Freshly Pressed: Four Friday Faves

No more of this “waiting until the end of the month” nonsense to see what was hot on Freshly Pressed! To keep our Freshly Pressed editors’ picks, um, fresh, we’ll highlight a few of our (and your) favorite posts here every Friday.

If One More Woman Complains About the Size of Her Body . . .

Caitlin Kelly’s post on Broadside hit a nerve with hundreds of you.

Whining about weight teaches the girls in our lives, who look to us their role models, that this is just what women do, that focusing miserably and endlessly on our individual body size and shape is our most pressing issue as women — instead of political and economic issues that affect us all, size 00s to 24s,  like paid maternity leave or better domestic violence protection or access to birth control and abortion.

Caitlin’s post racked up the Likes, but also spawned some fascinating conversation in her comments section. We loved seeing your responses as much as we enjoyed reading this no-holds-barred post in the first place.

My Life, Plan B (or what to do when life doesn’t go as planned)

Mama Bear, the blogger behind Call Me She Bear, is almost 40 years old, and coming to terms with the fact that her life hasn’t turned out quite the way she’d been planning.

(I’m sure none of us can relate, right?)

What’s Mama Bear’s Plan B? Actually:

“Plan B is not a plan at all. It’s more of an intention. It’s an intention to let go of the tight grip on my big expectations, take things one day at a time, do what’s in front of me to the best of my ability, and trust that the blur coming up for me on the horizon will become clear to me and worthwhile when I get there.”

The gorgeous photos accompanying the post pushed it over the top. We can’t wait to read about how Plan B works out.

“I’m Spiritual, Not Religious”

We had a feeling some great conversation would come out of this post, and we weren’t wrong. After all, it’s hard to imagine that a bunch of opinionated bloggers wouldn’t have something to say about this:

To claim to be spiritual and not religious is like claiming to have taken a swim without getting wet. Anyone who embarks on anything spiritual will either receive the religious tradition from which it comes, or create their own religious tradition in the attempt to understand and practice it.

Not everyone agreed with blogger Eric’s take, but the discussion was both thought-provoking and civil — the very best of what the WordPress.com community is about.

Hanging Up the Tutu

Becca at 25toFly had quite the cheering squad among fellow bloggers this week, and when we read this post about her journey to find her life’s passion and re-define herself after leaving a career in dance, we understood why.

I had become the one thing that I had almost forgotten I’d sworn not to be, Miss play-it-safe.  Sure, I’d find a job. That job would pay well enough for me to live as comfortably as I always have. People would see me as “successful,” but I wouldn’t stop thinking, “Is this it?” I would eventually become that forty-year-old woman still bragging about how many pirouettes she could do twenty years ago while shamefully dodging conversation about her soul draining day job.

Her new direction? Writing. You think it’s a good choice, and so do we.

Thanks to everyone who sent us recommendations this week — you introduced us to a bunch of great bloggers, some of whom have since been featured on Freshly Pressed. Keep it up! You can tweet links you love to us @freshly_pressed. (And be sure to follow @freshly_pressed to see all your fellow bloggers’ picks, even those that don’t make it to the Freshly Pressed page.)

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