woman to not only be ok with aging but to be ok at any age.

My dear friends, I needed to write this, to come clean about something I am doing that is so destructive, self-damaging, derogatory and ugly. I can now clearly see the elephant in the room is me.

Elephants don’t belong in rooms, and damaging thoughts don’t belong in our hearts.

I am going to kick the elephant out of the room, slay this shit and embrace the most important truth I have ever learned and that is I am not what I do or what I look like. I am just who I am. I don’t judge you that way. I am going to give myself, others and Madonna a break for being beautiful female human beings who can’t help but get older. There is no more room for the elephant there is only room for an abundance of:

Compassion,

Gentleness

Kindness

Gratitude

and above all else,

LOVE

I am so much more. I have so much more. Sometimes I forget and I’m sorry.