Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Enough! No More Beating Myself Up

From EveryDayFeminism.com
It's recently come to my attention that I am rather hard on myself.  I guess that most people probably are, but this realization came to me when I made the statement, "I love television and I am not going to feel bad about it."

You see, I've sort of held this belief that good crunchy granola people (like who I would like to be) don't watch television.  They don't get sucked into terrible reality TV shows.  They don't have an Amazon account where episodes of How I Met Your Mother, Bones, and Supernatural, automatically appear every week. 

These good and proper hippies don't 'squee' with delight when new episodes of Merlin are available on Netflix.  And they definitely don't let their kids stay up late on a school night to watch the season premiere of RuPaul's Drag Race.

But wait there's more...These people also don't go to Taco Bell for dinner or get a craving for Cheetos and just go for it.  These people don't ignore dirty dishes in the sink or have a crushing weight of credit card debt.  This ideal person isn't known by name at the local Starbucks, they are too granola for Starbucks!  The good people out there aren't doing ANY of these things...

You see, *I* do all of these things, therefore, these things must be bad.  Boo!  Hiss!  I suck.

I've created this ideal "witchy, hippie, natural living, person" in my mind.  This is the person that I think I am supposed to be.  This is the person that lives "better" than I do and I should strive to be.  I suppose that these are all good things to strive for, but along the way this turned into another excuse for me to berate myself.

Why do I feel like I have to hide my television watching or pretend that I don't love Taco Bell?  No one out there cares and if they do, it shouldn't matter to me.

Blurting out that I love television and I'm not going to feel bad about it was a liberating moment for me.  It also helped me to remember that I've always loved TV.  When I was a teenager and all of my friends would lock themselves in their bedrooms and listen to music, I was hiding in my room watching TV or movies (often while reading at the same time).

This pic has NOTHING to do with this blog post.
So I'm done.  I'm not going to feel bad for the things that I love, no matter how un-crunchy un-granola I might think they are.