LAVENDER & EUCALYPTUS

I've been thinking lately about how powerful it is to be fat. To allow yourself to be fat. To embrace it. To relish in it. And how we live in a culture that will do absolutely everything it possibly can to prevent us from holding that much power. See, to be fat is to be big . And we're supposed to be small. Especially women. Especially queers. Especially BIPOC. Especially trans folks. If you are a straight, white, heterosexual, cisgender man, then you can be as gigantic as you want! Stomp on everyone!! Scream at the sun!!! You will be rewarded for it!!!!! But everyone else? It's our job to shut up and get out of the way. Which is just like... what the fuck? Who signed me up for this?? I sure as hell didn't sign myself up. But I did adhere to it for many years. Of course, there was always some part of me that was trying to bust through the seams of this shitty hand I was dealt. I got in yelling matches with my brother and father, went off to college and chopped off all m...

Well... what the fuck is there to say. I feel very strongly that this could truly just be a whole series of posts... so I'm sure I'll get to say just a small fraction of what I'm thinking and feeling and then we can just... put a pin in it.  I don't want to write some long chronicle of my entire journey with anorexia, thinness, fatness, internalized and externalized fatphobia, etc here... There's just not enough space and it's 11:22 AM (which is early for me, hello quarantine) and I'm still waking up. So I'm just gonna jump around and do some stream of consciousness stuff. Welcome to my brain. It's been hard getting fat. I'm not gonna lie. It's been hard having mostly thin friends, so that when I started getting fat, I was like wait, who do I even talk to about this?? The only person I really knew to turn to was my closest fat friend, and I leaned on her way too hard. I had no frame of reference for how to process weight gain in a healthy and...

 I'm starting to get really scared. I wanted this blog to be quippy and charming and fun - a mix of vulnerability and humor. But that's not really, technically, the agreement I made with myself. My intention in creating this blog was to chronicle. Just chronicle. Whatever is going on, whatever I'm feeling, however it wants to come out. Just write. And the reason I haven't told anyone I know about it is that I want to it remain as unfiltered as possible. But the problem is that... writing an unfiltered chronicle of my life is going to be... messy. Right after I created this account, like literally within two or three days or something, the Black Lives Matter protests exploded. I started having nightmares, stopped sleeping, started freaking out pretty much morning noon and night. I dove headfirst into activist work. I was watching City Council meetings, making donations, joining anti-racist organizations - and above all, I was sharing information nonstop on social media. ...

Hello, internet!  Wow. I'm gonna be real, I haven't written an honest to god blog post since like... high school? Lord... it's been so many years, I can't even remember. I've been so invested in poetry for at least a decade... I think some part of me believed that I had "grown out" of blogging. That it was juvenile somehow. I think I was probably confusing the content with the format.  Man, I desperately wanted to put an emoji after that last sentence... this is gonna be an adjustment.  But here we are! Welcome!! I don't know what I'm doing! But like, no one does!! It's the human condition!  One of the things I promised myself about starting this blog was that I would *try* to *attempt* to *make an effort* to embrace imperfection. Not my forte. But I want this to be as personal and informal as possible. I think one of the writing traps I've fallen into over the years has been performing. Always writing to an audience. Always imagining who m...