This week Brandon Taylor wrote a Substack titled sugar in the blood. In it, Taylor writes about having T2 diabetes, being prescribed Ozempic and how society yells at fat people to change their bodies, but when they do, society yells at them for believing it would work. He writes, “… you people need to release the cops in your minds.”
I can't stop thinking about it, for many reasons.
One: of course, he’s right. I spent the first half of my life restricting food and over-exercising. Now that I have six years of recovery under my belt, I don’t intend to spend the next half doing the same. But we’re all on the same internet. You see it. As soon as a public figure in a fat body loses weight, or does something that we perceive as intending to lose weight, we yell at them, especially if we’re white (me) and they’re Black (Lizzo, Brandon Taylor).
This isn’t really about that, but if that last sentence crunches you up, you might benefit from reading It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies by Jessica Wilson. (I wrote about it here.)
What I do want to talk about is policing other people’s words and behaviors and deciding who’s good or bad. To be clear, I’m not talking about excusing people from accountability and consequences. I’m talking about judging people we don’t know, who’s actions have no bearing on our personal lives. You know, like Lizzo doing a juice cleanse.
That binary of good or bad is appealing to me. I love an absolute. A grey area? I don’t know her. (Except I do because I’ve had a decade of therapy and this is one of the biggest things we’ve worked on.)
I’m an Adult Child, which means I struggle with hyper-vigilance and perfectionism, which is codependency, but so few people understand codependency that it’s easier to just say perfectionism. TL;DR I grew up in a turbulent home and internalized that if I can control my environment, I can keep myself safe.
I’m like a house with faulty wiring. A professional has been in there and fixed everything, but every now and then, the microwave beeps for no reason.
Because I’m chronically online, I do a lot of my beeping at people I don’t know. Though I don’t believe it’s intentional, I do think there’s a performance aspect to it, especially for white women (again, me). Sometimes I beep to announce that I’m on the right side, or that I know what the right side is. A vanity beep, if you will.
If I show I’m on the “right side” (control my environment) then no one gets mad at me (keep myself safe). A classic curse of codependency.
There’s a saying in many recovery spaces: keep your side of the street clean. The TikTok version of this is, “Unbothered. Moisturized. Happy. In my lane. Focused. Flourishing.” My interpretation of this is, keep your eyes on your own paper. If the person beside you is cheating, trust that it will work itself out without your intervention. You do not need to be “the police” of what other people are doing. You can trust people to handle their own shit. If no one in the group is saying they’re uncomfortable, you do not have to appoint yourself Sheriff of the space and “lay down the law.”
It’s hard work, and it takes me frequently walking into my therapist’s office and saying, “I did it again.” If you would like to join me in releasing the cops in your/our minds, here are two great books to get you started:
Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself (Revised and Updated) by Melody Beattie
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson.
And finally, here is live footage of me in my lane, focused, flourishing, lip syncing to Matchbox Twenty.
I have had therapy & not one of those therapists has explained things as clearly as you did here. Thank you. Maybe my professionals didn't fix my wiring as well as I thought because I internally beep at weight loss stuff a lot. And then I hate myself, and my want to control my own body but my inability to do so, for all the beeping. At almost 45 I didn't want to still have faulty wiring but here I am.
I really love, relate to, & appreciate this. There’s so much to think about as a fellow house with faulty wiring. Thanks for writing this ♥️