health

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Exposed (TW: OCD, Perfectionism, Bugs)

If anything has debunked the mind-body split for me, it’s living with OCD. My obsessions are felt as deeply as they are thought. Every day I physically feel my compulsions begging for my submission. In resisting them, my body is flooded with a deep, gnawing unrest.

The normalization of perfectionism convinced me that my OCD was good for me. I looked good on paper – but I see no paper in my skin, my blood, my brain, my bones. I have learned that to save this body, I cannot give everything my best. “Just right” can never be achieved so long as I am the judge. The goalpost moves too quickly to register.

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Queer Brokenness: Intersection with Mental Illness

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Image Source: http://trauma.blog.yorku.ca/2015/12/south-asian-queer-community-lacks-visibility/  (Artist – Jinesh Patel)

(Content and Trigger Warning: Self Harm, Suicide, Substance Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Intimate Partner Violence, Bullying)

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I often find that mental illness and queerness aren’t addressed properly or constructively when talked about together. So often the public at large would have us believe that queerness is a result of mental illness or that mental illness is the result of queerness exclusively. With this in mind, the queer community will often push back on society’s behavior by talking about the two exclusively from each other, frequently ignoring all the ways mental illness intersect. That’s does not go to say that queerness is the result of mental illness or vice versa at all, but rather it shouldn’t be ignored that many people in the queer community go through both because of the way society has constructed and reacted towards queerness. For example, queerness has often been perceived as a deviant thing, it has historically been punished and worked against in a variety of ways. Continue reading →

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A for effort?

My brother and I were driving to school on Friday last week and on the radio they were talking about Obesity. Obesity is a huge problem in the United States of America. More than one-third (35.7 percent) of adults are considered to be obese. More than 1 in 20 (6.3 percent) have extreme obesity. Almost 3 in 4 men (74 percent) are considered to be overweight or obese. These are just numbers and there is more to it than that. But we cannot ignore the amount of health problems that comes with obesity.

So apparently right now some companies are trying things out to reduce the level of obesity in America. I heard them talk on the radio about how companies are considering taxing and also reducing the sugar quantity in all these soft drinks or beverages, in order to get people not to buy it as much and also drop a couple of pounds.

In my opinion, while these sound like interesting methods to cut down the obesity level in America, I just don’t think they would really be effective. Like how much tax are you really going to be allowed to put on something like soda to get people who really want it not to buy it? Maybe reducing the sugar quantity might help, but I feel as though a lot of people might be angered by this.

 

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Can you see my oppression?

For a couple of weeks, I have noticed something that has been circling my life, that something is oppression. Continue reading →

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The Burden of Emotional Labor

A red faced woman stands in front of me with her lips pursed and a pink plush pig toy on the counter in several pieces. She reaches into her bag and throws more white stuffing onto the counter. Along with a balled up receipt, she throws at my chest.  “I want a refund.”

I hate this part. Continue reading →

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Now and Then

At some point in my life I was 325lbs of pure fat. This was a result of me eating too much (having a sweet tooth and loving junk food) and not working out, I did not have any health conditions that caused me to be fat. Something as little as climbing up the stairs to get to my room, would get me breathing heavily and sweating. Looking myself in the mirror was always very difficult because my man-boobs and love-handles would irritate and make me feel uncomfortable. I remember all the insults I received from some of my family members, peers, and even strangers about my weight. Some of them were being hateful and bullies, but most of them were actually just trying to help/motivate me to lose weight. It didn’t matter if they had good or bad intentions, I was always sensitive about my weight.

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Diff’rent Smokes

I remember it was a cold, dark night. I was back at my house in Columbia, and I believe I was in elementary school at the time. Back then, my dad was barely ever home, and this particular night happened to be one of those rare occasions where my mom was not home either. Fortunately, my sister was home to babysit me (sidenote: she is 12 years older than me), but at the time, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her around the house for a good 30 minutes (sidenote: I was kind of needy). So I searched around the house, and finally I thought to look out the little windows to the side of the front door. I could just barely make out a dark figure at the door, with puffs of smoke slowly seeping out the figure’s mouth. The glow of a lit cigarette was also evident. A couple minutes later, after I ran far away from the front door, my sister came back inside. I told her I saw someone (“or something“) smoking right outside our front door. She seemed kind of panicky at this point, but then she replied, “Oh, it was just our neighbors, the Silvermans!”

Nice try, but why blame our nice Jewish neighbors?

Fast forward to the present, and my sister is still smoking. Note that she was just a small girl at a pretty shitty high school at the time of the incident described above; now, she’s a high-powered account executive in her early 30s. She has tried quitting on several different occasions, and just recently, she went about a month without lighting up. But she succumbed to the temptation this past week, blaming it on work stress, and that I could “never understand” how hard it is to really kick the habit. And honestly, I probably never will. From what I can tell, based on her addiction, as well as that of my father and my significant other, the lure of nicotine is terribly strong. It does not matter that the scent of tobacco stains everything she wears. It does not matter how many times my mom has tried to scare my sister with all the ailments and potential disabilities she could develop from a smoking habit. It does not matter that she knows all of this, because that is how true addiction works I guess.

I want to be as supportive as I can, but it’s admittedly becoming tougher by the day. She herself talks about how life was really hard for her, and that our mom was barely ever around when she was growing up. She sometimes gets annoyed with me, saying that she could have been working towards a medical degree too if only my mom was around to encourage her academic growth (she’s doing just fine work-wise though…I mean she’s making more money than most doctors ever will).

She mentioned that she started smoking due to peer pressure (which is weird to me, because I’ve always seen her as such a tough, intimidating person…), and she figured no one around the house would try to stop her. I was fortunate enough, in hindsight, to constantly have my mom there to supervise me and my development into the (arguably) healthy, neurotic asshole that I am today. I was lucky that our family’s financial situation was a million times better, just as I popped out into the world. I did not have to go to the high school my sister graduated from – instead, I ended up attending a much more competitive, high-ranking school (not to mention, most of the students I knew there were more interested in sabotaging my class rank than trying to get me to smoke). But it makes me wonder how much more susceptible I could have been to peer pressure and the lure of cigarettes, alcohol, or other types of drugs if my privileges were not available to me.