musings of a bardic kitchen witch

I've been called "fat" pretty much my entire life by my peers. I was taught through assimilation of meaning that to be fat was not just a statement of fact, but an insult and also to imply that I was unattractive, undesirable, and not worth knowing. The irony of this of course being that while yes, I have fat, I was not exactly obese until I was probably a senior in high school.  I was not, however, rail thin nor under-developed much to my chagrin.  Puberty decided to "gift" me as early as eleven, and just went crazy from there. My mother and my sister were on the opposite side of the spectrum, and also cared a lot more about their presentation than I ever did. Rather than even try to fit into the box that was expected of me at an early age, I chose to ignore it altogether.  The words and implications hurt, but if it was decided that I was not worth knowing, what was the point of trying to convince other people otherwise? It lead to a lonely life. In addition to...

I've been participating in a zoom social mixer for a couple weeks now. I'm enjoying it to some degree. New people, similar mindsets, generally fun conversations. Today we had two new people, but one in specific was a death doula. I'm not completely unfamiliar with the job. I've known at least two birthing doulas or doulas-to-be in my lifetime, and I'd heard that death doulas were a thing. This past year has resulted in death being a thing on my mind in the background, whether I want it to be or not.  My mother is getting older and talks about dying at times, much to my chagrin; I've had six-degrees-of-COVID with a few of my friends and relatives of my spouse. 350,000 U.S. Americans have died from this virus. 9,061 of that number live in my state.  That's 2.5% of the country.  We are #4 on cases in the country in the past week; #8 for deaths.  It's hard to just... pretend that those numbers don't weigh on my mind.  So the DD talks about how she runs d...