The Grapes of Wrath

Today was a funny day to wake up. My phone vibrated at 8:40 a.m. with a text message from a friend. No preface, no context, no "good morning," just this portion of an incredible and powerful Marianne Williamson quote:

"We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you."

Then I scrolled over to my emails only to find this comment posted on a YouTube video from my "Body Empowerment" series:

"You Look Like A Miserable, Bloated, Drunk-Bison... You have Saggy, Droopy eyes like a Bloodhound... You are HUGE... You look like a Third grade teacher who gets her ass kicked by her RedNeck Husband... Congrats on the new baby BTW. What are you now? 9 mos pregnant. Make a poem about What A Lard-Ass you are... Looking st you motivates me to be skinny... U fucking disgust me... Good night my fellow Behemoth-BITCH :)"

Part of me wants to send the Marianne Williamson quote to this YouTube viewer, but I'm not particially interested in engaging in a back and forth with this viewer directly. So I figured if I posted both it and the WIlliamson quote somewhere on the Internet, maybe the energy of the Williamson quote would land somewhere on their computer screen and keyboard and seap through their fingers and eyes into their soul and they would stop bullying strangers on the Internet as a manifestation of some awful pain eating them up inside.

The best part of the YouTube comment is the last line when the viewer writes "my fellow Behemoth-BITCH :)." "Fellow." What self-deprecation. How we treat ourselves with such shame. As Daniel "Fritz" Silber-Baker says in his poem "Swag," which references this Williamson quote, "Turn my swag on."