Hugs for the holidays

The seasons are changing, and it’s that time of year when we have to start being extra-careful about our immunity.

And I’m not just talking about the flu–I’m talking about body image issues.

In case you weren’t aware, disordered eating is a communicable disease–or, perhaps I should say it’s a communicatable disease. It’s not the kind of disease that’s spread by hugging–on the contrary, hugs are an essential daily vitamin that can help you build your immunity. It’s the kind of disease that spreads from person to person through negative self-talk, marketing ploys, and cultural habits.

Every year during this time our attention turns to America’s favorite past time: coming up with an excuse for eating and then coming up with an excuse for punishing ourselves for eating.

And every year during this time, our TVs, radios, blog feeds, and social media networks turn into a giant discussion about how to binge, how to stop bingeing, and how to make up for bingeing once the season is over. This is the time of year when it seems like you can’t have a conversation about anything without bringing up who’s eating what, where, and when, and how you’ll be doing penance for it.

It’s in the national media, and it’s also close to home. For example, just two days ago, during the closing minutes at my dance studio, one of the newer teachers said in her soothing voice (and I’m loosely quoting, because I wasn’t taking notes while stretching), “The holidays are coming. And you’re going to eat a lot. But you will come back, and you will get back in shape.”

[Insert sound of a record scratching here.]

Um, what?

How about, “The holidays are coming, and you’re going to spend lots of quality time with people you love. Food and exercise may be involved, but they’re not all that important in the grand scheme of things?”

Or, “The holidays are coming, and if you do choose to fixate on food, know that you’re not alone, and that you don’t have to punish yourself with exercise to make up for it. Throw away your scale and do yoga because it feels good?”

Or even, “The holidays are coming, and it can be difficult to be around food and family members and stressful situations. Keep coming back to ballet because it will give you the tools you need to stay mind-full and avoid stuffing yourself belly-full out of frustration or stress?”

Look, I know that there’s little I can say in this one blog that’s going to get the Today Show to stop showing you segments about how to cook a 5000 calorie Thanksgiving and then burn off a 5000 calorie Thanksgiving, or TV commercials to stop glorifying disordered eating behaviors (like fixating on or sneaking food), or the inevitable “January 1 is coming so eat while you can but save your money for a gym membership” magazine ads.

That said, change has to start somewhere–and it can start with YOU.

If you want to have a happy and healthy holiday season, then it’s up to YOU to start changing the way YOU talk about food with family and friends.

When the ladies in the locker room are talking about how fat they already feel because they’re anticipating the holiday binge, you can choose not to participate–and, even better, change the subject by asking them who they’ll be celebrating with or where they’ll be traveling.

As soon as food or exercise comes up as the topic of conversation, YOU have a choice to change the channel, leave the room, or redirect the conversation. And if you’re stuck on your yoga mat, you can choose not to listen–or, do what I did, and focus instead on the upcoming port de bras (or yoga poses), which you want to try to work on.

Whatever you do: Don’t feed the negativity about feeding!

Even if you don’t have an eating disorder, if you’re a member of the western culture and even marginally exposed to our cultural practices around the fall/winter holiday season, then you have plenty of opportunities to be exposed to the communicatable disease that is disordered eating.

Just as you can spread a cold when you forget to cover your mouth when you cough, so can you spread disordered eating and exercise behaviors when you choose to indulge in the negative body talk about indulging during the holidays.

Build up your immunity now by practicing the following:

Worried about bingeing on once-a-year foods? Cook a dish or two now, and enjoy it on a random week night so you can remember that Thanksgiving or Christmas (or whatever holiday you’re celebrating) is not the only time you’ll have access to that food.

Make a list of non-food or gym-based activities that you’re looking forward to participating in from now through January. Use that list to redirect the conversation when friends or family (or you!) start fixating on food.

Get a notebook or a piece of paper, and put a check mark every time you catch yourself saying something negative about your body in anticipation of the holiday season. About the chime in on that “I can eat less and exercise more” conversation with your girlfriends? Check it off. Mind racing with anxiety when a stuffing commercial comes on? Check it off. The benefits are two fold: over time, you’ll be able to start unconsciously making the catches, AND you’ll be able to mindfully redirect your thought process with positive self-talk.

Be honest with friends and family: ask them not to make a big deal about food and exercise in conversation. You’re allowed to set healthy boundaries, and as long as you’re being respectful in how you ask (i.e. don’t attack them for bringing up the leftover situation), you can help condition those with whom you spend your time to notice when they’re engaging in triggering conversation as well.
Remind yourself that a holiday feast is just another meal. Allow yourself to savor the foods you don’t normally eat, but remember to spend time savoring the company you’re in as well. You’ll spend less time gorging (or restricting but fixating) on the sweet potatoes if you’re having a great conversation with your family and friends.

You don’t have to worry yourself sick over your food and exercise situation this holiday season. Change the way you communicate, and in turn, those around you might follow suit.
And, just in case, make sure you’re getting plenty of vitamin H* in the meantime.

*Hugs, obviously.

The silent struggle

Perhaps it’s easier to look away from eating disorders because they are quiet. They are solitary, shameful struggles, raging internal wars that don’t necessarily radiate outwards. And we anorexics, bulimics, over-exercisers and bingers have perfected the art of pretending like everything is fine, just fine. We make it easy to turn the other cheek to our sickness. In fact, we want you to. We assure our friends and family with a smile; “Don’t worry, I already ate dinner earlier.” “Oh no, I’m just feeling kind of sick today. No appetite.” “I’ve only been on the elliptical for 20 minutes, not 3 hours, this timer must be wrong.”

More often than not, the concerned party leave us alone. It would be intrusive to keep pestering, and if someone says they’re fine, you should take their word for it. Right?

Mental health and well-being in general are uncomfortable topics of discussion. When we say someone is mentally ill or has a mental illness, our minds go to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, strait jackets and lobotomies, even though that’s no longer our reality. No one wants to talk about mental illness because it’s terrifying to us. Sadness, depression, weakness, vulnerability; it’s all too much.

Yet, our silence and inability to talk about suffering and the dark parts of the human condition only makes us sicker.

Eating disorders are mental illnesses. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, in fact. They are not a choice, they are not a lifestyle. They don’t only affect vain white girls who want to fit into skinny jeans. They don’t have to look a certain way. They’re not always about control. And men have eating disorders too.

I’m not sure what it is about eating disorders that makes them so taboo. Perhaps it’s the stigma surrounding them. Perhaps it’s the lack of education about them. Perhaps it’s the feeling of helplessness from the confidante when a victim seeks their help. Either way, the stigma is there and it’s incredibly tangible.

I have struggled with anorexia for many years now. When I first developed my eating disorder, I didn’t know what was happening to me. I knew something was very wrong, but I couldn’t vocalize it. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t feed myself, that I was constantly obsessing about the size of my thighs and about the calories I had or hadn’t consumed that day. I was so ashamed to admit that I felt an incomparable rush from losing weight and that it was the first time in my life I felt powerful and confident. I was even more ashamed to admit that this was no longer something I could control and that it had consumed me.

My anorexia spiraled so quickly that only now, almost ten years later, am I starting to chip away at it - exploring the reasons behind it, and wondering if I can truly live without it. Only now am I really starting to heal, because only now am I talking.

So please, if you are worried about someone, tell them. If you are worried about yourself, tell someone. When you ask someone how they are, really listen. When asked how you are, try to respond authentically. Let’s make eye contact and try to keep it. Let’s do the harder, more uncomfortable, beautifully vulnerable thing.

Let’s start the conversation.

If you're feeling lost, you're heading in the right direction

I’m just over a month past my 25th birthday and I won’t lie to you – I am totally lost. It’s completely normal for people my age and yet I didn’t expect it to feel or look anything like this. In fact, I was the type of little girl who always knew what she wanted, always had a plan laid out in front of her, always the one with a bright picture of where I saw myself all grown-up. So, you can imagine my surprise when this year people would ask me what I had planned for the future and my response was simply I’m not really sure.

At first I was hopelessly in denial, finding myself in long conversations with older adults about grad schools, traveling, and going back into campaign politics. The truth is, while all of those sound like great ideas I’m not sure if I want to do all of them, any of them, or none of them at all.

It isn’t just career-wise either. I’m all over the map when it comes to my love life too. It’s like I don’t even have a type anymore. I couldn’t tell you what I was looking for in a hook-up buddy let alone a boyfriend or a girlfriend. While most girls my age have a deal breaker list, I feel like mine is an ever changing document that I’m not even sure when to follow. It feels like this part in my life is just one big search party where no one can tell me what we’re supposed to be looking for in the first place.

It’s not a comforting feeling.

The worst part is when I look around at some of my peers, and while most of them are in the same boat, there are a select few that make me feel like I’m flunking out of school. You know the people I’m talking about – the engaged ones, the ones with amazing jobs with nice salaries, the ones who always have instagram pictures in different countries while I spend a good portion of my lunch break wondering how they afforded to just… leave.

After a while I stopped being in denial and started accepting it for what it is – the lost years. Then I got to a point recently where I started to think that being this lost meant I wasn’t moving forward in life. I blame my birthday for me realizing that I’m heading into an entirely new portion of my twenties where shit’s supposed to start making more sense not less sense. The thought only fills me with an anxiety so thick I have to lay down afterwards in order not to throw up. It’s like all of a sudden, when I picture my future all I see is blurry images surrounded by fog.

What I do know is there are a lot of things I’m ruling out by experiencing them. All these places I want to live, things I do and do not want to have in a potential relationship, areas I am interested in pursing career wise. It’s as if by a process of elimination I’m figuring out each next step as it comes along. Yet, maybe, the things in my life that feel like failures are actually helping me begin to see things as they come into focus.

Do I still feel lost? Yes and no. I’m no longer that little girl with a linear plan for what and who I want in my life. I allow things to happen and even if they don’t work out I use it as a map that is slowly but surely leading me out of these lost years and into something better.

How do I know I’m headed in the right direction? Sometimes things happen that feel the opposite of good, am I really heading the right way? You’re only going in the wrong direction is you stop living, if you stop taking chances, stop searching for answers to how to live the life of your dreams. As long as you’re doing that, even if you’re lost, you’re headed in the right direction.

I was going to avoid saying anything more publicly, but I’ve realized that’s inconsistent with my own internal logic

I’ve been considering the reaction to the closing of the Patrick Kane case, both my own and that of social media. I was, initially, going to avoid saying much of anything more publicly, but I’ve realized that’s inconsistent with my own internal logic, so here goes nothing...

First, a bit of context: I have spent a lot time in the past few months researching the investigation, and certainly seeking out more information not presented in reputable media. I have read Sedita’s statement and watched two different (similar but with a few salient differences) half-hour interviews with the DA. To anyone mired in uncertainty, I highly recommend watching at least one of the interviews. The statement was fairly informative but the interviews provide context of the allegations, details of the components of the investigation, and clarity as to the DA’s choices in the statement.

In light of that material, I don’t believe Kane committed the crime he was accused of. To continue to think so would require me to believe that the DA’s office was not only incompetent but outright fabricating evidence that contradicted her story, which is a level of pessimism and conspiracy theory that I’m not able to engage with. Having spent several months assuming Kane is guilty, the transition to presumptive innocence isn’t exactly easy on the mind, but the DA has provided far more information than I ever expected to receive. I do not believe this is wishful thinking on my part, as I gave up all hope of being able to personally believe in Kane’s innocence, or retrieve anything associated with him, the day the allegations broke. It was a long period of time in which I spent accepting of his guilt and emotionally detached from the situation, too long for me to believe that I’ve suddenly regressed to irrational fannish desires.

I don’t believe I’m betraying fellow rape survivors by believing he’s innocent. I don’t believe I’m a bad feminist for believing he’s innocent. I don’t believe I’m supporting a corrupt system by believing he’s innocent. When I did accept his guilt, it was never because I knew in my heart-of-hearts that he did it (lacking even the specifics of the allegations), but because it was statistically likely and thus safer for me, and for the complainant, and for fellow rape survivors at large to act in a way consistent with that. I found those who publicly proclaimed his innocence right off the bat and championed continued support reprehensible.

However, I was wary of the more aggressive actions and more definitive statements made by the presumptive-guilt camp, especially those who claimed things as extreme as “false rape accusations never happen!” First of all, that’s simply not true. The 2–8% number thrown around is, of course, questionable in its accuracy but at least not zero. A 2–8% belief in the accused’s guilt and the accuser’s honesty is the safer choice, but it’s not wise to rest everything on that being the outcome, especially in a case like this were we lacked almost any real information for the majority of the investigation. By making the validity of our dialogue contingent on his guilt, we are not doing the cause any favors. It is possible to have a conversation about how individuals and organizations should act, how we should protect victims, how we should support women who report sexual assault to the police (including this one) without relying on the outcome of a single case. Progress for marginalized groups should never rest on the integrity of single members of those groups.

People say they hate false rape claims because they give misogynists ground to stand on and more reasons to hate women and the feminists who defend them. One way we can give them less ammunition is by making it clear that women deserve support in these situations a priority because of the inherent and historical biases in our society and our legal systems, not because women are always truthful. False rape claims are worthy of despair, but they are neither as damaging as men believe nor as rare as women believe. They are only fatal to the cause if we make their non-existence a prerequisite to giving victims — alleged and proven in a court of law — kind and fair support.

I’ve seen it said — and thought myself — that despite the clarity of the resolution of the Kane investigation it is ‘safer’ to publicly act as if and publicly state that you still believe he is guilty, regardless of your actual beliefs. After some reflection, I don’t believe this is true. First, by continuing to say in public something you do not believe, you are causing others to doubt the reliability of their own minds and morals on the topic. To sit there alone while everyone is saying “this in no way proves the complainant was untruthful!” when the DA is explicitly stating that the complainant was untruthful is both disingenuous and damaging to other people’s emotional states and other women’s ability to trust their own intellect and instinct.

It suggests that if you are a good enough feminist, you will believe Kane is guilty, and if you believe he is innocent, you are broken, anti-feminist garbage. I can’t conclude that that is a more helpful approach to the situation than honesty in your conclusions. Silence, of course, is an option available to all of us, but when one side is silent out of fear of retaliation (as many parts of me would like to be), the end result is the same as joining in the vitriol at the other extreme. If you lie somewhere in the middle, unsure and unable to know what to believe, then that too is a valid conclusion and not one worth feeling shame over. If you truly believe he is guilty, as well, then my intent is not at all to silence you, but to welcome you to engage constructively and with recognition that the other side is not an evil demon to be slayed.

The major argument in favor of continuing to believe the complainant’s allegations are true is that it protects rape victims.

This, more than anything, seems utterly and completely false.

Why? If we, as feminists, as decent human beings, as people with hope that we can improve society, want rape victims to feel safe and comfortable and hopeful when they approach the police to report a sexual assault, we want them to believe the DA’s conclusions are correct. We want them to have confidence that their case will not be dismissed for lack of corroborating evidence, and that their allegations will be listened to and respected. We want them to feel that the DA did a thorough, fair job in this investigation, and to understand that it was dismissed because little to no evidence supported the claim and much evidence contradicted it, and that this is not indicative of what they will experience. Rape victims already know it is very difficult to prove sexual assault in a court of law, but we should not be shouting from the rooftops that this case is an example of that, because it is not. If a person is a victim of rape, they should not have to fear that the forensic evidence and the physical evidence will contradict their story, that no witnesses will corroborate salient details, and that no material evidence supporting their claim will appear.

If we keep shouting that the dismissal of this case is an egregious failure of the legal system, we are doing nothing but telling rape victims "We have no hope." I do not believe this is a better option. Changing your mind is a difficult process, but given the evidence presented by the DA, I believe we have a responsibility to undertake it. It might be more comfortable to refuse to consider the information presented, but I do not believe it’s a better option.

I want rape victims to report their crimes. I do not believe yelling at people that they are trash for believing this woman was not raped is going to achieve that.

Do I think we should call the complainant garbage? No. As Sedita says, we do not know what happened, only that the complainant’s version of events did not happen. I have no need to attack a woman whom I do not know, whom I have nothing to do with. Do I think we should have entertained Kane-sympathizing gossip and unfounded rumors? Absolutely not. Does this require me to continue to believe she was truthful in light of the final report on the closure of the investigation? I don’t in any way believe it does, nor do I believe it is helpful to rape victims going forward.

The bottom line for me is this: there are deep problems in society with how we treat rape allegations involving other parties, particularly when the accused is a male celebrity. We must be able to place the needs of victims over our own emotional attachments and our own discomforts. Nobody should be so attached to a celebrity that his fall from grace is tantamount to the destruction of their happiness, but similarly, no single case should be the totality of our argument for progress. Clinging to proven untruths will neither create the progress we are so desperately seeking nor support rape victims going forward.

So, while I understand the facts of the case and begrudgingly agree with the DA's decision, I still do not like the guy and find him to be a reprehensible human being. Nothing will disappoint me more than one of my greatest struggles interfering with one of my greatest loves.

The Invisibility of an Eating Disorder

Each day is a new day. I wake up with the intention of having nothing more than a coffee for the foreseeable future. I quietly applaud myself if I persist. Each bite of food I take leads to an inner struggle as I question whether I will stay the course and get a light salad thereby cementing my extremely limited caloric intake for the day or do I dare have a sandwich thereby necessitating a insatiable consumption of junk food.

The days alone are easier, there is nothing to hide. I can eat anything that I please with a ravenous gluttony or deny myself necessary sustenance with an unabashed sense of pride. There is rarely an in between.

I cant seem to remember a time where this wasn’t the case. Many have commented on my aptly labeled “weird” eating habits but few have inquired further. Those closer to me have noted that I have a “problem with eating” with little more than exuberant frustration at my decision. As if I have a choice.

Here’s the thing about eating disorders, there is no choice.

In my attempt to manipulate a sense of control over my life and my decisions, I am rendered powerless by food.

I starve myself because I can, because I can control that. Even then though, I cannot, I lose control and I eat. And boy do I eat. A box of cookies, a bag of chips, a cake, because why not? I have already succumbed, what more can I lose? Once the taste of that one cookie has touched my lips, I have already lost, so what difference does a dozen more make? Today is a lost day, I think as I devour the first cookie which will inevitably lead to finishing off the box and looking through menus of food to order.

I am an otherwise intelligent person, and I realize this thought process is neither healthy nor rational, yet here I am still ascribing to it after all these years. And this is where the true invisibility lies.

People can observe the quirky behavior that I take on with food, but in a society where being thin is revered as one of the ultimate bastions of success, the struggle hidden beyond that is rarely ever addressed. The weight loss is applauded with envious compliments. The gluttony is reviled with promises of extended gym trips and future limitations. All of this done with light hearted comments intended to leave little more than superficial commentary but it fuels this invisible battle that I am fighting.