Day Two Hundred and Fourteen!!!

Obsessions 
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Some obsessions are more photographic than others. Like for example, Opra Winfrey, who was on the air for over 20 years as an interview talk show host, and ended her talk show reign, in order to recreate herself as a magazine editor. Since then she has her magazine called ‘Opra’, like all other mainstream magazines, show images of airbrushed perfection. These eye catching images bombard us through; advertising, the media, and especially the entertainment industry.  The one thing about Oprah has on her side, different from all others on TV and in print, is that she has no problem showing how she has struggled with her weight over all of those twenty years of mainstream success. With her success has also come struggle, and we have had the opportunity to join in with her in her struggle. 


As in her magazine and her show when it was on TV, she has had the opportunity to look her best. In the media she looks gorgeous and polished. Her goal for her TV show was that she wanted all of us to live our best lives. As much as this was her goal, I am sure that this fame came with a lot of stress.


I would imagine that being constantly out in the public eye would take an enormous amount of self-maintenance and continuous ongoing perpetual self-care. I think that this pursuit of helping others while in the eye of the public, was and still is, a powerful obsession. Besides Opra wanting to help others with their life circumstances, she also tried to show her true self, with all of her struggles with self-esteem issues as well as weight loss issues that has overcome her for many years. In one of her shows she showed herself dragging out her lost fat (in a major weight- loss diet plan she had taken on). The excess fat that she had lost, she dragged behind her in a red wagon. She also did real life, reality type programs as when she showed the world what she looked like when she wakes up in the morning without makeup, without any kind of preparation for the world, not airbrushed.


Julia Child once made the comment, “The tomato hides its grief. Internal damage is hard to spot.” This is a great statement that outlines our human struggle, in which we can only really identify what goes on for others with what we can see on the outside. But the truth is, that everyone has their own issues that we can not always see. 


Advertising, media, and the entertainment industry show us glamorous desire, designer clad self-abuse. It comes in slick sophisticated packaging to sell insecurity. How many of these glossy magazines do you have piled up and have flipped through for inspiration? How many self help books do you have piled up, either read or unread? Motivation is a great inspiration, yet the truth is that we need to be able to make sense of what has been presented to us as societal ‘norms’, and what is actual reality. The internal damage, as suggested by Julia Child, is what needs to be healed in order to begin to really be able to live our best lives.