It’s the season of the year where I think everyone has some end-of-year reflections. The winter solstice is almost here and we are shedding what we no longer need and condensing that which is worthy of carrying forward into a more manageable size for the road ahead. 2021 was a wild year and I’ve struggled to access my own reflections and insights lately so I went and opened my journal to see what I have been saying to myself this year.
I found an entry I wrote in purple-blue Papermate Flair medium point felt marker on April 25, 2021 and I want to share it, largely unedited. This journal entry was functionally one straight stream-of-consciousness paragraph so I did break it up for clarity of reading. I felt a shy urge to redact some of the musings and chose not to but I did add emphasis. Content note: I mention my weight and reference my struggle with my fat body; I try to do it with my deep commitment to fat liberation and acceptance at the center but I’m also a human swimming in a world of diet culture.
I submitted a pitch to Autostraddle [which ultimately became this piece a couple months later]. Might submit another one. I have a couple of interviews re: Sanctuary Hotel and DT 100/St. Stephens. I finished Sister Outsider and started Heavy by Kiese Laymon. I long for a house; space for just the two of us and maybe a kid. I long for a discipline and capacity for sustaining creative work. It feels hard for me to develop them when I’m going to 3-4 medical appointments a week. Plus physical therapy walks. Plus therapy and acupuncture. Plus a cap on my HR. I long for financial flexibility. Like not everything is on a razor wire between paying bills and crisis. There’s no new laptop money. no buy a traveling van money. No gym membership money. No car repair money. I’d like a little more flexibility.
I had to fundraise my rent money today because my short-term disability claim has not been processed and I have no income. Everything is based on work.
I’m fatter than I want to be. But I’m also the most me I’ve ever been in this fatter-than-I-like body. My nearly 300 pound body looked huge on the zoom screen with my family today. Unrecognizable to me. But I’ve always been illegible to them?
I go back to work a week from tomorrow. I’m trying to think back on these 3 months and figure out what I can take with me. Something about making your bed, heart rate thresholds, mutual aid, mental exertion, disability insurance, and labor. I need to marinate and be more intentional about these thoughts. I need to go back and read what I’ve thought about. But it feels like it’s about working less; bodies changing; imagining a future and then pursuing it- slow and steady. It’s about the creativity and possibility that opens up when you’re not working. It’s about medical care and healing being something separate from each other. It’s about medical care as a full-time job. It’s about the labor of care- self, interpersonal, and community-land care. I cared for people in new ways while on leave. I cared for myself differently? I fucked around and wasted time- or did I waste it? [I’m currently, in December 2021, reading Laziness Does Not Exist so I’m glad to see this theme has been on my mind all year.]
I move so slow now and while my insecurities would prefer to move faster and more efficiently, my body likes this pace. I like the pace where watering my plants takes over an hour of slow, subthreshold steady labor. Like it’s a big part of my day to water now. I walk almost every day for long stretches which is somehow the most consistently “active” while simultaneously being the -least- active of my life as well? It’s about the under-current of weight stigma and anti-fatness. It’s about disability and fatness. It’s about pandemic living- a form of hunkering- and fatness. It’s about really appreciating the structure of a good pair of high-waisted athletic pants. It’s about getting out of sympathetic nervous systems and leaning into rest and digest and sunbathing and cozy oversize sweatshirts.
It’s about dreading the returning to work while clinging to the life raft of radical acceptance that I have to and I can. I know how to do this work and I remember what it was like when I was less burned out. What it felt like to gain energy from my jobs instead of hemorraghe it (spelling?). I care about the guys and I’m trying to also care for my self and especially this part of me that showed up while I’ve been cocooning? nesting? resting? recovering? recharging? I’m not sure.
She’s a bit of a…. Beatnik? [cringe] bumming around while thinking big thoughts and getting stoned on the daily and making iconic artworks. She’s grounded for the most part but has big waves of emotions she’s learning to tame [learning to move through and hold is my new language for it]. She eats a lot? Nothing tastes right or smells right and everything sounds bad but also I’m ravenous all the time? I eat butter noodles weekly because I can’t taste anything and am looking for comfort anywhere. She’s protective and yet open. She still hides much of what she eats when out in the world. She found her sense of 2021 style and also has reached new highs of body loathing. She built trust in her body as even it -seemingly- continued to betray her by growing larger, rounder, flabbier, weaker by the day.
She listens to a lot of Hozier. She smokes weed more than she likes and the cannabis helps with a number of symptoms. People seem to hear her voice and the Cap-Virgo placements she has to offer. At her best, her voice, insistence on cussing, and her analysis are crystal clear and generative and communal. At her wer worst she’s a whiny bitch but an earnest one.
Whew. I had wisdom in April that I don’t feel like I have in December. Something about the seasons.