jezebel

In keeping with my 2013 theme of self-care, I wanted to talk about another way I have simplified my life and quieted the noise. Gossip rags used to be my guilty pleasure. I am from L.A. so that makes sense. Every morning I would check in with People, Us Weekly, TMZ, and Perez Hilton. Man, I used to read Perez religiously. Do people still read Perez after he got super skinny and…nice? I also used to read People Magazine’s Moms and Babies Blog because I apparently enjoyed self-torture.

Anyway, a few months back, I was in another one of my purging moods and I decided to nix my daily fix of gossip reading. I banned myself from checking any of the above websites. I also unfollowed the tabloids via Twitter and all forms of social media. I did this under the premise that I needed to cleanse myself of fake news and instead replace it with a little insight into what has been going on in…I don’t know…the real world. Huh? World news?

Well, at least, that is what I told myself at the time. I think my real motive was more along the lines of distancing myself from the baby mania that is tearing through the celebrity world right now. If you haven’t noticed, the celebrity world is baby and pregnancy CRAZY. Every time I visited a tabloid website, I was greeted with, yet, another pregnancy announcement or a picture of some celebrity’s growing baby bump (more like twenty five pictures of growing baby bumps from all different angles). I am not talking about “important” celebrities either. Apparently you don’t have to be a star these days to get your pregnancy announced. You can be the girlfriend of J. Lo’s back up dancer’s understudy.

This shit is out of control.

So yeah, while this post may paint me as a bitter infertile who hates baby bumps (I really don’t) I would like to hope it also paints me as someone who understandably has no room for this in my life at the moment. Like anyone, I have my bad days and may not be in the mood to let it all run off my back so easily. On ugly days, I would put myself through this stupid, toxic thought process of, “OMG, she is pregnant. But, she does drugs/drinks/is named Snooki. How could she possibly be pregnant?” While celebrity babies are certainly not the be all, end all of infertile breaking points for me, I could do without knowing about Kim Kardashian’s questionable maternity fashion decisions with my morning coffee.*

And so far this experiment has worked! I put some distance between myself and the tabloids, and I really don’t miss all of that fluff at all nor do I have many of my toxic thought pattern moments. I am not fanatical about it. Sometimes you just need some form of guilty pleasure in your life. I totally get that. But lately, due to the aforementioned celebrity baby craze, it just wasn’t working for me, and I decided to do something about it. Perhaps one day I will return to my celebrity gossip rag days, but for now, you can find me on cnn.com trying to get smarter and shit.

 

*While I don’t tune into the tabloids anymore, I do read yahoo.com and they alerted me to this phenomenon.