First we can start with the physicality of it all. Dance, in its traditional ballet form, is an expressive but incredibly restrictive art form. In ballet you body goes through certain fixed movements, there being only about five arm movements in traditional ballet, fluidly. Being en pointe is painful, it pushes you stand taller and stand, literally, on your toes. You get cramps in your feet and legs.
Yet you feel beautiful and graceful
Continue reading[tw: description of tense family relationship, intense anger, and family fights]
If I had to pick one thing to resent my parents for, it would be the inherited anger issues. Well, that and leaving me the responsibility of being the only member of the family to actually work on those issues.
For those who didn’t know me before college, I’d been known to have a short fuse, one hell of a temper, a mean streak, and a distinct lack of filter once I got going. In short, I had a reputation as a feisty little bitch. (And worse behind my back, I’m sure– this one is tame, almost fun.) At college, I’m a lot calmer. It’s an environment removed from my parents and brother where I can actually practice anger management techniques without someone doing their damnedest to escalate anyway, away from the three people on Earth who know how to get under my skin better than anything else.
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Love.
Love can be defined in many ways. Love is what brings people together. Love is what makes the world go round and round. Without love we will all be lost, and it will become a deadly place. Love is wanting the best for them, even though you gave them the best of you and they thought it wasn’t enough. Love is making time for them even though your schedule is busy. Love is ordering extra fries because you know they will get hungry later. Love isn’t always easy, sometimes it can be hard. Love is always seeing the good in them, even though it’s hurting you in the end. Love is when you feel the butterflies in your stomach when you speak to them. Love is when you are willing to put yourself through hell because you know they’re worth it. Love is complex. Love can be full of mixed emotions and beliefs. We always hear songs about love but love is hard to explain sometimes. Someone told me that “it is better to lose your pride with someone you love, rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride”. Love is sacrifice. Love is giving your all no matter what. Love is when your head over heels for someone or something. My friend Ryan said “Love is trust. Most importantly love is an unmovable force that is completely unmatched. ” Love can sometimes drive you crazy, but it also can make you the happiest you’ve ever been. No matter how much you try to deny love, you can’t. It’s the most uncontrollable and unpredictable emotion.
Continue readingIf 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.
Continue readingFinishing the Spring 2020 semester was honestly one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do because of the stress™ of quarantine. So, when I found out I was getting less than a 0% chance to live in a campus apartment with my best friends, I knew I needed to move out of my childhood home. It took me a week to convince my parents I wasn’t joking about moving out. It took me another week to explain how staying at home would break me down to the shell of a human. Eventually I made my point.
My parents’ term (yes, term) of agreement for moving out: Get a job. And a job I got!
A few days into job hunting, I was interviewed and hired at Sonic Drive-In. A week into the job, I was getting used to working with repetitive motion, heavy lifting, and spending uncomfortable lengths of time on weak ankles. We don’t have restaurant mats for support, because at Sonic, we die like men.
Continue readingTW: chest dysphoria, surgery
For as along as I can remember, I’ve always hated my chest. At age 12, I had B cups and by age 21, I had triple DDD. This became especially devastating as I gained a better understanding of my gender identity as a nonbinary individual in my mid twenties. To cope with the body dysphoria and feel somewhat more happy and connected to my body, I began using binders regularly. Being fat and binding is a special kind of torture, especially during humid Maryland summers, but the physical discomfort was always worth the confidence binding gave me.
Bodies scare me. We need them to exist, but they require so much work to maintain and upkeep. Between the mental, emotional, and physical sides of things taking care of a body in an ideal world is a full-time job. When you add in trauma, mental illness, physical illness, difficult living situations, stress from jobs or relationships, and all of the other things that make it more difficult to maintain a body, the amount of effort and time needed can quickly become overwhelming.
Continue readingThere are so many selves we create in order to live our lives easily: as a child, as a sibling, as a student, as a friend, as an employee… When I was younger, I struggled with understanding who I am and what it meant to be me. Teenhood was complicated, as I know it is for almost everyone, but for me this was compounded by my introduction to the internet.
Continue readingAs someone who has grappled with long term health complications since my youth, being confronted with the coronavirus pandemic has been…interesting, to say the least. A lot of things are familiar, albeit still scary: not knowing if and when I’m going to get devastatingly sick and trying to find ways to cope with this is a big one. But another major thing that has stuck with me, and yet, goes comparatively unaddressed is the unshakable feeling of isolation and outright invalidation that comes with living with invisible illnesses during these times.
Continue readingAccessibility is such an umbrella term for so many things- be it mental health, our physical bodies, learning, etc. According to Webster dictionary, it isn’t until we hit the fifth bullet point for it to say, “easily used or accessed by people with disabilities : adapted for use by people with disabilities”. I don’t know about you, but that still doesn’t narrow it down for me.
Unruly Bodies 