A Discussion About Rule 62

An open letter to men in recovery: stop using “Rule 62” to dismiss women, comorbidity and intersectionality.

To ring in 2020, I spent New Year’s Eve with my friends who are sober–most if not all of whom are qualifying members of Alcoholics Anonymous (I am not; however, I understand the fellowship and framework quite well).

I was discussing sobriety with a man I had just met upon walking in the door to my good friends’ house on the water on the south shore of Long Island–the designated gathering place for 50+ sober people at any given time on a holiday such as July 4th, MDW, and this year, NYE.

I mentioned the unfortunate lack of consideration for folks with eating disorders like myself in the program of AA–especially considering that so many women (approximately 50%) experience comorbid symptoms of eating disorders and substance abuse including alcoholism.

The man in question simply said, “Rule 62,” and looked at me blankly.

Rule 62. 

Don’t take yourself so damn seriously. 

Rule 62, for those unfamiliar, is a rule that has found its way into recovery circles as unspoken tradition.

The backstory, from what I understand, has to do with tradition four (“Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A./E.D.A/whateverA as a whole.”) in anonymous programs, which discusses the  idea that individual meeting groups can operate on their own volition without involving or compromising the integrity of the fellowship as a whole.

When AA was expanding, a group attempted to be “all things to all people”–they resolved to take care of meetings, residential treatment, and other facets of recovery life all under one roof–and realized that their goal was way bigger than they could manage in the context of the AA program.

This group came up with 61 rules and sent them to AA as a manifesto or proclamation for beginning their ambitious program. Then, they realized just how daunting a task it would be to take care of every single person’s needs in the realm of addiction treatment–and before scrapping the idea, they came up with rule 62. 

So, what about it? 

Last week, I read a really powerful and thought-provoking opinion piece in the New York Times about the patriarchal foundations and history of AA as an organization. We all know the names Bill W. and Dr. Bob, two men who were alive during the first world war and became alcoholics due to a perceived spiritual malady that they believed had to do with an inflated ego and sense of self, as well as a lack of presence of a higher power in their lives. They were their own higher power for the duration of their relationship with alcohol and drinking–which, as the NYT article suggests, is the essence of white male privilege. 

They sought to recover from this sense of ego, but did it also heal their harmfully separatist sense of rigid gender roles and toxic masculinity?

Alcoholics Anonymous itself has, seemingly ironically tried to be all things to all people; opening itself to women, people of color, people with doctorates, average folks, and everyone in-between, but how can it do that if it still holds itself in the principles, practices and ideas of a world that was designed by and for white men? How can a fellowship with such a marginal number of women attending compared to men even say that “anyone can do it” if they have the capacity to be honest? 

The problem is, this claim is dishonest in and of itself.

Rule 62 was meant to be an ego-check on a group of alcoholics who thought (mistakenly) that their individual group’s program could be a one-stop shop for recovery. When they failed, they wrote this rule as a way of softening the ways that their ambitious and admirable mission had not gone to plan. Well intentioned? Maybe.

In this conversation in my friend’s kitchen, Rule 62 was used to dismiss my very real concern about the harm still being done to people like me in the rooms who are not having their eating disorders addressed–a problem backed by statistics, as I shared before.

I know, I know. If AA were to take on eating disorders too, they wouldn’t really be AA anymore. But this is 2020; and we really need to start accounting for the more than half of the fellowship that needs access to a safe place to express the comorbidity of their alcoholism with other issues like disordered eating and, in the case of my region, opioid abuse. By not being sensitive to issues that clearly and empirically intersect with the problem of alcoholism, there is an imminent danger of making full recovery inaccessible to so many members and potential members.

“At least you’re not drinking” (I hear this one a lot, too!) isn’t good enough anymore. Eating disorders have an unbelievably high mortality rate, especially anorexia nervosa. And I’d venture to say that MOST eating disordered alcoholics can relate to the feeling that alcohol sets off their ED, and vice versa. This is serious.

Food is available at tons of AA meetings without supporting the people for whom food might be a trigger. With over 50 percent of addicts and alcoholics also having an ED–it seems a little insensitive not to address this, and to tell those who are authentically worried about it “not to take themselves so damn seriously.” 

It’s not really a coincidence or an accident that this “rule” is probably most often bestowed upon women, as it was done unto me.

Having an ego and unwarrantedly flaunting your ability to quote a book that is, dare I say, just as fallible and subjective as we all are is…confusing, and honestly, a form of gaslighting imo.

Women don’t need to be powerless, and we don’t need to be told not to take ourselves so seriously. The world outside of those church basements and sober gatherings already does that to and for us. 

Now, I know that this individual’s use and interpretation of Rule 62–like the fallible interpretations of a lot of things in AA and other anonymous groups–speak to the person, not to the fellowship as a whole, hence, the fourth tradition. Hell, Rule 62 was created so that a bunch of people who created a plan and failed, like any human might do, could laugh at themselves and not be bummed that they hadn’t succeeded. We all need a little of that in our lives, certainly.

But I wonder how many times this rule has also been used to drive women into silence about the things that bother them about the world that they live in; things happening inside and outside the rooms. Because the fact is, we absolutely need more power in the world at large and in the daily context of our lives, not less.

And that’s not going to come to us when we are told that the realities of the things we face–pay gaps, the motherhood tax, harassment, assault, violence, dismissal, diet culture, body shame, objectification, legislation made against and about our bodies, repeated interpersonal abuse and marginalization–aren’t serious, problematic or important enough for the men who claim to be united in recovery with us (while, might I add, segregating themselves OFTEN) to take seriously.

I’m a member of a recovery fellowship that isn’t AA, but since AA laid that foundation, I’m addressing it directly, I guess. Any if not all of my closest friends are members of AA. Some of them may cheer me on for saying this, and some might not. That’s okay. However, if anonymous recovery groups, and recovery as a whole, isn’t the same boys club that it says it “used” to be, I’m going to need some of the recovering men I see, know, and love, to start proving that. In fact, I demand it, because (gasp!) I take myself seriously. Out of nothing more than self-respect.

 

‘Callout culture’ isn’t necessarily ‘toxic,’ it just asks us to be uncomfortable

Have you ever messed up?

Let’s begin with a story. A few months ago, I was part of a HAES group on Facebook that centered fat bodies. I was SUPER excited about my new yoga wheel, which would make doing a bunch of different poses more accessible to me and my size 18-20 self.

I posted a picture of me in shoulder stand on my wheel with the caption of “my fat a** doing yoga” and honestly, I realize it was–not my finest moment as an ally.

There was a mixture of messages; people equally glad for me to be able to do yoga accessibly, something that is not often seen because yoga has been co-opted by thin white bodies that make an effort to push out and not represent fat folks.

But more quickly and more frequently, I got messages and comments from people larger than me, giving me critical feedback about why yoga wheels aren’t always accessible for people who live with butts even bigger than mine; or why seeing the word “fat a**” (which I now fully recognize as a slur that sometimes reminds people of being bullied) triggered them. It wasn’t necessarily mine to reclaim from the beginning. And in my post, and in all my excitement, I managed to center myself while marginalizing other folks.

 

Your missteps and mistakes aren’t about you

No one was saying my body was not or is not important–but I failed to note that my body, despite its not-thinness, queerness, and not fully-ableness, is the most represented one in the “body positive” and even in the fat positive community. I failed to see that even if and when you are a fat person, you can still benefit from thin privilege without being thin. You can still be affirmed as a “good fat” by the society we live in; the very same one that preaches that thin is healthy, thin is virtuous and good, thin is best. Because smaller fat people are closer to being thin than people who are, say, “infinifat”; and they are given more social currency because they “fit.” And I don’t mean to say “they,” like I’m not one of them. I am.

Neglecting to put a TW or a CW (trigger or content warning) stirred up a lot of feelings for a lot of people–put me in contact with the moderators–and left me feeling defensive. I did not want to have to mark and label my own body as “triggering”, especially after fighting with it for almost two decades through binge eating, restricting, dieting and exercise abuse. 

I fought and fought and fought with people for my own worth and validity–had over 400 comments directed at me, my message, and some even at my body. These were hurtful and painful and did a really, REALLY huge number on my mental health for a few weeks. I had to grapple with the fact that I had hurt people, no matter how unintentionally, and not try to level the playing field with hurting them again even if they were hurting me back.

Comments like “someone the size of one of my legs pretending they have the same experiences as me is laughable” — objectifying me and sticking into my head over and over again, awakening my eating disorder for the first time in what would have been months.

Then came the supporters, who I didn’t ask for–less nuanced in the social justice aspect of fat politics–who would post and then dip out of the group in ‘solidarity’ with me; and I began to feel like these people were giving me a representation that wasn’t true to who I am. They were supportive, and well-meaning; but misguided in some areas of this language and this work. This is where it got even more stressful.

The “all lives matter” rhetoric coming from those who share equal marginalization with me as a 2X/3X sized person was really disappointing–I didn’t and do not stand by it and it was uncomfortable that it even went to that space.

I had to shut it off for a while after so many conversations with the moderators about reparations, my errors, and my own feelings of being disrespected. I was SO uncomfortable and scared and wounded — and sitting in my own place of reference waiting for someone to patch me up and dust me off and tell me I was 100% right and demanding emotional labor from others — something I have learned better than to do, honestly.

It would have been so easy to frame this in the narrative that ‘callout culture is toxic,’ but that waives my accountability and my need to center and repair my relationships with those who experience a lot more difficulty in their life from a psychosocial space than I do.

I am a tremendous believer in the idea that impact ALWAYS outweighs the intention of our actions. We can mean well, but if we harm people, we are ultimately responsible for that. I drafted an accountability post a few weeks after this happened, in an effort to repair the emotional viscerality of the situation, but my mental health and consulting with the admins kept me from posting it to the group.

 

This doesn’t necessarily accurately represent ALL bodies, but it is helpful in understanding where to put yourself–especially when understanding that there are bodies that experience varying degrees of size discrimination in accessibility, fashion, social situations, etc.

“Small fat” privilege definitely makes up a lot of the voiced experience in many of the movements that body positive or body neutral people have access to, and this itself is not ideal. I want to do my best to be a better ally and simultaneously voice my experiences as an “in-between fat” person (because the current “measure” doesn’t really describe me well), and hopefully somewhere along the way, others can identify with holding space for their in-betweenness–at the same time, I want to stand out of the way so that bodies that don’t look like mine can speak, move and do the work that they need to do to free themselves without sizeism, healthism, or fatphobia. Centering less normative voices is an action–one of many–that can counter the “white and slim thick is normal, nothing else” that goes on on the internet. Nobody is free until we all are. Education on how to do this is not owed to me, but I am absolutely willing and ready and eager to be told where to position myself in this process.

The amount of gratitude there is to express for dialogue; past, present, and future, is boundless. My deepest apologies for harm done and for all that I have neglected to do in this learning process.

That being said…

One thing that I refuse to do is to drown out the voices that hold me accountable with toxic positivity. In the past, I’ve justified and made excuses, but toxic positivity is something that seems to be replacing ‘callout culture’ and it isn’t for the better. I see this mostly among able-bodied, small fat, white, cis/heteronormative writers and influencers–and it’s far more toxic than ‘callout culture’ itself.

Toxic positivity is a term that comes from the mental health realm, in addressing stigma associated with mental illness. It looks like those well-meaning messages and words of good intention that come from people who don’t share your experience or have no idea what they’re talking about. They offer suggestions like “have you tried going outside”, tell you about how kale or pilates saved them from depression or start a lot of sentences with “should.” Know the type? The friends and family who are just trying to make you feel better about being anxious or depressed, but are really just adding to the stigma, incompetence, self-doubt, frustration or stress you feel if you experience symptoms of a mental illness.

Toxic Positivity in Accountability Culture is Similar

What I mean by “toxic positivity” when it comes to responding to your audience is responding to accurate, valid or critical thought and criticism/feedback with “you’re being negative,” or “positive vibes only!” and other such language. What this does is ultimately silence and dismiss the person who might be trying to help us learn and grow as an influencer and an ally. Toxic positivity demands only affirming or validating responses from those in its circle, and sometimes literally blocks out the rest and dismisses them as “haters.”

But our ‘haters’ can often teach us about what we need to do to be better, and they don’t owe it to us to be kind or gentle about it–especially if our actions are harmful to them. You might come out of a mistake a little (ego) bruised. But. you grow through what you go through. 

 

 

Being called out, confronted, or asked to pass the mic is uncomfortable and immediately launches people into the defensive–I know that from my own experiences of screwing up, and not just in the time I mentioned; it has often been uncomfortable for me. At the same time, it has also shaped me. This goes for my interactions about race (because I have a blind spot as a white person), gender identity (because I have a blind spot as a cis person), and disability (because I have a blind spot as an able-bodied person. It’s no one’s job to hold my hand and educate me, but it is my job once I have been told how a certain view, voice or amount of space I am taking up on other peoples’ behalf or at their expense is harmful to them–to educate myself and not demand anything from anybody until I know how to act right.

I have no reason to apologize for my body, but I do have to apologize and make right on it if I force people to hear what I think, see what triggers them, or listen to words that are harmful to them without their consent. I don’t just get to tell people to “stop following me” if something I do or say triggers them–because it’s my responsibility as a justice-oriented person, activist and feminist not to perpetuate the same messages that do harm to marginalized people whether they follow me or not. 

It is, first and foremost, a privilege to be able to say any of the above toxic positivity responses–because it means likely not having had to think about the person who’s experience one is responding to. That is the essence of privilege–not having to think about it. And calling folks out isn’t necessarily toxic–individuals who call out can become toxic when they start attacking others’ humanity and forgetting that there’s a person on the other end of the listening session, but the act of calling someone out for being less than mindful is, imo, perfectly acceptable in a world or in a learning community that prioritizes justice and representation. The only thing that will make that justice restorative is time, and a whole lot of listening. And that’s what these ‘conversations’ (which can sometimes look and sound and feel confrontational or tense) should look like–listening sessions, where the privileged listen and the marginalized speak about harm done and reparations to be made.

 

 

 

How Dichotomies are Ruining Your Life, Relationships and your Health (Part 1)

From a really early age, we are taught opposites as a way of categorizing things in our brain. Humans are conditioned to put things into filing systems based on what they are not, more often than what they are.

While this is a helpful skill for visual and spatial discrimination in our early development, it can turn into social discrimination and hardline rigidity in our adult lives.

The systems of binaries we create for the purpose of more convenient categorization don’t actually match up with the realities of our diverse world. There is more to us than just fat or thin, straight or gay, black or white.

An example that we struggle with as a society right now is the acceptance of non binary gender identities.

Even in the area of orientation (an identity entirely separate from gender), we are doing okay but could be better.  I struggled with my identity from the beginning of my adolescence until maybe the second year of college. I identified as bi to my friends and for all intents and purposes, to myself, but never really became fully comfortable or felt “in place” around guys.

When I came out at 19 to my mom, I told her I was a lesbian–but I knew it was more expansive than that. I have since opted for the term queer; an umbrella term that sits comfortably in the middle of non-hetero identity.

A lot of bi people experience bi-erasure; this notion that a person can’t be truly bi, but that either they are just needy and greedy or “not a real” gay/lesbian person.

And there are certain merits we give to people who cosmetically conform to the binary identities we have, even while they exist outside the margins with as little visibility as possible. Lesbian women can be lesbians on their own time, but must perform and exist as women (mostly by paying their dues to the male gaze) in the outside world. But often, fat people, trans people, and many others don’t have the same set of performance privileges (Vade & Solovay). The further into the margins you get, the less flexibility you have to be yourself; even behind closed doors.

This kind of dichotomizing happens both outside and within the queer community, and its a way of labeling that asserts a moral superiority that is just as socially constructed as the identities themselves.

It also does nothing to resolve the issue of breaking down the gender binary, and plays right into the harmful gendered stereotypes that non binary people find themselves having to apologetically aspire to in order to be perceived as “real” men/women. But guess what? Their very existence makes them “real”.

Binary thinking not only limits our relationships with each other, but also limits our realities, language surrounding those realities, others’ realities, and everyone’s understanding and empathy towards those realities. 

And even with the added factor of gender, food gets moralized even more deeply along with body image. (Cis) women are taught to aspire to thin bodies, and made to apologize for non-thin ones. At the same time, nobody seems to care what size trans women are because the binary tells us that they are and should remain invisible.

We can do our best to combat this by uplifting the voices of those who are non binary, fat, of color, differently abled, and who have different realities and experiences than those who are in set norm populations altogether.

For my recovery, one of the most dangerous dichotomies of all is the one that moralizes food. 

All food serves a purpose, and it doesn’t exist to be labeled “good” or “bad”. It exists to be enjoyed, to provide energy, to serve as a backdrop for social gatherings, and so much more.

 

It took me years to unlearn the patterns of thinking that told me that eating Oreos or skipping a day (or two or three) of working out made me a bad person. I did a lot of work to start seeing my body as my friend, and using food for whatever purpose it had in context. Sometimes, I eat cake because I want to. Sometimes I eat broccoli because I want to. Now that I don’t exist in binge cycles and eat with my brain in deprivation mode, I eat any and all foods that I enjoy because I want to. 

Lately I have also been battling with the idea that I am not allowed to feel full, that it’s bad to feel full, and that if I do start to feel full I must exercise to “get rid of it”. These are tried and true eating disordered thoughts that our culture has turned into normal patterns of behavior. 

It’s considered normal to avoid foods you like because they’re “too fattening”.

It’s considered normal to exercise so that you can “earn” dessert or even a meal.

It’s considered normal to be inundated by calories printed on the menu when you order out at restaurants (at least in New York).

It’s considered normal to want to aspire to not look like that fat girl you know.

View this post on Instagram

I am putting this type horseshit on blast. I am so triggered. This is one of the major problems I have with the fitness industry. This type of bullshit rhetoric is dangerous and unmotivating! This leads to self loathing. Imagine if we could celebrate loving the skin we are in as much as we criticize our bodies. Exercise because it feels good and stop this kind of bullshit talk! YOU CAN’T HEAL A BODY YOU HATE! Self love and self care is the only path to healing This shit is not about us! You are perfect as you are. Love is the way. Stop hating others #abolishhate #spreadlove

A post shared by Dianne Bondy (@diannebondyyogaofficial) on Jul 25, 2018 at 4:06am PDT

 

Thin has been considered normal for a long time, and statistically speaking we are getting new standards here in the good old United States. In this country, a size 14 woman is considered the average. But our attitudes haven’t caught up with us yet, because we still give an incredible amount of privilege, status, and deference to thin people. 

There are unspoken policies that pit fat people against the thin and create fatphobia and weight stigma, which cast fatness into a moral problem (Huff).

The same good/bad attitudes about foods are extended to bodies, depending on what bodies are consuming the “bad” food.

In order to be seen as trying, credible, valid, fat girls have to be eating salads at their desks alone at work–aspiring to be smaller.

If a fat girl eats a donut, it’s seen as an eternal “gotcha”–“that donut and all the other ones you probably eat are why you look like that!”

 

If a skinny girl eats a salad, she’s doing the right thing; participating in the maintenance of her thinness (which is like, more than 70% genetic, most likely, unless she has an eating disorder or a hyper-metabolic health issue).

If a skinny girl eats a donut, no one has a damn thing to say about the space she takes up, how that space is related to that donut and how it justifies hurling prejudice at her until she changes her habits.

Our need to categorize things in such rigid ways can turn into real time, unfiltered, and really-hard-to-unlearn-as-adults prejudice. Fat people bare the brunt of this in their everyday lives all the time. I learned this the hard way when I tried explaining HAES to my mom and she just completely told me that I was flat out wrong…

Even though there is empirically tested, scientific research that weight stigma is actually more of a pre-cursor to health issues than weight itself; and that causality and correlation are not the same thing when it comes to health conditions that have been considered to be caused by a person’s weight or fatness.

Our first step is to change our attitudes about split thinking before we can ever hope to change policies that affect the lives of LGBTQ+, fat, differently abled, or any other marginalized group. The “us” and “them” is what creates stigma, oppression, marginalization, and even policy that furthers the disparities among us.

Demi Lovato’s Invisible Illness

So I know I just wrote a really important post like…four days ago. But churning out stuff on this blog has become my default coping mechanism lately.

I have seen and taken in a lot of information today. This past weekend, I watched a documentary on the life of Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, who died of a heroin-induced heart attack at age 27. 

This morning, I was listening to his posthumously released spoken-word album An American Prayer, to the track “Curses, Invocations” — he ends the poem with the verse, “I will always be a word man…it’s better than a bird man.”

Words are healers for so many of us.

But I digress. This is all somewhat connected, I promise. I was walking through NYC this morning and afternoon, listening to people on the train, finding myself in resentments toward people I didn’t know, and frustrated at how rude people can be, especially on mass transit. Sweating, trying to get to an interview on time, and noticing people struggling and thinking about all the assumptions we make about others dawned on me a lot as I walked through Manhattan trying to find where I needed to be.

When I got home, my brother called me and told me to Google Demi Lovato’s name, and that she had been hospitalized for a heroin overdose just hours ago.

Like I said, I know it’s only hours-old news, and I was already in your feeds just days ago. But writing about this, news that shook me really hard, is the way I’m going to process it all right now. Bare with me, please. 

The first thing I did when I read the article about Demi’s overdose was text my friend Lexie to ask if she’d heard. A conversation ensued.

A while ago, we’d both shared our frustrations over a Twitter storm she was involved in about pulling a ‘prank’ on her bodyguard that involved being touched nonconsensually. 

I pretty much at that moment decided that Demi, in my eyes, was cancelled. I was really upset that a person who was such a fundamental part of my recovery would do something like that and shrug it off so thoughtlessly.

I didn’t take the time to think about the invisible struggles that people are often going through when they lack self-awareness the most. I judged a person who, in all honesty, I didn’t know and couldn’t have known was making errs in judgment like she did, probably because of shame.

And worse, I wanted her to feel shame because I’d like to think, that as someone who is deeply invested in justice and love and compassion, that anyone I chose as a role model would do better. But I realize as I am shaken by what is happening in her life, that she is human. A human who is sick and suffering, just like so many of us.

Most people know somewhat about Demi’s eating disorder relapse last year after breaking up with Wilmer Valderrama, and the recent release of her song “Sober”, in which she bravely admits to relapsing in the area of substance abuse, had a lot of people in her corner encouraging her to find recovery again.

Even in the recording of this song, it sounds nothing like Demi’s voice. I gave it a first listen today and the first thing I thought to myself was, she sounds so scared, so ashamed, and so broken. 

During this conversation with my friend, a fellow person in recovery from ED and other mental health issues, we both shared the possibility that maybe Demi hasn’t been truly okay for a long time. 

And that’s more than okay.

I don’t know Demi Lovato personally, but I would be kidding myself if I failed to admit that she has been an integral part of my recovery and my own resilience. Her strangely appropriative relationship with the LGBTQ+ community hasn’t always sat well with me, but she has also done something that a lot of people can’t or won’t–shown up for herself and for millions of others in the face of the darkest struggles a person can go through.

Demi Lovato embodies vulnerability and courage.

She has successfully been the representative of “its okay not to be okay” for a really long time. Even after her relapse was reported last year, that was the message that I think we all got–that it’s okay to falter and keep working on ourselves. There is so much power in being honest, but it’s imperative to always be following up on that with the people who need it. Because these attitudes and behaviors aren’t always visible to the entire world at all hours of the day. 

Some of us may not think the person doing best needs check-ups; but I can assure you, connection is the very thing that keeps recovery alive. 

Like Demi herself has said in the past: “Recovery doesn’t get a day off.”

None of us, despite whether we are one of the 65 million people who follow her on Twitter, knows Demi’s life day in and out. Since she has shown up as the face of recovery for this generation–a person who has seemingly overcome self harm, self hate, drug abuse, childhood trauma, bipolar disorder, alcoholism and an eating disorder–so many people have looked to her for inspiration and found it; myself included.

 

 

I remember seeing her at IZOD Center in 2014 and sobbing uncontrollably as she sat at the piano and sang “Warrior”. I cry every time I do a cover of the song myself, because so much of it is my truth. 

I, too, have had to recover from depression, crippling anxiety, abuse, codependency and an eating disorder simultaneously. I know that it often doesn’t happen all at once, and that the parts of your behaviors that aren’t “as severe” can seem like an okay thing to cling to because that’s the trade off your brain makes.

Once you are in recovery from one thing, your brain tries to sort the rest out, prioritizing your vices by which one will kill you last until they’re all no longer useful.

I liken it to playing something I call “symptomatic wack-a-mole,” because it can seem like just as you’ve got one symptom of your mental illness cared for and patched up, another one rears its ugly head.

And it’s not always as easy as “I’ve got this.” In fact, most people who can confidently say “I’ve got this” all by themselves, don’t really “got this.” Macklemore is a really good example–and one of my favorite recovery advocates to produce raw, unfiltered art on the realness of recovery.

 

At that concert four years ago, I had no way of knowing whether or not, at that exact moment, Demi was okay. Even Nick Jonas, who performed right beside her, has told media sources that sometimes he glances at her wrists when they see each other just to make sure she’s “okay.” Even then, that’s only a snapshot, a relative piece of wellbeing that makes up a recovering person’s ‘okay.’ Just like most of my family or friends and especially not strangers on the internet or even sitting around me at the concert that night had no way of knowing whether or not I was truly okay.

The best way to find out if someone is okay is to ask them. When you’re finished asking, listen. 

When you are held up and expected to represent an entire community of struggling, sometimes even broken people, self-care can be so hard. And the shame of falling from that image is even more tough to cope with. And when people depend on your success, your voice, and your triumphs to make a living, the burden only gets larger. And pretending, inauthenticity, and half-truthful recovery can only propel a person so far until those old vices start to get in line and fight for first. 

 

The one thing I was really floored by is that Demi is now (at least according to the reports) using opioids/heroin. A lot of people believe that heroin use is a dark, scary, last resort, unheard of ‘point of no return’ type of drug problem. But it’s way more common than we try to convince ourselves it is. I live on a literal island where the opioid epidemic is at its worst in our entire country. And it is grueling and scary and heartbreaking all the time.

As someone who shares a lot of struggles with Demi Lovato, I said to myself when I read this that she probably feels so powerless right now. Lexie pointed out that she felt that Demi still, to this day, despite recovery, probably feels this unstoppable desire to be perfect.

Being given the assignment of poster child for mental wellbeing is emotionally exhausting a lot of the time, and sometimes–I know from experience–this work can be counterproductive to our wellness in a lot of ways. Perfection was and likely still is the first thing I was addicted to. So many of us with eating disorders live this truth to its fullest extent.

 

I hope that with this instance of relapse, despite how public it is becoming, we can have conversations with each other about the invisibility of illnesses like addiction and mental health (which undoubtedly go hand in hand). Awareness is great, but often not enough. We must move from awareness into action.

We cannot treat brokenness, addiction, or shame without compassion and vulnerability. I have seen some really, really awful things in the comments of the articles I’ve surveyed about Demi’s overdose in the past few hours (Looking at you, TMZ). 

This may be an opportunity for Demi to get real and even more raw with her art. Thus far, her sobriety has been a public event, so much a part of her label-created image as an ex-Disney starlet. Her powerlessness as a celebrity, and as a celebrity in recovery, is so much bigger than herself, and the stakes are high. I think the pedestal on which she has been placed is holding her back more than anything, and I hope that she can find peace and freedom on her own terms as soon as possible.

Until then, it’s on us to let her heal, check in with ourselves and our loved ones as we cope with the realities of things like addiction and disease of the mind. Demi Lovato’s words, her image, her humility and her courage have all taught me first and foremost that no matter what we believe in, we must first believe in our own worthiness. 

Get better soon, Demi. Cheering for you. xoxox

-inbetweenqueen ❤

Revolutions Need Bodies/A Pride Guide for Everyone!!!

This post has been sitting in my drafts for the past few months, because I thought it would be super important to talk about the embodied practice of revolution.

What better time to do so than pride month?

I’ve been reflecting a lot on what I know about embodiment lately, and I feel like this perfectly goes with the idea of pride month and everything I feel about celebrating Pride as we do.

Micah Banzant

A little queer history: On June 28, 1969, Marsha P. Johnson threw a brick at a NYPD police officer at a bar that was frequented by many gay, lesbian, bi and trans folks. The Stonewall Inn was one of the only places in NYC where LGBTQ+ people were left alone to be themselves, as homosexuality was against the law in New York City at the time.

Mafia families controlled bars and paid police to stay away so that they could make a profit. They sold their bottom shelf liquor at top shelf prices, knowing that queer folks had nowhere else to go to socialize.

On June 28th, the NYPD raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.

The Stonewall Riots gave us NYC (and other nationwide celebrations) of “Pride”. 

But so many people forget this history.

 

 

The revolution that is PRIDE was built on the bodies of trans women of color, cis gay men, black lesbians, and continues to be built on fat peoples’ bodies, queer peoples’ bodies, and trans bodies, too. Some of these bodies share multiple marginalization. But the true shifts from tolerance to acceptance, from marginal to normalization, would not exist without them. Without us. 

It is because of Marsha and Silvia Rivera and so many other important and beautiful people that we have entered a new era of civil rights. And this revolution continues to build. As Marilyn Wann says in the foreword to the Fat Studies Reader: “If we cannot feel at home in our own skins, where else are we supposed to go?”

 

@transtastic (DeviantArt)

 

I experience it on a daily basis, in my relationship with my partner, and incidentally, in my relationship with myself and my body. To be queer is to act outside of normative structure. To be fat is to act outside of normative structure.

It’s worth acknowledging that with my marginalization, comes also my privilege. I am white, able bodied, a citizen, middle-class by birth, and these are things that not every queer or fat person shares with me.

We must not forget, during a month that is about equality, that there still are ways in which we are not all equal. 

 

Starting with Pride celebrations themselves.

As I stated in my history lesson earlier, Pride was born out of a mass resistance by LGBTQ people to no longer be policed and to resist the idea of only being able to socialize through active drug and alcohol culture.

Yet today, Pride itself often serves as a space for queer folks and their straight ally friends to get buzzed on the LIRR and go to Cubbyhole or Phoenix after the parade ends. This closes out the festivities to a lot of people in the LGBTQQIPPA+ community, those in recovery from substance abuse in particular.

It goes without saying, many people in the queer community become addicts in the first place because of homophobia, stigma, shame and self-hate; things that nobody deserves to feel, or should have to bury in an addiction.

Another reason I’ve come to reconsider pride as an “inclusive” space is the corporatization of the parade itself in the past couple of years. It’s become a space for banks and companies to give away rainbow stuff with their logo on it and pledge their support for one day of the year, while either implicitly or explicitly also reinforcing discriminatory hiring practices against queer and trans bodies.

Corporations made up 36% of San Diego Pride in 2016, while actual LGBTQ+ people only made up 26%. Many of the companies at pride festivals also exist in states where it’s legal to fire someone because of their orientation or gender identity. In other words, they’re proud to take your money, gay people, just don’t come out at work. 

The protest space itself is not disability accessible; for so many reasons. For folks with anxiety or autism, it can be extremely loud and overstimulating. For physically disabled folks, crowds aren’t known for being wheelchair friendly or generally accessible. Especially when the crowds are upwards of a few thousand people per city block.

And on an election year, expect candidates to be canvassing and shamelessly self-promoting.

And if you’re going to go to pride as a straight person, please be respectful of us. We are not your token gay friends, this day isn’t about how great an ally you are. Like, at all. 

IMPORTANT!!!! make sure you keep your hands to yourself. There is nothing more obnoxious than touching marchers or parade attendees without their consent, commodifying their identity. Don’t be Perez Hilton and go all “I can objectify women and harass them because *haha* I’m not attracted to them!”…just because you wouldn’t sleep with someone doesn’t make it funny that you’re potentially making them uncomfortable.

 

Elias Ericson

 

Let fat people be fat! I adore and love and cherish fat queer bodies. They belong there in that space as much as thin privileged folks do, and y’all best make room for them–no objectification, grumbling, rudeness, side eye, or marginalization or heckling allowed. Fat people exist and they are loved and they are welcome. And they’re not in queer relationships because they “couldn’t get a man/woman/other implied heteronormative relationship situation to love them”. Fatness isn’t a condition. But queer fat love is an act of liberation, and that’s what this entire month (and for some of us, every day life) is about.

In her essay “Fattening Queer History”, Elena Levy-Navarro defines her definition of “queer” outside of the spectrum of human sexuality and love, and into the realm of “other.” She discusses a queerness that “is ore expressly inclusive of all who challenge normatively, including fat people.” She argues the point that while the LGBTQ+ community struggles to be integrated and accepted in society, they may also perpetuate fatphobia in their communal spaces, which are supposed to be about love and justice. While researching pride flags for people to be aware of for this month, I came across a ‘fat fetish’ flag and I was appalled because this is exactly the problem. Fat bodies are squished into convenient narrative boxes, selectively assigned sexuality (based largely on “acceptable fatness” and the “pretty face” pejorative). But to the rest of the world, fat people, particularly fat queer people, are of otherwise no use, no worth, and no value in and across social contexts. And the LGBTQ+ community cannot continue to prop up this kind of commodification rhetoric–we must get rid of the in-house “othering” of bodies in our community as a whole.

Navarro argues for a “historical turn” in queer history, such that we reflect back on the past to look at the bodies of people involved in LGBTQ+ Liberation movements and honor them for their size, shape, assigned sex at birth, expression, gender identity, and the work that those bodies did to get us here.

Fat people experience the same kind of ignorance-based discrimination from the health care system, and are seen as “undesirables” lacking in reproductive ability (as many people view LGBTQ folks), thus rendered unimportant to the medical community. Western medicine hyper focuses on creating a “before” and “after” picture of a fat body, as if there is something assimilationist that is required to be accepted as a fat person, as is the case as a queer person.

This is, after all, the month when we hear slogans like “love is love” and the heterohistorical contextualizers of our society give a lot of effort and lip service to orienting queer people into a space that is heteronormative, using heteronormativity as the reference point. These attitudes and behaviors are the same ones that ask the question, “So which one of you is the _____?” (insert binary gender here), which completely misses the point that queer relationships are intentionally made up of differently gendered individuals. 

These revolutions need ALL bodies to be there. LGBTQQIPPA people are worthy of respect and if you aren’t a member of our community, remember that we are inviting you into our home, and trying to mitigate the injustice that has been done unto our bodies. 

 

 

Marriage equality and pride parades are great but they are still such small steps. Basic dignity, representation, and a movement away from only the “acceptable” queer relationships being visible (i.e. trans relationships, trans representation, fat queer/trans relationships), comprehensive inclusive healthcare, job security, and legal personhood recognition are only just some of the things we still need.

Right now, the basic essence of what it is to be trans is still listed as a disorder in the DSM, the same way that fat phobia is still seen as best practice in medicine. If we want to be liberated, we have to recognize all of these things simultaneously, and combat them simultaneously–and it takes more than a parade and a month of recognition to do just that.

For some of us, pride month is still inaccessible because it’s not safe to be out to our families or our work spaces. This prevents people from living congruent lives, being the same person in all spaces and at all times, and thus, from living with complete integrity. When we are forced to live a dishonest life, one mired in shame, our bodies break down. And these revolutions in social, societal and global change desperately need our bodies to be there, to show up, and to represent everyone.

Nobody should be expected to live from the neck up; only acknowledging their thoughts as a function of what makes them different. Our bodies are the center of how we live, what we do, who we are, and they deserve to be given space and acknowledged and loved. Our bodies should be seen, celebrated, and acknowledged for how they are gloriously, beautifully different!

Happy pride!

PS watch this music video it is everything 

Big Bodies are NOT a Big Problem

…But thin privilege is.

Why are we talking about this? 

I was recently at an eating disorder support group where I expressed ‘fat’ as a term that resonates as part of my identity. It has been paramount to my recovery in recent months, especially with all the noticeable changes/stretching my body has done since last summer.

I was told that my use of the word ‘fat’ (even though I was using it in a manner that is strictly self-referencing, not as a slur or to denigrate anyone) is “triggering, negative or may be harmful.” 

“Fat” has the connotation of being morally equivalent to bad, undisciplined, lazy, out of control, and so many other harmful narratives that I have experienced in my own lifetime. It is a catch-22 of “I’m not fat yet, but I could be, and that would be terrible” (for thin-bodied people) and “I’m already fat, so therefore I’m worthless, undeserving, lesser than”. It has always been as if fat was the worst thing that could or would ever happen to me. 

Fatness is viewed as nothing to aspire to, celebrate, or be okay with, much less reclaim. It is not thought possible that people in larger bodies could have eating disorders, and if we do, it’s because we have absolutely no willpower.

These notions remind me of one of my favorite poems, “When the Fat Girl Gets Skinny” by Blythe Baird. She says:

“When you have an eating disorder and you are thin to begin with, you go to the hospital. When you have an eating disorder and you are not thin to begin with, you are a success story.” 

 

How else would fat people suddenly “look great” and lose a whole bunch of weight? There is no magic to the behind-the-scenes obsessive weighing, restriction, working out to the point of injury or bodily stress and exhaustion. When people lose weight rapidly, it’s probably because they’re sick. Eating disorders are a valid, but often overlooked, form of ‘sick.’

 

Fat people are often associated/stereotyped with binge eating disorder, when the truth is that many fat people have used dietary restriction (myself included) as an eating disordered behavior. There is also evidence that dietary restriction is actually directly correlated to fatness, or higher set-point weight. In other words: the more you “diet”, the larger your body will be over time; because you are increasing your body’s threshold for fat preservation by frequently forcing it into deprivation/survival mode. 

The reality of the matter is that when someone in a thin body is discovered to be eating disordered, treatment is the first thought of those around them. When someone in a larger body is noticeably engaging in ED behaviors, the first thought is “Just lose some weight!”

Actual “suggestions” from people who noticed me bingeing, but didn’t acknowledge it was bingeing/that there might be an issue to further explore than just my “lack of discipline”:

• “Take human bites!”
• “Haven’t you had enough?”
• “Save some for everyone else.”
• Do you want to go to _(insert exercise plan the speaker claims to swear by)_ with me?”
• “If you want to lose weight, you need to portion control.” (I did not want to lose weight, nor did I indicate that I did)

Fat people get unsolicited advice in the interest of their “health” all the time; but no one ever stops to think about the effect that this has on their mental health. It takes away from the things that fat people can and are doing like getting up every day and taking care of themselves, going to school, finding cures for really crazy diseases, teaching someone else’s children, or volunteering to help bring food security to low-income families. We are not seen for what we are, for who we are, all because physically, we are “kind of hard to miss.” So why are our other attributes so easy to dismiss?

 

The answer is simple: there is a blatant prejudice that exists against larger bodied people thanks to the media, the medical industry, the diet industry (which, by the way, grosses $60B annually). We are not given a solution other than an unending list of “If you would just”s. 

We are instructed to aspire to thinness or “normal” weight, and used as an example of what not to become. We are invisible because the society at large is afraid that if people see us, they will think that (gasp!) you can be happy while you are also not thin. Thin people fear us because they desperately do not want to look like we do.

 

 

But wouldn’t that be glorifying obesity? Ah. No. I am not walking around telling everyone they NEED to be fat, they need to live in a larger body, that they MUST subject themselves to the everyday size discrimination and ridicule and invalidation that fat folks experience!

If anything, our society is doing the opposite; going to any lengths to glorify thinness–thin people are visible everywhere, and “fight the fat” ads troll local strip malls with exercise studios where I live in the suburbs. There’s a very strategic, discriminatory reason that there are advertisements for Weight Watchers, South Beach, YourWeigh, Nutrisystem and a gazillion other corporate diet garbage being projected into our consciousness. This is not the same as fat people asking for representation of their reality; the presence of fat people doesn’t immediately suggest that they are “pushing their lifestyle on the world.” They are simply asking to be seen and heard without being asked to change anything about themselves. Diet culture doesn’t ask–it demands–that we change everything about ourselves. I live in a society that tells big girls that the only way to exist is to be small–and eternally is reminding us that we aren’t doing it right.

There is no natural way for a fat person to keep up with “normal” weight standards without dietary restriction, invasive/ineffective surgery, or laxative abuse; shouldn’t that tell us that maybe the answer is to altogether stop trying to manipulate our weight? 

 

 

To tell someone who lives in, identified with, and accepts their larger body in an eating disordered community that they cannot refer to themselves as fat takes away their identity, cuts off access to their own reality and renders it a ‘problem.’ It is nearly as harmful as “You’re not fat, you’re beautiful!”…as if they cannot be both all at once. Fat is not a bad word, it is not a blemish or a curse. It is just as much a part of me as being white, female, queer, or a teacher or a graduate student.

But to dismiss it altogether privileges recovery of thin-bodied people in a way that says they deserve compassion while suggesting that fat people aren’t “really” eating disordered. It keeps the word “fat” in negative terms, further other-ing fat people in the eating disordered community specifically. Taking other peoples’ fatness away from them minimizes their experiences, and perpetuates the fear mongering around a larger state of existence that our society can no longer afford. 

It also doesn’t take into account that maybe a person’s large body and acceptance of the fact of their body can be a way of liberating themselves from their eating disorder–their decision to not engage in behaviors like obsessive weighing, portion measurements down to the gram–and just acknowledge that their weight will fluctuate the way it needs to based on stress levels, water intake, hormone reactions, and other body chemistry related factors. 

I took back the word fat as a self-referencing term because as was said by Audre Lorde: “Nothing which I know about myself can be used against me to diminish me.” For a lot of my life, in school and at home in my basement where I used to work out for hours, in the pages of the journals I used to tally up the amount of calories I burned just standing, I was preoccupied with never letting fat “happen” to me. Even when it was hurled at me in the hallways of my middle school or brought to my attention by a teacher, I internalized my otherness to mean something dysfunctional about me.

Now, it is a reality that I have come face to face with and not only just accepted but made complete and total peace with. It makes getting through brain-induced dysmorphia days a lot easier. It makes freedom a lot easier. Freedom from the venom of the word “fat” has been my entry into freedom from fear; and I’m never going to stop saying it. 

 

 

A lot of folks are triggered by the word ‘fat’ for a lot of different reasons. Maybe it was used to invoke violence on their psyche on the playground growing up. Maybe it was a value that permeated the walls of their household before, after and during meals. Maybe it’s the thing that people aspire never to become.

And I encourage those who resonate with the latter to understand that this fear of fat is rooted in nothing more than fat phobia. Maybe you didn’t intend for that to happen. You probably didn’t. Society sucks, like I’ve already mentioned–it sucks for thin people and fat people and people of color and trans people and LGBTQ+ people and disabled people and indigenous people and all marginalized people. But if ‘fat’ invokes fear in you, it’s time to fight back against the current that perpetuates this myth that fat means something bad.

Because if fat phobia continues to exist in spaces where people are trying to heal, recovery becomes less accessible to all of us. 

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I’m walking in this year’s NEDA Walk on Long Island! Please donate! Any little bit helps in the fight for eating disorder recovery. Love & Light ❤

 

Super Binge Sunday

Great American foodball day came and went.

Not gonna lie, I spent most of today sleeping off a really gross sinus headache and playing with my girlfriend’s aunt’s eight cats (yesssssssss)

Also not gonna lie, I was really apprehensive for the Super Bowl party we were going to go to and how much food was going to be coming with us.

Heroes, chili, baked ziti, dessert food, chips, beer–all things that a few years ago, I would have been interested in bingeing with.

But today I can make different choices, and just altogether not be interested in the feeling that comes with binge behavior.

Part of me was really glad to be somewhat under the weather and not particularly hungry, but habits don’t die out simply because desire does not accompany them. 

This day around food was harder than thanksgiving or christmas were last year. I felt a small sense of “I’m not going to be able to do this” that wasn’t present on either holiday this past year. My meals this weekend were sort of erratic and I wasn’t feeling “like myself” much.

I haven’t celebrated the Super Bowl in a few years because I just don’t have much time to devote to watching football. I have only really been into it when there are things to be said about the “take a knee” stuff that goes on with players, beginning with Colin Kaepernick. I’m kind of grateful to not have celebrated it much since my recovery began, because another food-focused holiday is one I’d rather avoid than embrace. 

I’ve also taken to avoiding football and the NFL as an organization since Colin Kaepernick was denied a contract for standing up for racial injustice in America. It’s a thing I’ve said a lot about and continue to defend. Dissent is American.

Compulsory patriotism isn’t. And I’m happy for the Eagles, because as a team they stand by actions that act in solidarity with movements like Take a Knee that help start conversations–not about a flag, or our troops, or respect, but about the problem of brutality and racial inequity in our country that still exists. 

What’s football and injustice got to do with recovery? Doesn’t seem like a lot, I know.

But the messages we receive–messages that are paid for and burned into our consciousness–whether by companies, the Department of Defense, the media, or other sources; contribute to how we function in our bodies, how we feel about ourselves, and how we act and interact with those feelings and other people.

In a world of “buy this,” “eat this, but buy this to make it look like you don’t eat at all,” and “stand up for something but not like that“, it’s so important to take our power back. Sometimes that may mean disengaging, finding new messages, and loving ourselves enough not to rely on tricky ads, media weight bias, and racist stereotypes to tell us what to do with our own bodies. Sometimes, those sh*tty messages may even only exist in our own brain, with ourselves or our immediate surroundings as their source. Cut that ish out!!!!!!!

Like I learned today when I didn’t binge, there is always room to take our power back. Nobody creates that space for us. We have to elbow our way in and take up space (literally and figuratively) on our own.

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

-Assata Shakur

Healthing while Fat 😎

• Food shopping & stuff (alone!)
• Finishing the recovery guide
• Becoming my own recovery guide (and you can, too!)

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Another Sunday installment of the in-between queen blog. How’s everybody’s week going? 

I have a meeting with my doctor tonight to discuss my moods, health and how things have been going since I made a few adjustments last time we saw each other. I called my therapist for the first time in close to two months this past weekend. I’m in a relationship now (!!!) I am a week into my second-to-last semester of graduate school and (surprisingly) not behind on my reading or my assignments (yet!)

It feels like all my health behaviors are falling into line, after spending the past year or so layering them on top of one another one at a time.

It’s really unusual to feel this good, especially with a baseline of depression/low affect that has lasted for the past, I don’t know, forever, but I’m actually really enjoying feeling leveled out at contentment. 

I finished reading Kathryn Hansen’s Brain Over Binge Recovery Guide, which I am going to recommend to everyone I know, eating disordered or not.

I learned so much about factors affecting eating disordered behaviors like bingeing, nutrition, how the brain responds to deprivation; and I was able to make neurological and psychological sense of some of the things I used to do to maintain my idea of perfection as I saw it.

Being taught all this new stuff about health and wellness from a weight neutral perspective has made me realize just how much I have no desire to lose weight or maintain it, especially not as a measure of ‘health’.

Health and weight are not conclusively a cause of each other, and there is more to being healthy than appearing healthy or being thin. 

So many doctors don’t take into account that physical health and mental health deserve the same amount of attention and priority.

Even though I’ve “relapsed” in my recovery since it started two years ago, I have also discovered a layered approach to my behaviors that has worked for me to get me to this place.

There was a point at which I wasn’t exercising at all until I could do it without using it to purge or compensate; there was a point at which I only focused on my mental health, and surrounded myself with weight neutral, body positive, fat accepting social messages; now I’m taking care of what nutrition means and layering on intuitive eating; I have been really interested lately in nutrient density and the quality of foods, since I feel confident about my mastery of quantity as someone with binge eating disorder history.

Some people are really invested in diet culture, and I admit that it’s taken me a lot of work to divest from it, too.

But the idea that a fat person’s objective in life should be losing weight as a penultimate measure of health actually reinforces the weight stigma and marginalization that causes eating disorders, whether a person lives in a fat or a thin body.

I was involved in a good ol’ Facebook argument about the character of Kate (Chrissy Metz) from This is Us, and how they do a great job of pushing the “funny fat girl” trope onto American viewers for the gazillionth time and how Kate’s narrative of constant body insecurity (which she clearly *eyeroll* deserves because she’s fat) is a tired one for fat people to consume.

Some of my biggest takeaways from the Brain Over Binge Recovery Guide were:

• losing weight isn’t the only way to be healthy
• most binge behaviors are born out of habit, not out of some underlying emotional issue
• not all calories are created equal
• factors affecting weight are not only limited to food: our body type is a result of a perfect storm of genetics, social influence, environment, stress, proper sleep, and movement.
• diet culture is gross and like, a huge liar (2400 calories, not 2000!)

I personalized my recovery plan based on two really simple components. It was a nice break from all the sometimes overcomplicating jargon of recovery that can sometimes even get in the way of our recovery. I know that that’s been true for me; the more I overthink it, the more it has persisted.

Yesterday after a walk in the woods, I went food shopping at two different stores with one mission: look for foods that are dense in nutrients and that I know taste good. I was afraid because I was going grocery shopping hungry, which is something that can be dangerous especially for bingers.

Luckily, I walked in and there was a free sample lady (bless her heart) who offered me three different types of chia granola bars, and I ended up buying six and she “namaste’d” me on my way to the peanut butter aisle.

I continued my journey and realized that my opportunities for wholesome and good nutrition were endless! This was especially true because I was in Whole Foods. I got a few packets of Justin’s, and I now swear by their version of Nutella.

I picked up some zucchini noodles, spinach, pesto sauce, sweet potato chips, and decided to even treat myself to some almond soap. I’m so excited to prep this week!

The result: today, I made myself some spaghetti and pesto, and finished off my lunch with a spinach-grapefruit-apple juice that I blended in my kitchen. This food experimentation is such a huge thing for me; another piece of my freedom being expressed.

My mom, though I think she was just trying to keep me from making a mess of her kitchen, actually helped me press some garlic and sauté the veggies I had for lunch.

She was teaching me little things about how to cook, and I enjoyed learning from her and having her throw suggestions at me while I made my food (I added more olive oil, some extra garlic, and even some cherry tomatoes and it came out DELISH!)

I’ve become really interested in mood-food pairing, (Check out the Self-Healing cookbook!) or cooking/eating to produce a result or respond to the emotions or sensations my brain and body call for. Because sometimes chocolate and other foods we assign “bad” moral value to are called for, necessary, and we just want to eat them!

I’ve been eating bananas close to bed time, as they aid in melatonin production; and as a way of rewiring my habit for refined sugar foods before bed, which often impedes my sleep (as if my brain doesn’t already do that on its own!) Helping my body do its job by feeding it the right materials to do well.

Taking the Trash (Talk) Out

• Overcoming abusive comments
• the last of the holidays
• settling into my fatgirl body

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It’s been a really weird, rough week.

Family is constantly on the lookout for suggestions about my body shape, intentional comments that they can make (usually grounded in fat shaming) that are meant to “motivate” me, unsolicited exercise advice, and acting out my past behaviors in front of me. 

It isn’t really a secret that since I’ve started recovering, I have experienced weight gain. Last year in OA, I lost a bunch of weight because I was basically dieting. It became unsustainable, restrictive and unhealthy. I started exercising again out of obligation, all joy and free will for movement removed. I had to set boundaries for myself about what recovery really meant, take a break from exercise altogether for a while until I could develop a healthy relationship to moving, and as a result, wasn’t doing the whole energy in-energy out balance thing.

Since I’ve stopped dieting I’ve stepped into a fat body. And it’s not always going to be true that people welcome changes about you, even if you’re okay with them. When I change, people around me either change as well or try really hard not to let me change because they’re uncomfortable with what that means about their own knowledge and their own actions. Right now no matter how many boundaries I establish or conversations I attempt to shut down or just walk away from, this keeps happening.

Some examples from this week alone:

1. “You’re not getting rid of these pants, you’re like five pounds away from probably fitting into them again if you just would try to lose weight.”

 

2. (Because I wanted another piece of chicken after not eating since 11 am)

“That’s called gluttony, its one of the seven deadly sins!”

(because suddenly my brother actually cared about something his Catholic school education taught him)

 

3. “You should do Orange Theory with me…they push you really hard and there are other people around to motivate you…

*turns volume down until silence ensues*

Me: “Yeah, I’m not interested. I do power yoga and it helps with strength anyway.”

“Yeah, I know, you don’t like pushing yourself when it comes to working out.”

These seem like totally innocuous comments to someone who isn’t constantly aware of the fact that they live in a world where their body is constantly told it isn’t good enough. They seem helpful or well meaning but are actually invalidating, triggering and don’t leave my consciousness for days after they’re said to me. But since I was twelve years old I’ve been in pursuit of modifying my body to be smaller because its always been reinforced that that is what ‘health’ is. And for so many other reasons that are larger and even more problematic than a very narrow view of health or wellness.

Since I’ve given up on that pursuit, it’s made a lot of people, my family in particular, really uncomfortable and hostile toward how I am choosing to recover and get better.

Recovery does not mean thinness. Intuitive eating does NOT result in weight loss. I have accepted this. Recovery from binge eating disorder is my pursuit of happiness. I love this body that I’m in, and I spend so much unnecessary time fighting these messages that make no sense to me.

Not exercising until I can figure out how I like to move my body is better than needing to burn more than 2,000 calories a day. Eating when I’m hungry and stopping when I’m full is better than eating nothing or bingeing, even though I’m in touch with my body and other people around me want to tell me I’m overeating. I listen to my body and listen to these messages at the same time I’m trying to fight with ED messages too. It’s like playing a really awesome song and having someone scream over it while you’re trying to enjoy the music.

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How do I silence these microaggressions?

I call these comments micro aggressions not to be dramatic, but because that’s what they are. They are meant to be subtle, dismissive, degrading and from a place of prejudice and bias all at once.

They are meant to silence me, correct my “bad” and “unhealthy” behavior, insinuate that I am “letting myself go” or “not trying”, not taking the work I do to maintain mental health into account. Microaggressions against people of size completely undercut the work we do to combat stigma about our own bodies and somehow also maintain our mental health while we face these constant barrages of societal and interpersonal disrespect.

We are told that we are not good enough and that we are too much at the same time. Sh*t’s confusing.

 

DJ Khaled once said in his amazingly profound snapchat story: “If you have trash in your life, take it out.” I wrote this quote down when it was said almost two years ago and remembered it today.

I’ve decided to take the trash talk out. 

I went on an hour long walk tonight and listened to the latest episode of the Food Psych podcast (linked earlier in the post and again here), as well as the Brain Over Binge podcast. I stretched and did some calf raises and stuff along the way, because I was having a lot of back pain from all the standing I do throughout the course of the day.

When I don’t move (like walking and yoga) for a while, my back and hips tend to get really tight so I had to make a few stops. But I got to hear some things that I really needed after the past week.

I reflected today on how anxious I actually am for the holidays. I get to see a lot of family members who aren’t a regular part of my life, and it brings up a lot of feelings and a lot of personalities into one space.

It’s usually emotionally overwhelming, but I’m trying to brace myself as much as possible and pray on it. It’ll all be over in five days, I keep telling myself. But five days can feel like forever when you have family + problematic food behaviors + problematic food talk all in the same area. 

To self care, I took myself out to dinner tonight and have been spending a lot more time out of my house. It felt really good to just sit and eat a burrito and some chips (yay Moe’s!) by myself.

It made me feel guilty at first to be avoiding people I love, but I need it in order to be mentally healthy and I have to learn that distance and space from unhealthy words and thoughts and behaviors are okay, no matter who is perpetuating them, or how much you love them. It is okay to walk away from behaviors that are not acceptable to you.

I also reflected today on a bunch of selfies I took last night before going out to dinner with my grad school friends. I looked really good, almost overdressed, on purpose, to combat all the language that’s been thrown at me and been bouncing around in my head all week. I talked myself down from feeling like I couldn’t go because I knew some of my trigger foods would be there. I tried to reclaim my ideas about myself and was really happy with the way I looked. And even in a selfie that was mostly face, I could see some of my new fatgirl features and I love them so much. I’m a little rounder in the chin, dimpled in the cheeks. And I love it! 

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bc_Lpf2ntfzxIhtfg_KpRwcC_EwYuZdmK05_2k0/?taken-by=theinbetweenqueen

This body is capable of so much, and I say that all the time. It’s healthy and flexible and a whole bunch of other cool things. But I realize now too, what it means to be flexible and even to be okay. I’m settling into my fatgirl body, and who knows? I may not be shaped like this forever, but I also might. What matters is that I am entitled to love it despite what I’m told or what I’m sold. 

The good, the bad, the beautiful

What. A. Week.

Good things, and bad things and weird things and so many things!!!!! (warning: this post is probably erratic as heck but it’s representative of my emotions so buckle up, babes!)

I hit a depression this past week and a half that kept me in a really uncertain head space. Despite my anxiety, I’ve been working really hard at body love. I feel almost like I HULK smashed!!!!! my way out of an episode. Or maybe I’m swinging back into just being really excited or maybe I’m just happy to be un-sad. Emotion is weird and human. I am weird and human (most of the time).

This weekend was the delivery back into a lot of positive behaviors, and a full week without any negative or disordered ones! It still feels really weird to say that I have a week back from consistent, persistent bingeing–but I’ve learned that it’s less about the day count and more about making the days count. 

A few months ago, I bought myself a single VIP ticket to see/meet & greet with Mary Lambert, the queen of everything/my favorite human of all time/the most beautiful fat queer babe to ever enter our plane of existence.

I was really apprehensive about going because I wasn’t sure what the food/drink situation was going to be, I was going completely alone, would have to ride the train to Manhattan alone, take the subway alone. I knew I would make friends at the show, because that’s just how Mary Lambert shows are–we cry together, we queer together, we sing together, we check each other’s lipstick that was drawn on in the reflection of a produce truck together. 

When I walked up to Mary and met her for the third time since this fandom began, I didn’t know what to say (as usual). I showed her my “Body Love” tattoo that she signed for me three years ago, and how it’s been stretched over and out and modified to include her autograph — an addition I made in 2015 after the last show I met her at.

I let her know just how much that specific poem changed my life, how much I needed it then when I lived in that body, and how much I didn’t even know I needed it now in my post-relapse, undeniably fat body. She let me talk at her, while saving her voice, I gave her a letter and a zine I made and we took pictures!!!!

The rest of the night was magic. Rachel McKibbens, one of my new favorite poets, read some pieces from her new book. I fell in love with Mal Blum, and I told them so via a really obvious Instagram post. I screamed internally at their codependency poem because I related SO HARD.

I laughed out loud. Seriously. Check them out. They are a babe (Everybody is a Babe Tour is such a fitting name for any tour Mal Blum and Mary Lambert are ever on, esp. together).

Of course I cried when Mary came on stage, and cried harder when she played “Body Love”, and when she shook her butt at me while I sat first row and she played “Secrets”. I learned about loving myself again. I learned about what my identity means to me, and what my body and my life and my health and wellness are worth. I learned that I am not done taking up space, but that I am done apologizing for it.

We have a hug picture, but both of us look awesome in this one and we look matchy so 

I also sat there in a room full of queer women and nonbinary people, fat and thin and in-between, and just felt so at home again. I have been restless in my identity for a while, viscerally, spiritually, intimately and personally. But my existence is radical and fluid and I’m so okay and safe and valid in spaces like this, so much so that I really believe that on Friday night I was brought back to life.

There was so much I needed about this concert, and I made it a point to be so present even though I was scared and alone and speed-ate a Moe’s burrito while walking three blocks to the venue off the subway.

 

And last night, I did two things that scare me–I hosted an event for International Suicide Survivor Day. I was the person who introduced all the speakers, listed statistics about mental health, and supported a space in which people could honor and memorialize lost loved ones and learn about how mental illness becomes fatal.

 

Me being a very official event host

We had so many intersectional experiences surrounding the issue of suicide come together to create a narrative with undertones of hope and resilience that I was so blessed to be a part of. THEN, as if I couldn’t be anymore out of my comfort zone, I sang! in! front! of! people! and! actually! sounded! amazing! 

After the event and all the crazy goodness that was my weekend, I topped it off with a catch-up diner trip with one of my best friends and favorite people in the entire world (like definitely as important but probably more important than Mary Lambert kind of favorite). My friend Kait showed up for me at this event, spoke her heart out, and got onion rings with me all on her one year anniversary in recovery. 

 

I love you soooooo stupid much

 

Being around women like Kait, who have struggled with disordered eating and so many more burdens of self-destruction in this life, is what anchors my soul. We shared a meal together and talked about treatment, struggle, body size perception, and our process.  She is my voice of reason, the person who holds up a huge mirror to all my experiences and just an overall unbelievably beautiful friend and person. I told her then and I’ll tell her now, right here, in this post–I am so proud of her and so beyond honored to call her my friend. 

We also incidentally spent today together, at a group I run, being the only two who showed up, and we made anxiety crafts while we talked more stuff out. It was something I didn’t know I needed. I also explored my fear foods today–a sugary drink, a really thick slice of pizza. And I didn’t freak out! I have been really hanging out in this fat body and paying attention to it. I let it experience hunger without deprivation, satisfaction without discomfort, and love without shame. 

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