Learning to Love my Nooks and Crannies

Hi! I'm Lori Grace, Cougar Town’s newest citizen and self-proclaimed historian, recording sordid details from my MILF-y life for posterity’s sake. So pull up a chair and get comfortable. Today I’m taking a closer look at my nooks and crannies.

We all have private sides – our wild aspirations, secret desires, dark deeds, our assholes. Evidence to the contrary aside, I’m what you might call, reserved. My wild aspirations, my secret desires, my dark deeds – I know them well, even if nobody else does. My asshole, on the other hand, I’ve considered far less often.

Likewise, certain aspects of ourselves, we cultivate for public consumption. Sure, we adjust our angles to illuminate various aspects in turn – for our families. Our friends. Our work-selves. Chief among my curated qualities for work – empathy, intelligence, and my smile.

As I approached this fork in my career path, I wondered how I would feel as a spicy content creator since my physical appearance would now be part of my work-persona. After all, I’m a gosh darn summa-cum-laude-double-major-liberal-arts Master for fuck’s sake! Who cares about my (amazing) curves?!

And then I remembered that time in my Faulkner seminar (or was it American Postmodernism?) when my classmate wondered aloud if the stellar marks I’d received on my essay had more to do with my boobs than my brain. The thought had never crossed my mind.

It’s 2005 and I’m a second year teacher on morning bus duty with an administrator, and I’m shrugging off his friendly comments on my appearance and borderline lewd topics of conversation day in and day out. Then there’s the athletic director who asked me to coach the dance team because I'm young and pretty. The dance moms who hate me because I'm young and pretty. The coaches who give me special deference (none of which I asked for or wanted) because I'm young and pretty. The grandmother who accosts me at parent-teacher conferences to tell me her grandson can't pay attention in senior English class because he can't quit thinking about my panties.

Flash forward almost 20 years and a lifetime of experiences, and I’m in a Lyft after an admin retreat with a half dozen lovely ladies and our organization’s two co-founders. Let’s just say, everyone on my team is smart and stacked. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In the wise words of a curvy cartoon Jessica Rabbit, I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way. And the truth is, sometimes I am bad. I am as naughty as I want to be as often as I want to be. That's as it should be. But no matter where I go or what I do – including at work – my shape casts me in the role of sultry, sensual, slutty, and sexual, whether I want to be or not.

It doesn’t help that every time I blush, my nipples get hard. In recent years, the right one a bit more quickly than the left, but I digress. And as a sensory-challenged introvert, I blush a lot!

At any rate, I’m not here to debate the finer points of gender politics and personal appearance in the workplace. So I’ll leave it at this – if I was under the impression that my physical appearance didn’t affect my career, I was lying to myself. Becoming a spicy content creator has, for the first time in my life, allowed me to choose how, when, and where my body influences my work-life. I have more control over how my body is presented and portrayed, and to whom. Because the truth of the matter is, whether I’ve wanted it to or not, my body has had an impact on my career.

It feels amazing to be using both my physical attributes and my mind to grow my business as a spicy content creator.

But those nooks and crannies. My scars and my stretch marks. Every dimple and sag. My mum tum and sun spots. Every time I upgrade my iPhone (the 14 Pro is a game changer for spicy content creation, by the way), I see myself in crisper, cleaner high definition. The detail is astounding! I see something new to love or hate. Often, my first reaction isn’t love. But, more and more, my first reaction isn’t hate. I’m learning to approach my body with curiosity and wonder. If things don’t look quite like they did 20 years ago, there’s a lifetime of love and experience represented in the alterations.

When I look back through my early content – the stuff I’d rejected as not good enough – I see it in a new light. A truer light. And when I look forward through the progression of my content, I see my confidence grow month to month, photo to photo. It hasn’t happened overnight, but I’m learning to love my nooks and crannies. (It doesn’t hurt that thousands of fans and followers love them, too).