the world is a terror and the canvas of the body is near
%% this post references eating disorders and weightloss medication. %%
i met a friend downtown for coffee yesterday afternoon; a fuzzy caterpillar did slow laps around our table as we talked over the windchimes and the band practicing next door. the world is a place, we agree.
when i got home, j had cleaned up the yard and was pulling our canopy out of the storage room. we strung up the outdoor lights and the sun set slowly over two real living people, not the ghosts we’d become in the old house.
he went in for a shower and i stayed on the patio scrolling back through old dance videos to flatter myself over how much stronger i’ve gotten. i travel backwards through time, one year and then two, and see myself become more devastated and also more thin; i feel jealous of her and know it’s time to go inside.
we tried a new restaurant for dinner.
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social media keeps telling me that if we don’t talk about women’s bodies, women are going to die. and so we must inform celebrities that their illness indeed makes them look sickly, that their grotesque sternums won’t fool us this time. you are repulsed, but in, like, an empathetic way.
the idea that we have “destigmatized” anything about mental health is such a farce.
there are dots to connect between women’s bodies, obedience, patriarchy, white supremacy, fascism, and the historically illiterate tradwife-ing of it all. there are dots to connect between celebrities’ bodies and the body image of young girls.
there is a much more direct connection, though, between a particular woman’s body and her circumstances within the broader context of Being Alive Right Now, which money cannot quite buy her out of (yet).
the proliferation of weightloss-assisting drugs is worrying, but not quite as scary as the cycle of righteous myopia whipping strangers into a frenzy - how violently we demand our unique flavor of submission.