Nowadays, body image seems to be a topic on everybody’s mind. Is it on my mind? Hell, no! Sure, there are days when I wish I could be super thin, but then there are days when I just look in the mirror and feel perfectly content with the lovely, short and voluptuous woman staring right back at me. Being bedridden all the time doesn’t allow me the pleasure of knowing what are the latest trends and phrases that get spurt out across the lands these days. While checking for this month’s topics, I was more than happy to give my two-cents about body image slogans, such as “Fat Acceptance”, “Thinspiration”, and “Fit is the New Skinny.” What exactly do these terms mean to me, well, let’s find out! Spoiler alert, they mean absolutely nothing to me.

Perhaps, I am so lackadaisical about this topic because I’ve been various body types throughout my short 24 years of life. In my early teens, I was very thin. When I decided to try out for cheer-leading, I had to work out a lot in order to keep up with our high-energy dance routines. All of the working out caused me to get extremely fit. I had short, but extremely toned legs and I could tumble across a gym room without feeling the least bit tired. The only thing I was insecure about during that time was my bust size. I was barely a 32B-cup at the time and I had always wanted them to be bigger for some dumb teenager reason that I can’t remember now. I remained in that shape until late junior year of college, which is when my health began to deteriorate rapidly. After numerous surgeries and being placed on bed-rest for over three years, it was only natural that I was going to put on a few pounds…Well, a hundred or so pounds to be exact. On the bright side, my body is now curvy, and well, some people may call it fat, but I could give a rat’s ass about what they call me. I like it and I know for a fact that there are a lot of people out there who like it, too. Not to mention, I gained those 40D-cup breasts I’ve been yearning for all those years ago!

However, when you are faced with a serious and chronic medical problem, you tend to put a lot of things into perspective. My condition leaves me fatigued to the point where I can hardly get up to go to the restroom on my own. There are times when the pain is so great that I can hardly move or breathe properly. I have frequent hospital visits and a medicine cabinet that overflows with medications I have to take. Stress actually increases the chance that I’ll have the really severe symptoms, which brings me to my next point: Why would I sit around and stress over my body image? I don’t really give a damn about what the outside currently looks like, because the inside feels an immense amount of pain on a regular basis. If I were not sick, I would probably have turned out to be a much different person and I most likely would have cared about body image. Hell, I maybe would have even embraced the slogans, but it all just seems so irrelevant to me in my current state.

Unfortunately, my body is going through yet another bizarre body image cycle. My pancreatic condition has gotten worse over the last six months and the result of this is some rapid, unintentional weight-loss. I wound up losing 41 pounds, so now my body is trying to change into yet another image. Will I fret over this? Not really. I will miss having 40D-cup breasts, but no matter what size my breasts wind up, I’ll be happy with them. With the way my life is right now, simply being alive is more important to me than a bunch of superficial slogans.