In the end, you're still you...

I'll admit it...my dander is up. So I'm going to vent.

Somebody, anybody, please tell me how tearing down another person can make you truly, TRULY feel better about yourself? If you can convince me that it's possible, then I'll shut up. Because I don't think it is.

If you are so insecure or unhappy with yourself that you deflect the attention to your shortcomings by a) making another person feel badly about themselves or b) point out and hound them for what truly may be their own 'flaws', you've succeeded in only one thing. Tearing somebody down. You have done NOTHING to accept and/or address the things about yourself that make you unhappy. Period. Convince me otherwise. Please. I don't think you can.

So to make this topic relevant to this blog, let me tell you why I'm so ticked off. If you read this and feel any self-conviction, I'm only half apologizing for that. Actually, I'm not apologizing at all. Suck it up.

There is a person I know from the gym. Truly what you would call a fitness badass. I aspire to be in the kind of shape she is in. I don't aspire to feel like that entitles me to judge what other people do. Case in point: posting on Facebook about how horrible it was for people to use the elevator when it was "only" two flights of stairs. Which of course was followed up with a comment by somebody else referring to these people as fatties.

First off, she didn't say whether they were thin or not. The assumption was that they were fat. What difference does it make? Well, the assumption by the original poster AND the follow up poster were that the choice to take the elevator was solely a product of laziness. (And all lazy people are fat and all fat people are lazy. Right? Yes, my tongue is planted firmly in my cheek. OF COURSE NOT.)

Maybe the person taking the elevator just had knee surgery. Maybe they have a heart condition. Maybe they were just tired and take the stairs every other time. Maybe...wait. WHO CARES? What does it do for them to belittle others? It does not make them ANY MORE FIT. It does not do a DAMN THING to further their pursuit of the perfect body.

Runners who point out that other people were "just walking" (and yes, that's a quote) will not be able to run faster or longer if those who are "just walking" sit in a recliner or run a marathon in record time.

The bottom line is, you are still who you are, no matter what. And if you're not happy with it, tearing anybody else down won't fix it.

And taking this in a slightly different direction, comments like that make me cringe because I know from FIRST-HAND, PERSONAL EXPERIENCE what it's like to feel like if you walk into a gym, or go anywhere there are people working out who don't know what it's like to be fat walking into to a gym and thinking they are judging you. So what happens? You don't go. You feel worse about yourself, and the cycle continues.

Really, I should thank her. I want her to know that comments like that just fuel my fire. My fire to make people feel empowered to do what they never thought they could do. "Just walking" is pretty damn impressive for some of us.