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...