Wild Once Women

This is a challenging time for so many people in so many ways, but I want to send some extra love to people who are dealing with eating disorders. Many of us have a complicated relationship with food, even at the best of times, and the current situation can be challenging to navigate.

You might not have the support you need—you can’t go to support groups that help you focus on physical health, and  mental well-being, and body image. People who rely on eating certain foods so as not to trigger feelings that may lead to binging, purging, and other disordered eating behaviours may not have access to the things they need. Anyone who is responsibly practicing self-isolation is at home all day and, even if you’re able to work from home, you’re surrounded by food in a way that you probably aren’t in your regular work environment. It might be less, it might be more, but the point is that it’s different and outside of routine. Routine is important to many of us who have experienced disordered eating patterns.

A lot of articles and social media posts are providing advice and humour about not getting fat/getting fat, cutting portion sizes, etc. while we’re in our homes and less active than we normally would be, and I get that the people who post them often have good intentions, but sometimes they feed into fat phobia and generate conflicting emotions.

I’m not here to tell you what your portion sizes should be, or how many calories to consume, or provide any kind of dietary advice. I do want to remind you that this is a considerably stressful time and that it’s a normal biological function to crave more calories with higher fat and sugar content during tough times. It’s an evolutionary survival mechanism and, while it’s not quite so useful given that many of us have easy access to food at all hours of the day, it remains one of the ways that your body is trying to take care of itself.  As your cortisol levels increase in times of stress, so does ghrelin, a hormone responsible for sending hunger cues to your brain. Some people will eat more food during this time and some will eat less. The need for control will be so great right now that they may restrict their food consumption in an attempt to gain some control over something in an otherwise uncertain situation.

Whatever your body is telling you, even if you are feeling betrayed by your body, remind yourself that your reactions are actually your body trying to take care of you. You are looking for nourishment to get through this. You are looking for control to get through this. Your body is trying to get you through this in the ways that it currently knows how to. The important part is that you get through this.

Again, I’m not telling you to eat, or not eat, or what to eat, or how much to eat. I’m trying to say, please, be kind to yourself. Be gentle and patient. If your body is in panic mode, you might be making choices that you wouldn’t make under different circumstances and that’s totally understandable. Eating or not eating a certain type or amount of food, or choosing one food over another, is not a failure or a success. Your value as a person exists completely outside of that. The old saying got things so very wrong. You are not what you eat, or when you eat, or how you eat, or why you eat. You are so much more important than that.

I have a confession. My confession is that there are many ways that this self-isolation situation is having the exact opposite effect on me compared to many others. I have reduced anxiety about certain areas of my life, I am enjoying my workouts even more, my house is staying cleaner, and I feel like my body is being allowed to figure out its own rhythms right now. I don’t share this to be insensitive, because I am fully aware that things are bad, they’re going to get worse, and we’re all going to suffer in various ways (and that so many people are already suffering hugely).

I’m going to share some personal things and I want to be clear that my feelings might come across as insensitive but, in fact, I am deeply sensitive to the fact that my feelings are not like *most* people’s right now. People are feeling a lot of things in the midst of the panic, and the fear, and the uncertainty about Covid-19. All of those feelings, and many others, are valid responses. In fact, all emotions are valid, and I’m going to ask you to remember that as you continue reading this.

In the midst of people’s anxiety, now that I am able to work from home (therefore, reducing my exposure to large numbers of people) and practice clear physical distancing during the infrequent times that I have to leave for groceries or a prescription for me or someone in my family, I am incredibly calm. This is maybe the most calm I’ve been in 20 years. Maybe longer. Maybe ever.

Let me be clear that my emotions still fluctuate. For example, sometimes I’m angry as all get out. I’m sick of people ignoring physical distancing rules, and people’s conspiracy theories about the media, and people being so completely selfish that they’re perfectly fine with putting others at risk. I’m downright pissed off, but my anger is mostly on behalf of others like our essential services workers and aging populations that we are putting at risk when we ignore science and common sense.

The calm is real, though, and is underlying everything. I know what this is, and I know that it’s partially a trauma response. I’m calm in a crisis. It’s in my training (I’m trained as both a social worker and an educator), it’s in my work experiences, and it’s in my personal experiences. You have to be calm in a crisis. To fall apart can put me or someone else in danger, and as someone who has been a facilitator and/or teacher for years, I am responsible for the room. It’s my job to stay calm for everyone. I’ve experienced plenty of my own trauma and I’ve also spent many years listening to and holding space for other people’s trauma. Remaining calm is the only option, but there is more to it than that.

I have anxiety. Over the years, it’s ranged from very mild to very severe, with more of it being on the mild end of the spectrum, and I’m lucky for that. In fact, for a long time, I didn’t recognise my anxiety for what it was. I thought it was drive and ambition. I’m always reaching for the next goal. Some people call this “destination happiness” as though it’s an official diagnosis in the DSM-V (it’s not), but for many of us that does not accurately describe our feelings and experiences at all. I’m happy where I am. I’ve been genuinely happy for years. But I’ve been living with a sense of urgency forever. It’s driven me to earn degrees, make moves that were good for my family, be a home owner from a young age, invest early, save, pick big goals and then reach them over and over again. Those things have been useful, and given me a lot of direction and purpose but, also, it’s been fucking exhausting.

For the first time in my life, all of the usual planning and questioning that goes on in my head (Where will I be in five years? Should we sell our house and move into a condo in the next two years? My current work position ends after this year—will I manage to find a job at the same institution or will I have to find something else yet again? Will my children ever be able to afford to move out in this economy? Will my auto-immune issues allow me to work until a reasonable retirement age? Am I investing/saving enough? Am I living my life the way I want to while I still have relative health?) doesn’t matter at all. Covid-19 is a game changer. It’s a horrible, terrible, unfortunate game changer. This situation has removed the possibility of me making any decisions right now, other than the decision to physically distance from people, help others when I can, and wash my hands constantly.

I can choose to be calm, and I am fully aware of the luxury in that. So many people are struggling. Some people don’t have nice homes to hunker down in, or food in the cupboards, or healthy relationships with the people that they have to self-isolate with. Every single day I know that I live with privilege, so please do not mistake my sense of calm for a lack of empathy, because I care very much about the safety and health of others. But I can’t help but feel these fluttery wings of relief in my chest that tell me it’s okay to just exist right now. I don’t have to grind. I don’t have to try to excel. I just have to be.

I don’t know how else to say this except to say that my body has been in crisis mode nearly every day of my life for the last few decades.  Some people are in major crisis mode right now. Some of us have been living with that for a long time, and I hate that anyone has to experience the fight-or-flight feeling in situations where it isn’t necessary or helpful. It’s hard, and I wish everyone was feeling healthy and safe right now and always.

I see memes going around that say things like “Check on your extroverted friends. We’re not okay right now.” and I get it, and I’m definitely checking in with my people but, the thing is, when this is over and things go back to something resembling *normal*, THAT is when some of us will be less okay and most of the world does not accommodate those feelings or the people that feel them.  I’m not asking you to check in with your introverted friends when this is over because that’s the last thing we want (hahaha) but, seriously, please try to be more patient and understanding about what it’s like to be introverted and/or have anxiety.  What you are feeling right now might be close to what someone feels about existing in the regular world on a daily basis.

If you’re feeling calm right now, too, it’s okay. It is okay not to feel guilty or weird for having a response that is outside of the *norm*. Our experiences are just as valid and important, even if they’re not as well documented or as widely shared.

 

 

 

**WARNING: This post may contain spoilers for “This is Us” if you haven’t seen the most recently aired episode.**

 

I have a request of Dan Fogelman and all the writers of the hit show “This is Us”. Viewers have seen the flash-forward that reveals that Rebecca is not well, and the family is gathering around her to prepare for her end. Kate has been absent, strategically we assume, from that flash-forward. There is plenty of viewer speculation all over the internet about what has become of Kate and, while I don’t have any speculation as to her fate, I do have that request I mentioned in my opening sentence. Please, let Kate remain fat.

 

Let Kate remain fat so that we can see a ground-breaking example that reminds us to stop romanticizing thinness or weight-loss as though it’s the only worthwhile outcome.  Maybe future Kate is happy, maybe she’s not, but that isn’t really the point because people who are fat have complex lives too. We are more than just the stereotypes and tropes that exist about us. Sure, for a lot of people who are fat, focusing on diet and lifestyle changes are an on-going part of life, but also we are dynamic people. We’re educated, we have careers, we have relationships of all types, we raise families, we battle illnesses the same way people who are not labelled as obese do. We have bad days, and good days, and everything in between.

 

I know that you and the writers understand this, because Kate is more than just a fat woman on your show. She’s complex, she’s talented, she’s sweet, and sometimes she’s naive and she struggles, because we’re meant to believe that this character, Kate, is a real person. The reality is that people who are fat often never become thin. Sure, some people become less fat, and some even do become thin, but most people who are fat will continue to be considered overweight by the medical community and by society for their whole lives. Everyone needs to get over this notion that weight is simply about will power, or exercise, or any other single thing. It is so very complicated and many people could only ever be thin through illness or other detrimental means that should never be promoted.

 

While I’m asking for things, I have a second request. Some of the speculation around Kate is that people wonder if she’s even still alive. I suspect (hope) you’re not going to kill off Kate, and I’m asking that you don’t, for many of the same reasons as above. Please don’t make Kate a cautionary tale about dying of obesity. So many people live with obesity, and they often live to old age. Let Kate be fat and let Kate be alive. Don’t do it because I asked you to. Do it because it’s the most likely reality for Kate. Having body fat is not a death sentence. Help those who don’t already understand to realize that obesity isn’t a word that defines a person, the same way any other single aspect of a person doesn’t have to define them. I know that you understand the complexity of people and their lives. I see it when you address addictions on the show, I watch it when you explore PTSD, I see it in the ways you portray family members who fall out and then forgive.

 

I know that it’s not your job to take a stand against misinformation, social stigma, or negative stereotypes, but I’m asking you to anyway, because representation matters. Body positivity is not about promoting obesity, it’s about recognizing that all bodies are beautiful, but also coming to the realization that outer beauty should not be the feature that defines us, anyway. No one owes it to anyone else to look a certain way, but I do think we owe it to each other to be kind when we can, to influence positive change when we have the power to do so, and to help create dialogue that changes the negative narrative about specific groups of people in society.

 

Kate’s fate matters, not just to the show but to people who are fat, because This is Us.

 

He took a long drag on his cigarette, enjoying the faint sizzle of the paper as he inhaled deeply. The morning sunlight reflected off the water below in a rapid, dazzling display of dance. He didn’t allow himself many rituals because they were too risky, but every time he had business in this little boom-and-bust town he stopped by this spot beside the river to enjoy his morning cigarette. The small comforts were the only comforts he had at all considering he had no fixed address and moved from town to town doing what he was told.

He knew why he was there, again, and hated knowing that he was delivering shitty drugs cut with god-knows-what to this unassuming little town. Running drugs was just one errand on a long list of errands that he took care of but didn’t care for.  At least the drug runs were better than the hits. It wasn’t required of him often, less than half a dozen times in all the 40 years he’d been working for the Boss, but sometimes he’d been ordered to take someone out and he’d followed orders because that’s what he did. Maybe, if things had been different, he’d have been something else like a banker (he’d always liked numbers), or a salesman, or maybe he’d have worked at the mill like his dad. Things were what they were, though. He’d killed his father when he was 15 and he figured if you could commit one crime out of necessity then you might as well commit a lot of them out of necessity.

He couldn’t remember the first time his father flew into a rage and hit his mother but there were plenty of times in between that were lodged into some deep part of his brain where probably nothing short of dementia could knock it out for good. It’s the last time that mattered most, though. It’s that time that changed the entire trajectory of his life.

Mom, despite her hidden bruises and constant fear, had wanted to be a writer. She’d applied to their local rinky-dink newspaper to write a column of some sort, and by some miracle (disaster was more like it) they’d agreed to let her write it. She’d hauled down the old typewriter from the attic—a beast of a thing—and went right to work with her fingers flying like her hands knew what they were doing, despite the fact that she hadn’t typed since the year after she’d married his father. He’d arrived home from school to the racket of the keys as their old hammers clacked in complaint after years of neglect. He was only home long enough to change and slug back a glass of cool water before heading out to mow a few large lawns two streets over. His mom had barely noticed him, such was her excitement. The lawns had taken him longer than expected because one of the neighbours had been chatty and another had to wait for her husband to arrive home so that she could pay him for his work.

When he finally pushed the mower up the driveway and into the garage he was hot and sweaty, and looking forward to dinner and something cold to drink. His father’s car was in the driveway, home from his shift at the mill. It wasn’t until he entered the cool dimness of the house and his eyes adjusted that he was able to make out what was going on. His father was choking his mother, nearly lifting her off the ground as she clawed at his hands, desperately scrabbling for air in her lungs and floor beneath her feet.

Sometimes he took the brunt of his father’s anger but far more often than not it was his mother. He could only imagine his father’s reaction to his mother’s declaration that she was going to write for the paper. He could imagine his father saying something like “No wife of mine is going to write for that shit-show of a liberal rag”. His mother managed a choking sound and he instinctively kicked his father in the shins—a surprise that made his father drop his mother to the floor where she lay in a defeated heap, gulping air and trying to recover in preparation for whatever blows were to come next. The blows would come, but they wouldn’t be what she expected. His father turned towards him then, and he could see the rage in his father’s face. He had seen his father angry a hundred—or a thousand—times, but this was new. This was some next level bullshit that he was about to bring down upon this household. He could almost smell the murder radiating off of his father—the smell of wood chips from the mill mixed with hot, sweaty adrenaline and fury.

He picked up the old typewriter from the kitchen table and with all his might he connected it to his father’s skull. The force with which he struck his father’s head caused a few of the arms and keys to snap off and clatter to the floor with the heft of their metal. The real weight was in the realization that he’d killed his own father, which was evident from the blood quickly pooling around his father’s head on the kitchen floor. His gaze shifted from the blood to his mother’s mouth that was frozen in a perfect O of horror, which he found ironic in its mirroring of the O key that had settled on the floor under the kitchen table. Oh-Oh.

His mother quickly regained composure. She ran her hands down her apron to smooth it and started to tell him how they would hide the body, but he stopped her. “It’s no use, Mom”, he said. It was only then that she cried. Not for her dead husband whose brains were congealing on the floor, or for the swollen split in her lip, or for the marks that were quickly appearing on her neck, but because she knew that she might never see her son again. He would have to leave and never come back. She thought to herself, momentarily, that she couldn’t have written a more terrible ending if she’d tried, and then she wondered if she was losing her mind to be thinking of a thing like that at a time like this.

He was already racing around the house and tossing things into a duffle bag.  He didn’t need much. He didn’t have much. Some clothes, a wad of cash he’d been hiding in a shoe box in his closet that he’d earned mowing lawns and doing other odd jobs around the neighbourhood. As he closed his hands around the cash he thought about what he’d been saving it for—for him and his mom to get away from here, from him. And now they were both free, in a way, except he never really would be because he’d have to stay on the move and always moving away from something wasn’t much different than never really getting away from it at all.

By the time he’d collected his few belongings, his mom was in the doorway, saying that he didn’t have to go right this minute, that she could call the cops in the morning, that he should sleep in his own bed for the night and leave in the daylight, but he couldn’t stay and he certainly couldn’t think about sleep.  He feared he wouldn’t have the guts to leave if he stayed in the house another night.

It had been almost 20 years before he’d dared to call his mother. He was nearly 35, and it suddenly struck him that he was the same age as she had been when he’d left. He’d used a pay phone, and when she’d answered the line was slightly crackly, much like his nerves. The sound of her voice saying “Hello?” made his stomach clench up and his bowels feel loose. Twenty years without hearing the voice of the woman who had tucked him in at night with stories of Henry and Ribsy, the woman who had stirred ginger ale until it was flat and brought it to him in bed when we was sick, the woman who had tried to protect him as best she could in the circumstances they were dealt.

Though he was now a grown man, his voice cracked and he heard himself squeak out the word, “Mom?”, and it didn’t matter that twenty years had passed because she was his mother and he was her son.  Twenty minutes was all he’d allowed himself—one minute for each year he’d been away from her. He wished he had longer to talk, but he had to keep moving. Always moving, never really going anywhere at all. In the end, he had promised he’d try to call again, maybe later in the year around Christmas time.

He’d taken care to change his name, change his appearance, and always gave a wide berth to his home town. He took another drag on his cigarette and thought about the fact that he’d managed to dodge the police for all these years. It wasn’t something he felt smug about because he’d never been trying to outsmart them. He was just trying to survive. Somehow, he’d managed to remain out of prison but even that was such a small comfort.

He dropped the remainder of his cigarette on the ground and crushed it under it boot. He had another long day and many miles ahead of him.

———————————————————————————————–

Note: Short story writing is not something I’m experienced at but, for whatever reason, it’s been one way that my brain has been working through snippets of memories, lately. To be clear, nothing in this story is based on any real-events that I know of, except for a tiny detail. Years ago, about once a week or so on my early morning commutes to work, I’d see the same person pulled over at the side of the road, smoking a cigarette, looking out at the river.  He was older than the character in my story, but I wanted time lines to match up in terms of how old he’d have likely been in the years that my story is set. I made up this story in my head about him, though I didn’t put any details down on paper (if that’s what we call phone memos and Word docs) for years. Instead, I thought of him as “The Smoking Man”, and that’s what I called my story as a working title, but I know it has too great an association with The X-Files to be a good choice.  The commute I was making was to a job that I loved but also that involved listening to a lot of people’s stories of trauma. It’s impossible not to be affected by that type of work, in at least a hundred different ways. For whatever reason, my brain keeps knocking bits of memory loose from that time, recently, and I keep working through them in the form of short stories that I write in my head. I have another one I’d like to attempt to write next but it’s going to be a much greater challenge. Some stories are simply harder to detach yourself from but maybe that’s the best reason to tell them.

 

 

I’ve never been a good judge of age. I feel incredibly uncomfortable when people do that thing where they encourage me to guess their age because the facts are that a) I don’t actually care and b) I’m going to be forced to guess some number lower than what I maybe think and whatever number I maybe think is vague at best, anyway, due to the first sentence in this paragraph.  I’m going to aim slightly lower than the age I think you might be because I’ve spent most of my life being a people-pleaser and in doing so I’m going to suffer feelings of being disingenuous and that always stresses me out. See? This is not a fun game.

The game is starting to shift, though, and it’s because I’m old enough to have grown tired of managing everyone else’s expectations and feelings at the cost of my own and that is what 40 is looking like, for me. In case this needs to be said, I’m not suggesting that I blow off responsibilities or put my feelings first in such a way that I think it’s okay to be hurtful to others. Neither of those things is remotely in line with my values or desires. Similarly, one of my values needs to be placing value in myself.

At some point within the last year I saw a tumblr post on one of those “best of” compilations that spoke to me, as follows:

I have spent nearly 40 years breaking myself into bite-sized pieces. I’ve worried that I’m too weird, I’m too nerdy, I’m too wordy, I’m too big, I’m too much. 40 changed that. 40 gave me permission to say that I’m tired of trying to please everyone. 40 gave me permission to say that this is who I am. 40 gave me permission to recognize that I will never be everyone’s cup of tea but that some people don’t like tea and, frankly, it’s not up to me to change their mind. 40 gave me permission to stop apologizing all the time for being myself. 40 gave me permission to be angry sometimes and it also gave me permission to be happy.

I fit many of the tropes about middle-aged women. I really do like the music they’re playing in the grocery stores. I actually can get pretty excited about a new kitchen gadget. I really do want a pumpkin-spice latte a couple times a year. So what? Excuse me for trying to find joy in a mundane chore like shopping, or wanting a gadget to make the endless meal prep a little easier, or for wanting a moment of warmth and comfort in a cup. The world so often tells women that the things they like, or want, or do are “trite”, or “cute”, or “unimportant” and many of us buy into that for a lot of years…far too many years (any number of years is too many). And then 40 comes along (or maybe it’s a different age for you) and you realize that the world is always going to ask you to make yourself smaller but that it will never matter how many times you try to fold yourself up or over because  the world will just keep asking.

The important part of the tumblr post isn’t the bit about letting people choke, though. I don’t want anyone to choke.  Rather, it’s that I’m tired of breaking myself into bite-sized pieces. Instead, it’s up to people not to bite off more than they can chew.