Alright, to be honest, I have this title because I gave it to myself.  I got tired of waiting on you guys to do it and Kathryn Hepburn said that “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”  So, I commandeered it.  Nobody else was using it, anyway.

The tiny little snag is that the title doesn’t exactly fit all of the time – the goddess has feet of clay.  Like last night, for instance, this was my Facebook status:

“I’m exhausted. I’m cranky. I’m beginning to feel frayed. I want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Sunbeam bread, Ruffles chips, a diet coke and a piece of Ruby Carson’s coconut cake. I can’t have those (especially not the last one); so, I’m going to the gym to walk. Crap.”

Hardly the stuff of a Positive-Thinking Blog Goddess; however, since the goddess is actually just me, it works out as authentic, which is okay, too.

I didn’t want to go to the gym.  I wanted comfort food loaded with carbs.  I wanted my grandmother’s coconut cake. I wanted to eat every morsel of that, then fall into a sugar coma.  Instead, I went to the gym and walked five miles.  (If I walk 25 miles a week, I can fulfill the modified 300 Mile Challenge with the 501st Brigade Support Battalion.)  The cranky Muppet part of me really wants to say that the walk and the endorphins did me no good – I should have just opened up the JIF.  But, the truth is, I did feel better – not conquer-the-world better, but better, nevertheless.

Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing we’ve been talking about all along?  If it were my nature to bebop on down to gym or pop out for a quick run all the time, I would never have had a weight problem, an attitude problem or any of my other myriad issues.  I would be that happy-happy-happy all the time-time-time person and you would have turned away, nauseated, at my first post.

What we have been talking about and continue to talk about is changing our verbs and changing our behaviors, not our natures.  I’m not sure we really CAN change our natures; but, I’m 100% certain that we can change our behaviors.  I am also 100% certain that we cannot change our behaviors successfully 100% of the time, always doing what is best for our current and future selves.  We will fail.  We will backslide.  We will willfully rebel.  I will look my conscience right in the eye and take a big bite of cheesecake.  It’s going to happen.

What is also going to happen is that I will feel a diary-induced bellyache followed by some shame for having rebelled.  Then I’ll eat a Tums and make a better choice the next time.

In the meantime, it is essential that I both acknowledge and forgive myself for the clay feet I really knew I had all along.