Woman in Black (Whole65, Day 29)

Tonight, Love's Labour's Lost finally opens. it's not perfect, but it's fun, and it's full of people I love, so I am happy and excited to share it with people. 

We got a sample of the production photos (taken by the incredible theatre photographer Evelyn Huynh) from tech week last night, and I threw a few of them onto Facebook for publicity.

I find, even though I'm mostly happy with how I look in photos and how it reflects my progress in my fitness, my eyes are still immediately drawn to areas I want to improve...specifically, areas I still want to slim down. More often than not, with this costume, it's my belly and my legs.

In the photos below, I'm the one all in black.

I don't even want to think about how this would look without the Spanx tights I'm wearing.

This one I cropped to show just my upper body and made it my FB profile pic.

I didn't even see how cute our faces looked, at first. All I saw was my underwear lines and my gut.

My counterpart (the actor playing Ferdinand) is so flippin' adorable--wait is that my mic pack or a roll of back fat? :-(

I'm kicking myself for thinking this way (but it's literal decades of habit, to immediately look for what's wrong with pictures of me and want to fix them.) And for all that I feel like I've made great progress, I still am confounded sometimes by the long road ahead and the goals I hope to achieve that seem ridiculous and pie-in-the-sky.

But seriously, can't I just look at these pictures and go "yeah that scene is so fun" or "I love my sleeves" or "omg look at our faces" without feeling that strange obligatory loathing for the sight of myself through a lens? Am I really that body-negative?

I hate that idea. 

Photos aside, I truly am glad to be opening this show tonight, and also to be beginning Julius Caesar rehearsals next week. Tomorrow will be Day 30 of this Whole65 journey and I'm hopeful that by the end of it I'll have lost some more weight and gotten a bit healthier.

I signed up for another half marathon, this one in Disneyland in November. Grant me strength...I should have my head examined.