Today I did the first stop on the Dances With Fat World Tour. I taught a class on Lyrical Movement for Larger Bodies for PURE NYC. They are an awesome group and watching them dance before and after the workshop was amazing and inspiring! I highly recommend that you check out their stuff on YouTube as well. They also travel so be sure to keep an eye out for them in your town. I took a phone, a flip cam, and my new video camera and I failed to get so much as a picture. I will get better at this.

After spending time with the amazing women at PURE NYC it was time to hail my first cab. I tried several corners but it seems like everywhere I went the taxis were somewhere else, or they didn’t see me or didn’t stop. I started to try to think about what I would do if I couldn’t successfully get a cab. A woman stopped out and in a moment successfully hailed a cab and got in. Moments later I confidently raised my hand and was on my way in my first hailed cab – feeling mighty.

And a concept that I learned long ago in a psychology class came to mind – the idea that if you see a single person do something it suddenly becomes possible to you. I think that this is particularly important in a society where we’re told repeatedly (by industries who are trying to sell us stuff) that as fat people we’re practically immobile. Idiots on the internet suggest that every obese person has difficulty to playing with our kids or riding a bike but no thin people do. I got hate mail the other day saying that fat people can’t run marathons. WRONG!

And let’s not pretend that it’s just fat people, we’re told all the time that we’re limited by our age, because we’re parents, because we’re not parents, because we have grey/curly/no hair. I actually heard people the other day making fun of someone because her jeans weren’t “relevant”. What does that even mean?

There are a couple reasons I think this happens. One is that marketers have found out that some people will buy anything if they can convince us that it will get us something we want. I’ve seen commercials that looked like soft-core porn turn out to be for perfume. Then there are the people who want you to feel bad so that they can feel good about themselves. Those are the people who will call your jeans irrelevant (I still can’t believe that’s a thing). Sadly they’ll often also ignore your accomplishments due to an acute, debilitating case of But But But Syndrome. But this isn’t about them anyway, except to remind you that these people don’t have our best interests in mind and we don’t have to believe what they say – we can rise above merely being some ad campaigns target demographic.

So remember that when you go about your life doing what you love to do and being who you want to be, you not only make yourself happy but you help open up options for other people that they didn’t even know they had. People who may have believed the lies that are told to us about ourselves, our limits, and our possibilities.

I think that’s what Marianne Williamson meant when she said “And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” You may never know who identifies with you or why, and it doesn’t matter – it’s an unconscious act because we cannot be conscious of it unless the other person chooses to tell you. And there’s no obligation, and it’s not about what you can’t do, but about what you can and want to do – just be you.

If you go take that belly dancing class that you always wanted to take, or play with your grandkids at the park, or ride your bike through the neighborhood, or wear horizontal stripes, or whatever your thing is you are giving people who identify with you the option to change what they believe is possible for them. It’s not about trying to prove anything to anyone. taking risks for the sake of taking them, or ignoring reality. It’s about realizing and testing our own limits rather than allowing them to be assigned to us by critics and marketing experts. It’s about finding a way to do what we love to do instead of what we’re told is possible or appropriate for us. It’s the simple but immensely powerful fact that, just by being us, we can change the world.