Tools for embodiment
Hello, it’s been a while! It turns out my big problem was not as solved as I hoped, and while I was feeling bad again, I had to commit the self-harm of meeting some unmissable deadlines anyway. I appreciate that this newsletter is an eminently missable deadline, to be jettisoned whenever necessary. But I also know there’s a kind of creative magic that can only grow in the soil of commitment and consistency. I miss that magic. I’m not sure if I’m ready to be here again, but I am ready to try and see what happens.
A nurse friend of mine1 told me, when I was close to my worst, that our bodies are amazing at telling us what’s going on, and we’re terrible at understanding what they’re trying to say. We interpret our bodies’ less pleasant strategies for keeping us well—pain, vomiting, exhaustion, fevers, just to name a few—as attacks and betrayals. But they’re actually messages, and more often than not, they’re survival strategies. Fevers and inflammation are integral to healing. Vomiting forces whatever shouldn’t be inside of you out. Exhaustion sends you to bed so your body has enough energy to do what it needs to do. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Sometimes the body is, shall we say, misguided about what counts as a threat, in the case of allergies or autoimmunity. (Attention autoantibodies: my thyroid doesn’t need to be killed, please cease and desist!) But even when something goes awry, symptoms are there to warn you, to ask you for help, to explain. It’s not their fault we don’t know how to listen.
When my last round of Weird COVID recovery and subsequent thyroid decline was at its nadir, my body’s needs were undeniable: sleep, food, and fresh air, in that order. I didn’t feel good, but I did feel embodied. As I’ve moved towards feeling better, that embodiment has become harder to access. The messages are less obvious, the consequences of not recognizing them less immediate, the cost-benefit calculations less clear cut. Not helping matters is the fact that productivity culture is always ready to swoop in at the first sign of confusion and doubt, trying to convince me to value suffering and control over ease and intuition. And since much of my present confusion is tied to what my body is doing and why, diet culture—productivity culture’s evil(er) twin—has also shown up to the party, uninvited and unwelcome. I’ve spent years preparing to battle this foe, and it’s still so much harder than I expected. Here are two things that are helping me fight back and trust my body even when I don’t quite know what it’s saying.
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1. Liftoff/She’s a Beast
No one—I repeat, no one—writes about bodies like Casey Johnston. A fellow survivor of the early 2000s American war on millennial women’s bodies, she evangelizes for weightlifting—and the eating and resting it requires—as a way of discovering a new and more rewarding way of relating to your physical self. I casually followed her Ask a Swole Woman column since it was at The Hairpin (RIP); it went through several homes and now lives within Casey’s own newsletter, She’s a Beast. I read or re-read close to her entire back catalogue when I could process words but was still too tired and brain-foggy to manage a book. Her writing gave me permission to eat what (and however much) I needed to recover, and it made me so excited for the day when hard exercise would once again make me feel good, instead of like a dear friend was suddenly trying to murder me. That day eventually arrived, and I just finished Casey’s introductory weightlifting program Liftoff: Couch to Barbell. As promised, after 12 weeks, I can throw around a barbell and (usually) claim my rightful place in the squat rack amongst my fellow gym bros.
Here’s a classic Ask a Swole Woman about getting started with weightlifting, which captures the activities and philosophy of Liftoff. (It’s intended to be slow and doable, to the point where I could easily stick with it through some energetic ups-and-downs.) Here’s Casey’s popular contribution to the recent Ozempic discourse. And this (paywalled) issue of She’s a Beast about sports and weight will make the scales fall from your eyes re: just how many people are out here starving themselves and inflicting their emotional and physical misery on everyone around them.
2. Fat Talk
I’ve recommended Virginia Sole-Smith’s work before, and now her book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture is out and making waves! (If you want to see an example of starving people inflicting their misery on others, take a look at the comments on her profile in The Cut. Or better yet, don’t.) Fat Talk is about how diet culture has wormed its way into almost every aspect of parenting and childhood, and also about how to identify this demon and slowly, painfully, but also ruthlessly exorcise it from your relationship with yourself, your family, and any young people in your life. (I mean, to the extent that individual work will help solve structural problems—some, maybe even a lot within your personal experience of the world, but not enough.) I’m not a parent, but I still got a lot out of it, especially when it comes to understanding how restriction fuels obsession and how warped our cultural understanding of nutrition is. It’s also a welcoming and comprehensive primer if concepts like anti-fat bias and Health at Every Size are new to you.
If you’re a parent, I implore you to read Fat Talk immediately and resolve to spare the next generation the damage that was done to us. As long as diet companies are advising parents to hide their (perfectly fine) snacks by locking them in the trunk of their car the second their child’s (unconsciously biased) pediatrician frowns at the (unscientific) BMI chart (a true fact from the book!), any and all counter programming is vital and potentially life-saving. Just say no to condemning another generation to an adulthood spent digging themselves out from under the disordered eating and exercise habits that robbed them of years of enjoyment and full presence in the world. Imagine the power they will have, the kids who were never told that small was the best thing they could be. Imagine all the things they will do instead.
Hi Martina!