The posture of a valkyrie

[truepenny]

I have terrible posture. Full stop.

Partly, this is because I have weak back muscles and a not-quite-scolioticly crooked spine--and am lazy like a three-toed sloth on downers. Partly this is because I am short-sighted and an obligate bibliovore--and until recently, a graduate student. Grad Student Crouch is a well-known affliction among my friends. Partly this is because I hit puberty at the age of eleven, and in the culture of condoned sexual harrassment that is junior high school (or was, in the late 80s), if you didn't want guys telling you you had nice knockers (a verbatim quote, btw, and wherever that asshole is, I hope he hates himself for it), you kept those shoulders forward and down. (And even that wouldn't save you, but it sure beat going around leading with your chest.)

Of course, I'm a woman now, and approaching détente with my sexuality, and also have a better appreciation of how utterly I'm fucking myself up and the trouble I'm letting myself in for ten, twenty, thirty years down the road. Ergo, the sign on my monitor that reads Straighten your spine.

(Other signs on my monitor are:

Omit needless words.

MORE COMPLICATED does not necessarily equal BETTER

any story is a war

I showed up on time, so I get to be Cowboy Guy

     The footsteps of the cat upon the snow:
     plum-blossoms

there isn't any safe and painless way to love. You have to stand and deliver, as the highway robbers say.)

But it's hard to remember. It's hard to do. And one thing yoga and pilates and weight training do is remind me to make those realignments so that ribs and hips are in the appropriate configuration along the spine, and remind me that I actually feel better and stronger if I do it.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Word.

I was reading a book about various stretches once, and the (male) author was totally clueless about why girls of a certain age would start standing "wrong." His solution was that they shouldn't do that! And I laughed and laughed.

[libskrat]

Advice: Check your chair, and buy another if you have to. It's ever so much easier to sit right when your chair helps you do that.

You'll realize the difference less when you find the right chair and get used to it than when you have to sit in a wrong chair afterwards and you realize you hate the damn thing.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

Amen. My chair/desk arrangement is very bad, and I constantly fold my legs at strange angles and list to one side or the other. Beading is even worse than writing for me--I'm usually bent double by the time I finish a necklace. Maybe I should put a corset on before I sit down to write.

Junior high and high school didn't do anything positive for my posture either.

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Yes, yoga is great for that (I haven't tried pilates). I've done yoga for 3-4 years regularly, and that is the main benefit I've taken away from it, and it's still here now that I haven't been doing yoga seriously for about 10 years. You become conscious of your posture, and eventually don't need the sign any more -- you will just notice that you're not as comfortable as you could be. (And yeah -- I have scoliosis, am a compulsive reader, and learned bad posture around the same age as you did, though mostly just because I was the tallest person around most of the time and didn't like it.)

[pameladean]

Agh! That happened to me! Puberty at eleven, no film, thank you, stupid stupid stupid boys allowed to behave like morons because, well, gosh, that's how boys are, aren't they cute, the little bastards. This was in NINETEEN-SIXTY-FUCKING-FOUR. How far we have not come.

P.

[tassie-gal.livejournal.com]

If it helps at all my pilates instructors mantra to me (who has horrid posture, shoulders around ears and very low self confidence) is "Shoulders in back pockets girls!" We tell her its gonna go on her grave stone if she isnt careful!

[larryhammer]

If a three-toed sloth was on downers, how would you tell?

---L, he asked plaintively.

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

It would probably let go of the branch.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh parents and teachers were telling me to stand up straight all over the damn place.

It's just that that's not much motivation compared to the shit my so-called peer group was throwing at me. My goal for junior high school was to be invisible, and that works better if you slouch.

[larryhammer]

*snerk*

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

There were days I would have given my left kidney to be shunned.

Not that I didn't get the shunning as well--it's just that sometimes the little predatory minds got bored, and I was far enough up the social ziggurat to be fun prey. And I wanted to be invisible, but I wasn't any good at it. When your ninth grade class votes you Most Academic at the ninth grade prom (I wasn't even there, mind you--I would have considered being thrown to the lions a better way to spend an evening), you aren't keeping your head down real well.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ouch. Yes.