Talking Bodies as Our Bodies Are Threatened
“Remember that loving this body of yours is not a prerequisite for attending to its needs. Care for it. Water it. Nourish it. Satisfy it. Reward it. Give it sunshine. Let it grow. Feed it when you are hungry and partake without guilt. Eating is not shameful. Do not add to the starvation. Do not add to the starvation. Fill your belly. You are allowed to satiate every bit of your hunger, no matter how much space your body occupies. You deserve sustenance, as all living things do, and you deserve to live.” --Sherronda Brown (in their essay Fat People Deserve to Glorify Our Bodies, on the now nonexistent Wear Your Voice magazine)
hello! warning! if you’re not tryna read stuff from me about Bodies and Socialization of Bodies, I feel that! If you’d like to listen to me say it instead you can do so here omg s/o to Maria M. for the idea of making this more accessible !! If you instead/additionally want to watch a quick YT video from my amazing fat lil sis about Unlearning Fatphobia I highly suggest!
This shit is complex. I wouldn’t speak on it if I hadn’t spent my life diligently listening, invested in the politics of our bodies. Fat-shaming and ableism come hand in hand. Racism and misogyny are intertwined with them. Food justice and classism, too. Throw in global agricultural trading policies, USDA/FDA guidelines, Big Pharma, medical racism, Hollywood, and the multi-billion-dollar dieting industry, of course. It’s impossible to avoid getting caught in the crosshairs of commodification. Just the fact that body “trends” exist at all makes no sense, until you accept that explicit action is taken to make each and every one of us feel bad in our bodies. Nobody is exempt, or else we wouldn’t be valuable. Insecurities give us value within ~ the market ~ and provide basis for discrimination.
Scorpio mercury retrograde has my virgo mercury ass thinking about the power of Language. These constructs of being “self-pitying,” “self-victimizing,” or “begging” for anything in the face of structural oppression. That’s...impossible? Acknowledging how you’ve been harmed by a system outside of your control is majorly grounding, if not empowering. Speaking to it OUT LOUD to others who share your conditions can lead to affirmation, validation, and community building. It’s difficult as hell to do so with people who don’t, but doing so clears out the haters who prefer you stay silent and ~grinding~ for crumbs and surface-level acceptance.
Hiding from the ways you’re systemically set up to be fucked over doesn’t make them go away. Shouting about it at people who don’t understand makes it so they can’t hide from it too. Social pressure to preserve a “dignified” affect until whatever systems of domination used against you burns you all the way out is a scam. And not true dignity. If you’re being subjected to fatphobic rhetoric or actions, please do talk about it. Point it out. You don’t have to deal with it alone, and the people perpetuating it around you need to CHANGE. You don’t need to continue allowing it in your relationships. And EVERYONE needs to CALL THIS SHIT OUT. I cannot (excuse me, absolutely can) believe how comfortable fatphobic people are with spewing their hate around me, and I am quick to shut that shit down and do the work of educating from my specific experiential lens of The Thin (hence this note, hehe). I’d never be at this place of loving my self and body, if I hadn’t shut up and listened to people who have to contend with fatphobia. Unlearning it has been a process of TRU enlightenment, and I have FAT people to thank for that. For some public voices check out Da’Shaun Harrison’s book Belly of the Beast and/or Sonalee (@thefatsextherapist).
My body is no one else’s to comment on or have opinions about, despite it’s visibility, despite the ocean of comments and opinions offered up over the years. To be hypervisible, invisible, a Black woman, a model, a writer, a leo, in isolation. To love my body and to worry for it. To love my body and to know how it can make people feel about their own. To love my body as it vomits, as it shakes, as it’s hospitalized, just as much as when it climbs and heals and dances. To nourish and protect it how I see fit, even as parents and agents and friends and ads and doctors and governments tell me otherwise. To nourish it, even as my mind coaxes just wither away. To love my body as it’s exploited and judged and envied and desired and hated all in a grand, confusing swarm of projections. To love my body as my self, to love my body as the only incarnation of self I’ll see this time around. To appreciate it no matter what.
I’ve been skin and bones my whole life. I know myself to be light, quick, dizzy, fatigued. I require lots of sleep, stretching, and salt to feel good. I wanted to continue feeling nearly nonexistent, able to hide, able to slip in between the crowds in an overwhelmingly tangible world. I’m consistently praised for being thin. Affirmed, teased, interrogated—all impacting my definition of who I am. For others who have existed in one form forever, I’m sure you can understand an attachment to constancy. My attachment to a feeling of weightlessness affected my body, my relationship to it, and my relationship to myself and others. As a low-income Black girl in predominantly white and wealthy spaces, I can understand why I craved thin privilege, why I lived within a scarcity mindset, and why I ached to disappear. But dissociation, in my case, just contributed to dysphoria and anorexia.
Now I look myself in the eyes. I look at myself until I get all blurry, until I can memorize and visualize myself in my mind’s eye. And for those who think it’s easy to do so in a frame like mine, I will add that it’s no use talking about flat stomachs if you’re not also going to mention protruding ribs. If it’s to happen naturally, they often go hand in hand. My thigh gap comes with bones in my ass so sharp, I carry cushions around the house. I’m soft to the touch due to the little down hairs that cover my body to keep me warm, because they know I’m undernourished. It’s no use talking about being thin, if we’re not going to talk about that, too. And, um, don’t even get me started on the eurocentric beauty standards I once internalized. But when I look in the mirror and these things start to worry me, I say out loud that I am alive, I love myself, my body and I are in this together. We’re all beautiful, because our fake ideas of beauty SIMPLY do not exist outside of oppressive constructions and competition. Believe that you are, know that you are, shift your understanding of beauty little by little until your only standard begins and ends with you. I’ve been doing so for as long as I can remember. But faced with life-threatening illness, as we all are at this time, it’s enough to begin in gratitude to your body for keeping you alive.
Body dysmorphia is actively encouraged by the media and in our daily interactions. Anorexia affects so many for a variety of trauma- and control-centered reasons. Starvation and scarcity mindsets are taught. I’ve known food to be wielded as a weapon, deemed conditional, a treat, an evil, a luxury, a burden. Food is a necessity. I have seen food as an expensive resource, something I don’t deserve. Food is life. I’ve vilified it for the harm that intensive agriculture, concentrated animal feeding operations, genetic modification, and deforestation have done to our land. But that’s not food, that’s CAPITALISM. These ideas have led me to internalize the process of consumption as arduous, a waste of time, more energy-draining than -giving. But that’s so counterintuitive. Food is nourishment. Taking up more space is a GOAL, energetically and physically. The root is the most important chakra!
I’ve learned so much from the fat liberation movement. We all have something to learn from fat studies, from this framework that inspects, theorizes about, and is fighting to free us all from the confines of the violent conflation of health and weight. They just simply do not correlate. Obesity is a construction, a weapon, and with it, the illegitimate causation between it and health issues we are ALL susceptible to getting. Just as Blackness only leads to higher mortality rates because of RACISM, fatness is an indicator of health problems because of FATPHOBIA in medicine. Because fat people are ignored by health professionals. Because complex bodies are myopically reduced to one single factor. Because of the harm done to bodies that are denied food. Because of the insidious vilification of bodies that encourages us simply not to concern ourselves with whether certain people live or die. Because of assholes who blame people for the bodies they are either born into, or grow into.
Even within my own family, my aforementioned little sister, who has been fat her whole life, has been aggressively surveilled by the medical industrial complex for “obesity-related” illness, while my skinny ass degenerated for years from one of the most common: heart disease. Left undiagnosed because of assumptions and ignorance, while my sister was and continues to be shamed and hounded from the other side of the same assumptions and ignorance. No one wins here! And no one is supposed to. For more info on Erica’s experience on that, do check out her YouTube video!
So I’ve also had food make me queasy and ill on a regular basis. Which is apparently common as heck! From my casual polls over a number of years, I’ve deduced that hella people of all sizes are out here straight sufferin’ from GI (gastrointestinal) issues. We’re all just in gut pain, constipated, cramping, nauseous, with acid refluxing all over the place, trying to solve our woes with sheer will, exercise, and restrictive eating, if not flat-out denial. None of that has worked for me, so I’ve pivoted to intuitive eating.
Intuitive eating asks us to take notice of what makes our body happy. I’m of the mind that the ONLY one you need to listen to about YOUR body is the hunk of organic matter you’re lugging around. That mf has all the answers. Anyone else you try to ask about your body will either be speaking from their own experience (biased & confusing), studied nutrition and/or medicine (racist & fatphobic), or in the best case scenario will ask you about your own bodily responses aka we’re back to you answering your own damn questions about what’s right for you. Intuitive eating is a journey; it’s life-affirming; it’s LOVELY to listen to your body and give it what it asks for without question.
Mad love to the new moon in Libra, and this beautiful blue moon in Taurus!!! This moon cycle has helped me find the slightest bit of center. Thank you, friends, for reading, sending your thoughts, appreciating my voice, and for the therapy support! Unfortunately, I’ve hit my max number of subsidized sessions (8), but those sessions were v healing! And though the process is not linear, it still feels good when the fallacy of ~progress~ encompasses me. I’m living in mutability, and trying to stop questioning it. As I stood in my temporary kitchen, in my temporary home, donned in this terrycloth robe belonging to an elderly man I’ve never met, cleaning my octagonal rose-tinted glasses,,,,,, I simply had to laugh. This life is so absurd.
I just left that temporary home in San Diego, and now I’m in Atlanta with some family. I’m hoping very much to get out of the country soon, as my way of protecting my body from the confluence of racism and disease that riddles this nation...and all other nations ack! But if you have ANY ideas of where I can safely settle, please don’t hesitate to reach out <3 and if you enjoyed this note, please do share around. And you can also pay me if you feel so inclined :) @kaydarling111 on the vemno. Here’s a lil poem to play me out!!
My size is not an accomplishment
It was not earned.
I have endured it,
Enjoyed it,
But I have not worked for it.
Bodies are complicated
At every size, with every year
They ask a lot of us,
Power through more
Speak in aches and gurgles
Hearts skip a beat, knees grow sore
I am no stranger to
disordered, restrictive, experimental,
Eating and not eating.
Grown shaky and dizzy,
melted into the ground
When I do not work with it
I’m learning from the groans
Listening through tingles and cramps
Genetic makeup provides no tips or tricks
Only uncensored, sensory access points,
Within the lining of my gut or
The fine lines of a fingerprint
Bodies, though burdensome, deserve
To be celebrated, treasured
Fought for, understood
Bodies, doing all they can, deserve
To be fed, held, fat, fleshy, stable
Size is not an accomplishment
But our bodies are gifts
Organic, magic, matter