My Unacceptable Body
Fat Acceptance & Commentary
My Trouble with Movement
Aug 30th
I guess it all starts with mom. While I happen to be very competitive when it comes to Monopoly, Clue, Settlers of Catan or even Sweet Valley High the Official Board Game, playing sports has never done anything for me. This worried my mother, a lifelong dieter and sufferer of distorted body-image, who doesn’t like sports either. And she encouraged (later forced) me to get exercise so that I didn’t have to face the horror of being a fat kid.
My mom is and has been an excellent mother, and has in recent years come to see and love her body for what it is. She has worked her butt off to overcome most of her disordered eating habits and is probably one of the healthiest, most body-positive people I know. But this is now and that was then. No parent is perfect, some are worse than others, but they all fuck us up somehow. This was my mom’s big error in parenting.
I thought she wanted me to exercise because I was fat. She wanted me to exercise because she thought that I thought I was fat. So it became what felt like a daily punishment. Swimming, which I once loved, was turned into an excruciating daily summer ritual at my grandparents’ pool, or even worse on fall nights at the high school as part of an after school swim team. This meant dance classes where I was eternally in the back row, a giant hulking mass in a leotard surrounded by tiny lithe pixies. This meant karate on weekends at the local McDojo in a nearby minimall, forced to spar with boys half my height as I was shooting up like a bean pole and sprouting breasts every which way. I was so relieved when my parents’ trainer decided I was old enough to do weight training, and that I could quit these humiliating programs with my minuscule peers.
Dee was really cool, a nurse/trainer/photographer/ex-model in her 60′s with a wise, grizzled toughness that commanded respect. I was in junior high, so I can’t exactly say that I felt good about myself when I worked with her, but I didn’t feel quite as bad as I did the rest of the time. She talked to me about yo-yo dieting and unrealistic dietary expectations, about Tom Waits and being a waitress in the 1960′s, about my life and school and movies and boys. She died suddenly of a brain tumor when I was 15, shortly after I had stopped working with her. No one told me.
So yeah, I guess you could say I have some baggage when it comes to exercising. The word alone makes me cringe. Exercise is self-hatred, punishment, humiliation and loss. At NOLOSE this year, I heard Deb Burgard talk about movement. Movement is something I could do.
Movement is something I need to do. In the past month I’ve begun to experience chronic hip and back pain from sitting down all the time. If I want to not be in pain, I need to start moving. But the question is, what do I do? When it came to exercise, my mom always asked me which thing I hated the least. That is not going to cut it. I need something to do because I like it. I need something positive.
So I’ve looked around the city for places I can go. Most gyms in my area are filled with gym bunnies and sleazoids looking to get laid, magazine bodies with bluetooth headsets, blech. I’d like to take a pilates or yoga class, but I’ve searched and searched for a body-positive class not focused on weight loss and come up empty-handed. While LA has plenty of fatties, we don’t have the same kinds of radical fat resources that the Bay and NYC have. It’s frustrating and disheartening that I can’t find a space to engage in movement I enjoy without feeling uncomfortable or unwelcome.
And then I remember. I remember my parents’ bedroom when I was a very little girl. I remember my mom doing aerobics to a Jane Fonda tape. I remember the outfits and the hair and the positive attitude. And most importantly I remember getting up and doing the video with my mom, not because it was exercise, but because it looked fun and because I wanted to.
So after a few months of thought, I have ordered a leotard and leggings. Not slimming black, but bright and shiny clashing colors. I have looked through my library and picked out my favorite disco, hi-nrg and 80s R&B tracks. I am currently choreographing a series of aerobic workouts, which I will then film myself doing and post on the Internet so that you can follow along at home if you want to. If I can’t find a positive space, I’ll create one. A space where we can work up a sweat and give our bodies what they need in an environment free of self-hatred, free of shame. A spandex utopia where all are welcome and all are beautiful. I’ll keep you posted.
Me and Food and Food and Me
Aug 14th
It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that I have a pretty fucked up, unhealthy relationship with food. I might even go further and say that I think that’s true of a large percentage of this country, maybe even this country as a whole.
Thing is, I don’t just love eating, I pretty much center my life around it. Eating, sharing food with others and discovering new places to eat are some of the most pleasurable pursuits in my life. Eating is social, sharing food is an act of love– if I want to feed you, it means I like you.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen when I’m alone. When I’m left alone for long enough, I simply do not eat. For one thing, I forget to (just like I forget to drink water or stand up or go to the bathroom or shower or do just about any kind of personal maintenance that doesn’t involve whatever it is that has my attention.) By the time I realize I’m hungry, usually from the tell-tale headache, wooziness and bad mood that accompanies extreme hunger, I feel too exhausted to stand up and get anything. Finally, about an hour or two after I realize I’m hungry, I say “ENOUGH!” and end up making bizarre food choices that make me feel sick. It sucks.
Possibly as a result of these habits, I have in recent years developed chronic acid indigestion, making it even harder for me to get myself to eat, knowing that anything I enjoy will send me into more excruciating pain. It’s not all the time, but it flares up often enough to make it seriously annoying.
I thought I’d developed that behavior in college, but I realized that I’ve been doing it for a much longer time. I was lucky in high school to have three amazing food-loving, life-loving best friends, who, in spite of their recreational drug use, probably influenced me to lead a healthy lifestyle more than anyone or anything before or since. But when I wasn’t with them, I was either overeating or not eating at all.
I remember being grounded at 13 and simply refusing to eat. Now, this act of rebellion wasn’t against anyone in particular. My parents and I, for the most part, ate our meals separately at different times during the day, unless we got take-out. We still do. If she wasn’t working, my mom might get something preprepared from the store, and very very rarely, the three of us would have Shabbat dinner together at the table. Most nights, dad would slink into the kitchen, heat up some Nutrisystem food and turn on ESPN. Mom would have a salad and a frozen organic entree. I would have a Lean Cuisine, a can of soup or a small salad. So when I was refusing to eat, I was basically just refusing to stand up and microwave something. I’m not blaming my parents for the way I do or do not or did or did not eat. It’s not their fault. They struggle with this stuff themselves! (My dad is still on Nutrisystem, or on it again. My mom works hard to make sure she eats well. I’m proud of her.) I’m not blaming them, also, because I strongly doubt I’m the only kid who grew up that way.
When I was 10 I learned to enjoy the feeling of an empty stomach. I wanted an eating disorder, but felt I lacked the self-control required for one. Anyways, I never lost any weight, I just kept gaining it, no matter how much I dieted or starved myself or anything. It didn’t occur to me that I was getting taller and going through puberty, I just figured I wasn’t tough enough to be thin. I did the Atkins diet the summer I turned 14. I went from 150 pounds to 130 in about a month and a half. It was my final diet. By the time I got to college I’d given up on being thin. Although I have gained weight in the past 6 months, I continue to feel better about the way I look every day. None of this has made any difference on the way I eat when I’m alone. At my first sign of hunger, my reflex reaction is “tough it out Lillian, you can go longer than this without eating.”
Now I am 21 years old and I am determined to cook. I’ve found it very pleasurable and easy to cook for my parents. I live with (and off of) them and I’m out of work, so it feels only fair that I pitch in. But when I’m alone (as I am this month), I have even less motivation to cook than I do to eat. Am I punishing myself like I did when I was 13? Or when I was depressed in college? Do I feel that I don’t deserve to eat?
Today I went out for breakfast with my boyfriend, as we usually do on the weekends. It was awesome. Six hours later my stomach started to hurt. I didn’t know what was wrong with it– I thought I was getting sick. It later occurred to me that it was hunger. I wish this was easier. I wish my first reaction to stomach pain wasn’t guilt for eating, or a resolution to go a week without dairy or meat or bread. I wish I really believed that eating is my right instead of something I need to earn. But I don’t. In spite of my growing acceptance of my fat body, I still don’t love it enough to care for it.
My least favorite sport
Aug 11th
I am extremely competitive. Just ask any friend who’s played cards with me, or online Monopoly for that matter… Petty arguments? I have to fight every urge in my body not to duke it out to the very end.
I’ve never been good at sports, which sucks when you’re competitive. When I was at Smith College, there was a game we would end up playing during finals week: the Suffering Olympics. We’d stand around in the cold (or sweltering heat) smoking cigarettes and complaining. A match looks something like this:
Player 1: Ugh, fuck my life. My film paper is due in 6 hours and I haven’t even watched the movies yet.
Player 2: That sucks, I remember that paper, the professor is a pain in the ass on details.
Player 1: Seriously! If I don’t ace this paper the bitch is going to fucking fail me. And I haven’t even slept in days!
Player 3: Me neither. Or maybe a week? I can’t remember. I’ve been hallucinating.
Player 2: Ever since my girlfriend dumped me, it’s been hard for me to do anything BUT sleep! I have three German papers to make up, AND the final, AND my chem and organic chem exams. I’m fucked.
Player 1: FUCK! I’m out of cigarettes! How am I going to get through finals now!?!? Wait, don’t you order cartons from the internet Player 3?
Player 3: I did, but the site was shifty and stole my identity and used up all my money. I hope the advanced Chinese exam isn’t too hard…
Player 2 gets hit by a car.
Players 1 and 3: Lucky bitch.
Players 1 and 3 tie for first and are given excellent ammo for future rounds (the story about taking Player 2 to the hospital). Competitive complaining was a reality, but we were aware of how ridiculous we were being. It’s kind of a bonding experience– 2000 students freaking out and losing their marbles at the same time. I forged my best friendships during finals.
Even though we were basically just invalidating each other’s experiences of horribleness in order to gain sympathy and feel super tragic, we all knew that the horribleness would end with the semester. It was appropriate and didn’t particularly hurt anyone.
When the Suffering Olympics are extended to the kind of horribleness that’s a regular part of people’s lives, we have a problem. When it becomes the Oppression Olympics, a competitive way of invalidating someone’s experience of oppression because you don’t think it’s as “bad” as your experience, we have a big problem. I’ve seen some of this happen on Twitter, and I’m sure there’s a whole lot more of it that I don’t see. I think while it’s imperative that we talk about and really unpack privilege, we also need to remember that one kind of privilege does not cancel out another kind of stigma. Being middle-class does not make a transperson any less trans. Being straight does not make a disabled person less disabled. Yes, a queer disabled person faces unique compound stigmas that neither an able-bodied queer person nor a heterosexual disabled person would face, but one does not change the reality of the other.
We need to examine the intersecting, compounding and contradicting relationships among the different privileges and stigmas that a single person can have. These relationships are far too complex to be reduced to Oppression Points, and when we do that, we invalidate the experiences of other oppressed and stigmatized persons. When the experiences of the oppressed are invalidated, everyone loses. When someone shuts up about injustice because they’re told other people have it harder, everyone loses. The language of the Oppression Olympics has to end.
Now it is important to note that I am speaking from a place of incredible, almost ridiculous privilege. I am a young, white, able-bodied, urban cisgrrl. I live with my very well-to-do parents, who both hold doctorates. All of my grandparents went to college. Some of my great-grandparents went to college. My great-great-grandmother went to college. English was my first language, and I took to it very quickly and very easily. I’m queer, but in a monogamous relationship with a cisman. I’m fat, but not superfat. The first time someone dismissed something I had to say just because I was the one saying it was last year.* I’m generally a very good judge of which times and situations are appropriate for me to speak during, and which ones aren’t. I’m pretty sure I don’t have a false sense of entitlement, but I have spent most of my life speaking my mind and letting my ideas take up space. I wish more people did.
So yes, I am aware that, as someone with very little experience of being excluded, it’s very easy for me to say that there’s room for everyone. I am naming it and laying it out on the table as best I know how. But is it really so naive to believe that we can let our thoughts take space without stepping on those of other people? That we can be both assertive and respectful? I know it seems really hard, and often really is when we’re angry or frustrated, but wouldn’t it be better for the conversation to say “Excuse me, I have something to say,” instead of “Shut the fuck up”? And when interrupted, I’ve found that a simple, stern, “Excuse me but I’m not finished talking. I really don’t like being interrupted” is much more effective than just trying to scream the loudest.
Wow, I really didn’t mean for this to turn into a lesson on group therapy etiquette, but it makes sense. I really believe that if we’re going to fight injustice and oppression and general hegemonic bullshit, we need to create safe space for critical discussion.
What do you think, readers? What is your experience of Oppression Olympics? How do you think we can encourage constructive, inclusive conversation? Am I totally out of my depth here? Am I a totally oblivious privileged dickweed? Do these questions sound like the ones you find at the end of junior high social studies textbook chapters?
*Not actually true, I’m realizing now. Hyper-religious friends of my extended family have been dismissing shit I say for ages, but since I dismissed their dismissals, I forgot. My mom is more fun on this topic than I. Ask her about the great Passover Pee Wee Herman debate.
Coming to terms with crazy
Jul 28th
When I was 8 years old, I was found in a bathroom stall at my school with bitemarks all over my arms. The next year, my new school called my parents to tell them that I was engaging in violent behavior towards other students. They sent me to a behavioral specialist and I have been in therapy ever since.
I despised that psychologist, not, as my parents suspected, because therapy is hard work, but because she was a complete bitch and a terrible therapist. Instead of teaching me how to deal with anger, she made me ashamed of being angry, teaching me to turn it in on myself. I saw her until I was 13 when it finally occurred to her that maybe, just maybe, my lethargy, hopelessness, bizarre sleep patterns and self-hatred might have something to do with my brain chemistry. Then I found my current psychiatrist who is wonderful and fabulous and responsible and brilliant and great. And we lived happily ever after.
As a kid and then as a teen, being in therapy was never something I felt ashamed of. Neither was being on meds, no matter how often I was (and continue to be) told that my problems were imaginary and the drugs were a crutch, or that I was going to become a zombie and should just accept Who I Am. Sure I hated the low stretches and the anxiety attacks, but I knew it was genetic and that I was working really hard to learn to cope.
So maybe that wasn’t totally true and I did blame myself inside for being weak and lazy and pathetic. For not trying hard enough. (This had better be setting off an alarm in your heads, fatties.) Depression was just a made up disease for people who were too lazy to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and blah blah blah. That was there too, but it was more related to being fat than being crazy. My psyche was just as fat as my body. Lethargic, slow and flabby. Pathetic and unattractive, yes, but not dangerous in the slightest. I felt defective– like my parents got stuck with a lemon at the baby dealership.
Crazy is a whole different animal. I developed PTSD after three semesters at Smith College. I’m not going to get into the whys and hows for a few reasons: 1- It’s none of your beeswax, 2- It’s too recent for me to really process in a bloggy way, and 3- Since I wasn’t raped or stabbed or in a war, some asshole will accuse me of faking it.
I didn’t really understand what PTSD was until I realized I had it. It sucks in a way that’s totally different from the way my depression and anxiety have sucked. It is paralyzing. Actually paralyzing. There are intellectual, emotional and physical spaces I simply cannot access. Have you ever tried to see how far back you can bend a finger? It stops at a certain point on its own. You can push it back a tiny bit past there, but it hurts. If you push more, you break your finger. These limitations now pop up in my day to day life without much in the way of warning. I can no longer do things I used to do all the time, and I don’t know what they are until I’m trying to do them and I can’t. Unlike a finger pulled back too far, my psyche doesn’t break– it just shuts down, and my body keeps going without me for a while.
As I mentioned, I was taking a class at the local community college on difference and public policy. My professor heard me mention to a classmate that I have PTSD and went on to loudly jest about it to the whole class.
You have PTSD? Really? Does everyone know what that is? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. What are you going to do, Lillian? Come in here and shoot up the whole class? Now everyone, don’t go saying she’s going to come in here and shoot everyone. Ha ha. But it’s not a really big deal, right? I mean, it doesn’t make you depressed or anything. You’re a happy person.
Seriously. That happened. I was flabbergasted. My bullied fat girl humor reflex kicked in and I stuttered something about not bringing enough emotional problems to share with the whole class, and could we please not talk about this? Class continued and I fought every urge inside of me not to cry and puke and explode and melt and die simultaneously. I was so humiliated. Everyone was staring at me and at the same time refusing to look at me. I knew it. I knew what was going through all of their minds: Oh. She’s crazy. Unhinged. Off. Something is wrong with her. Of course, they were probably thinking the exact opposite: Something is wrong with this professor. But I was freaking out! How was I supposed to know that? It occurs to me that maybe my professor just didn’t believe me, and that’s why he felt it necessary to make fun of me for being crazy, or for not being crazy enough? I’m not sure.
I feel like I have two options when it comes to other people: that my problems are illegitimate or that they make me completely batshit. It doesn’t matter if I’m a liar or if I’m a lunatic– I’m invalidated either way. It’s patronizing and misogynistic. I’m not “doing this” for attention, nor do I belong locked up in the attic. I will not be told to stop it or to calm down or to suck it up or to be reasonable. I am not hysterical or over-sensitive or childish or a cry-baby.
I have been in therapy for 12 years. That’s more than half of my life. And it is okay that I’m not “fixed.” It’s okay that I may never be “fixed,” even though if I said I didn’t want it, I’d be lying. I guess the point is that I haven’t come to terms with my crazy yet. And that’s okay too.
