Weekly Wellness is a community driven project to help each of us adopt a more mindful lifestyle. It is a twelve week experiment wherein we (Laura, myself, and whoever else wants to join) commit to one small change for each of those weeks in an effort to see how even a small shift can reap big rewards. (For the introduction read this and this.)
on fat talk:
a few years ago--just when i was starting to really get well--i dated a man.
and i was honest. as honest as i could be. (remember this?).
and he did what i would have done had i been in his position. he made jokes. and he made me laugh. and his jokes regarding my eating disorder and my health fostered a levity that made me feel normal. oh so normal. and that's not only what i needed, it's what i wanted.
but his jokes, well, they were most assuredly fat talk.
fat talk as humor.
tom (my very, very wise therapist who is an eating and weight disorder specialist) and i would go back and forth on this fat-talk-as-humor-thing. i want to be able to laugh at myself, i would say. i want to be able to make fun of the thing--diminish its power in this way. his response was essentially this: nope. you can diminish the thing and you can be self-deprecating, but not in this way. it's not necessary.
a few months later, after the man i was dating made an exit from my life (at my request), i found myself across the country sitting at a table with a group of people i barely knew. we were eating ice cream and later in the day we were going to play tennis. and i made a joke connecting the two. about how thank god for the tennis to work off the ice cream (something along those lines) and a young man across the table looked right at me and said, no, you don't get to do that. you don't get to make that joke. this is me looking out for you and saying, i'm not going to let you talk about yourself in that way. i'll never forget that moment--it remains one of the most mature (and sexiest) things a man has ever done for me.
it was also in that moment i understood what tom was talking about. i got it. i can be funny and i can be self-deprecating, absolutely. but i don't need to engage in fat talk to do it. those jokes are damaging. period. for the person saying it. and for those who are forced to hear it. and because we cannot know how damaging it is for those listening we must put an end to it. the language of fat and body and devaluation is small and insidious and climbs in under the skin. it affects our behavior before we even know it's happening.
for a good long while now i've been careful of fat talk. careful of engaging in it, quick to point it out (sometimes to the frustration of my friends who dammit, just let them be) but this week was different. there was something about making a formal commitment to abstain from it that was tremendously empowering. i felt lighter. those are the words i do not need. and without them a weight is lifted.
on water:
for the most part i gave up soda (coke and diet coke and pepsi and the like) a few years ago now. started drinking soda water instead--found that what i really wanted was the hit of carbonation more than the taste of the stuff. but there were always the small indulgences. the soda when eating out to dinner. or the can of diet coke at a friend's apartment. a diet-pepsi to get me through the occasional work day.
this week i didn't have any of those occasional cans. didn't even think about them or miss them or want them. it wasn't a conscious decision--just a really nice realization as i became more mindful of the water i was drinking.
a few weeks ago i sat in on a day-long conference centered around food and addiction and does food addiction actually exist? to be honest, much of what was said was over my head--the people speaking were scientists and researchers speaking to other scientist and researchers. but there was a moment when kelly brownell got up to speak (the man is a renowned expert on obesity--seriously look him up) and he was flipping through slides and he pulled up an image of coca plant. this in it's natural form is not dangerous to humans. process it enough and you get cocaine, extremely dangerous. process it even more and you crack cocaine. he then pulled up a slide of water. process it enough and you get coca-cola. diet coke. and on and on. his point was not that soda is as addictive as cocaine. it was that anything processed to that extent--that far removed from nature--is dangerous to consume. the effects of soda may not be immediate--or even fully known, but it certainly isn't good for us.
pass the water, please.
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now onto week two: REST!! to be completely honest, i'm not yet sure what this will mean for me. how can i rest better? my job and my life don't allow for a consistent sleep schedule because every day is different--some nights i don't get home from work until one. but i'm excited to figure out what this week will mean for me. does it mean keeping a cleaner apartment so that i feel more at ease when i'm in it? or climbing into bed as soon as i get home at night? does it mean making an effort to have a plan for my morning already in place the evening before? or maybe it's that one day i'll skip the gym and go for a full-body massage.
what does REST mean for you?
and how did you feel focusing on water consumption? read laura's insights here.
onward to...WEEK TWO: REST (and continued pledge to cut the fat talk).
...
in quotes
There is nothing more beautiful than seeing a person being themselves. Imagine going through you day being unapologetically you.| Steve Maraboll
one stop past Carroll.
sometimes i'll take the subway one stop further than needed. because when the F train leaves carroll street it rises above ground and for just one moment i'm fifteen again, riding the tube in london for the very first time. and once that moment passes and i remember where and who i am i look out over the neighborhood. and i can see the church one block down and i can see my tree-lined street and i can see all the corners i'm falling madly in love with. and as i move up and past them i think, be home soon.
it's the little things.
on finding Ella
Many years ago I found myself in a slip of a restaurant in the West Village drinking red wine with the playwright Sam Shepard.
It was before I graduated school. Before I learned that red wine always leaves me on the bathroom floor. Before I ever really put to pen to paper and figured out just how much it was I loved words.
This is what I remember: Amy Winehouse was on the radio. We talked about horses, his farm, not being terribly keen on New York (my phrasing, not his). And when we walked down the street together he placed his palm against my neck in a way that I've spent every day since hoping some other man will do without me having to ask. I felt like a marionette in his hands and it was heaven.
When the night ended he kindly walked me to the subway.
And that was all.
What everyone wanted to know, right after, as I attempted to describe the event of pseudo-date with famed American Playwright, Sam Shepard, was if he spoke about writing--he's notoriously private about many things.
And the thing is, yes, he did.
I'm quite sure. My only hesitation is that through the muck and fuzz of red wine and that time in my life I don't remember terribly well, could I possibly have made the next bit up? I don't think so because what follows is fascinating and let's be honest, I'm not all that clever. He spoke of his love of music and how what he really wanted to do was be a musician--a rocker--and because he didn't know how, or couldn't, he wrote plays. And writing, just as he did--writing plays--was his music.
I've always been a late-bloomer. Slow to catch on or catch up. I now calm my parents by telling them I have a decidedly longer-arc and surely that's okay?
It was only after college that I fell in love with writing. Only after college that I thought oh, these delicious words that I spent so much catapulting out of my mouth into dark theaters, I quite like the part that happens before.
And it was in other dark theaters, after college, that I stood before stages feeling the literal vibration of sound waves in my chest and the weight of words--the goddamn weight of some very, very good and very true words.
It was love.
Two love stories. Happening side by side. Twin strands that braided together made one long rope that pulled me to dry land. Out of the great big blue and into my life.
I can't write music and I sure as hell can't make it. But everything I've ever written in the last few years has been an attempt at it. My graceless offerings that I lay at the alter of Art. This is my music--small essays made of little more than sounds and beats and that which I hold dear and true.
At the age of eighteen--still many years before meeting Sam--having just moved to New York and knowing nothing--absolutely so little about anything of import--most especially how much I had yet to know, my first boyfriend asked who my Ella was.
I didn't understand the question.
You know, who's your Ella Fitzgerald? What music absolutely undoes you? Hell if I know. Man, I can't wait till you find out. The finding out--that's the best part. I can't tell you how many times I've thought back on that moment--how many times I've written about it. I had no idea as it was being asked how that question would hang over me, inform what was to follow.
Finding Ella.
The search for Ella.
In the past few years I've come to say I found her in the folk movement of the Pacific Northwest. Or maybe the sounds coming out of London these last few years.
But on Monday night, standing on a little patch of grass in Central Park, listening to The Avett Brothers, I thought, oh yes, here she is, this is it.
Nearly nine years later and I've got my answer.
He was right. Damn, he was right. There's nothing like the finding out.
LOVE LIST// septmeber 25
morning lattes . afternoon lattes . lit candles . red brick . Fall . Fall in New York . men on bikes . men with rolled jeans . beards . a little gray in those beards . stripes . cobblestone streets . front stoops and corner stores . high pony tails . pine nuts . corduroy pants . gray corduroy pants . and black ones too . Sunday markets . brunch . the peel of church bells . the Avett Brothers . the dance of water on a horizon . the blessing of Home . a pile of clean laundry . Saturday nights just before . a cupped hand . reminders (the big kind, the life kind) . that quiet sense that it'll all be alright . the promise of Paris . when the man leaning against the wrought iron fence just outside my home declares that the street feels nothing like New York. he could be somewhere in the South. and i laugh and tease, what do you know about the South . that the street feels somehow other . that I am somehow other . from another place--if not the South, a bit deeper down and in .