A Moment of Healing, Humility, and Hope

It has been almost a year since I have written anything. Partially this is because I couldn’t think of what to say and partially this is because I have just been too exhausted. This blog has mostly revolved around my thoughts on being in my body and finding acceptance, peace, freedom, and delight as a fat woman. My intention around sharing this content with others was to find my people who were doing the same thing. I am returning to try and articulate where I am on this journey now.

For the past 2 or so years, I have been suffering from an assortment of autoimmune disorders that are barely visible, but guarantee that I am in constant pain. My body is attacking my skin, my muscles, tendons, and joints. It has been very hard to move at all. Yesterday, I woke up and realized that I felt bruised all over my body. I was excited because that means it was going to be a good day. Most days I feel like I am actively being battered from the inside out, so being able to feel bruised, meant that I would be able to move relatively easily. It wasn’t until that moment that I got some perspective on the amount of pain I have been in.

Being unable to move in the ways that nourish me has been hard. Even restorative asana has been challenging. My yoga has been mostly occasional pranayama and meditation when I can muster the attention to be in my body that much. There has been no weightlifting, no walking, no anything really. It is a project to walk across my house or stand in the shower. I don’t brush or floss my teeth as much because it is exhausting. I mean, I have been unimaginably exhausted. Anyone who knows me personally will immediately understand how pissed I have been about this. I have enjoyed being invincible for a long time and now I am stuck on my couch.

I think about my experience teaching yoga to people in large bodies and I can remember many of them had chronic pain and I remember how I perceived that. I can remember watching my students with chronic body pain move through it with clumsy courage. At the time, I felt that I knew what they had to battle to get to the mat. I can tell you now, I was completely wrong. I had no idea. Y’all, it has been my life’s work learning how to be present in my own body, but these last couple of years had me profoundly dissociated. I am now starting over with occupying my body.

About 3 weeks ago I decided to force myself onto my stationary bike for 5 minutes. Those five minutes were some of the worst minutes of my life. I did it the next day because I could tell that the movement, though painful, moved my air and blood around my body and it started to bring me back. I kept up five minutes a day and now I am up to twenty minutes a day. Old me would not have been impressed by this. New me measures success much differently. Yesterday I was able to do four or five basic standing poses, which felt difficult but great. Every day, I begin to inhabit my body a little more, listening for what my body will open to.

All of this non-moving has been incredibly damaging. I have been gaining lots of weight and losing lots of strength. The fat on my body is now causing problems that did not exist before and I have been forced into medications that I dislike very much. Now, fat bodies are vilified and blamed for illness, I will not do that here. Being fat does not universally make one unhealthy. There are many concurrent problems that happen alongside fatness that have nothing to do with body size. For me, however, that is not the case.

Because of my particular point of view about the potential for fat people to maintain their health and dignity, I was very unwilling to look at the role that my body weight was playing in my health. I focused on acceptance. I found doctors that showed empathy and told the truth at the same time. While I have been focusing on acceptance, my body began to attack me more, the interventions started to stack up and I moved more and more away from having a real connection with my body.

I made the decision to have weight loss surgery. I have many feelings about this. I am sad because I have always wanted to find peace for my body on my terms. I am pissed because I wanted to somehow emerge from a lifetime of fat oppression victorious and free from the shame and blame of sexism, diet culture, and the beautification industry. I wanted to find comfort in my fat body. I wanted to embrace pleasure and nourishment as core values in my life. Unfortunately, I can’t battle on all fronts and have the life I want. I am going to have to let go of the battle for fat dignity and move on to reducing the amount of ammunition my body has to attack me with.

Through years of advocating for myself and other fat women, I believe that fat people can live big full lives, experience, joy, pleasure, fitness, love, health, and happiness. My position on this remains unchanged. I maintain the perspective that there is dangerous and false virtue assigned to thinness, fitness, dieting, and athleticism and that virtue ushers us deeper into the heart of capitalism and all manner of oppression including racism, sexism, and classism.

I am aware that weight loss surgery is dangerous and sometimes ineffective. I am aware that it perpetuates the idea that fatness is a problem to be solved. For me, right now, If I am ever going to have a path to health, I must have movement. It is unreasonable to try and reclaim movement from under this weight alongside all of the pain.

Nobody in a fat body including me should be harassed by the medical industry or pushed into surgery like this. I have fired dozens of doctors for recommending this path over the years. At this moment, it’s just me fighting for a quality of life that I have been missing for a couple of years now. I often feel like a lifetime of diet culture has finally broken my spirits, but that is not the truth. The truth is I am making a powerful decision for my future health.

I hope that anyone reading this can trust my mind and be in my corner. I will see you out there walking in the park, in yoga classes, building my strength back. I have a surgery date of Dec 20, 2021

Love,
JGC

Why Are People Fat?

Q: Why are people fat?
A: None of your damn business, but I have somethings to say about this question.

• Some people just have the genetic composure to be fat.

• Some people delight in the bounty of the earth until it expands their bodies.

• Some people are hiding inside their bodies.

• Some people are sick.

• Some people are such profound empaths that they feel all of the hurts in the world and they can’t stop the heaviness of that activity from settling into their being.

• Some people have had other people touch, abuse, exploit their bodies and they no longer wish to be objectified.

• They aren’t the slightest bit interested in complying with thin-ness or diet culture

• They are very very very interested in complying with thin-ness and diet culture, but it has destroyed their ability to have a conversation with their body, and caused them to continually gain weight.

• Some people are fat because their culture allows them to be and they get to fully enjoy their fat bodies.

• Some people like the way it looks and feels.

• Some people are fat for reasons I never thought of.

Here are some theories about fatness that I have been exposed to that we can throw away immediately:

• Fat people are missing some piece of information that you have to give them.

• Fat people are trying to disgust you.

• Fat people don’t care about their bodies.

• Fat people are lazy.

• Fat are stupid.

• Fat people don’t understand calories in calories out.

• Fat people are undisciplined.

• Fat people haven’t found the right diet.

• Fat people have given up on their life.

• Fat people don’t understand their Ayurvedic dosha.

• Fat people are greedy.

• Fat people don’t care about what they eat.

08.19.20 Healing, Raging, and Being a Goddamn Adult Inside A Global WTF Moment

What the actual fuck is happening? Actual Jesus! Holy shit. The veil of civility has been lifted and all of us (especially nice white people) seem pretty shook. People around the world are dying from the combination of a deadly virus and ineptitude, classism and racism which is really pulling into sharp focus the reality that many of us are considered expendable for the greater good of capitalism.

“It is what it is” means sometimes capitalism kills people and our leaders are good with it. Some people are less important than other people’s portfolios. Deal with it.

Fuck that.
Also the goddamn planet is screaming in agony.
Also sexism… which, think this is a much bigger deal than we can tell right now.

Ok, sorry, that was too much. I didn’t mean to punch you in the face with your current reality. It’s worth saying though, that if that did not feel like a punch in the face, we gotta talk. I don’t know what is going on with everyone’s nervous systems, but mine is on fire. While this is unfortunate and uncomfortable, I maintain that this is the correct response for the moment. While I struggle through the discomfort of adapting to this authentically shitty reality, I will communicate continuous gratitude to my body (special shout out to my autoimmune and nervous systems) for keeping it real. Also, and not to put too fine a point on it let’s get to work.

What does this mean? Here’s my hot take. I think it means that we adult way harder and better than what was modeled for us. it means that we ground ourselves in truth and sever our connections to situations and behaviors that are strictly performative and ego based. No more doing anything to look good. From now on we are only doing things that are good (I know…”good” is problematic, but hang in there). We are out of time for anything else.

Are you with me? Great.

This is what I am learning right now. Maybe you knew this already….but this is fresh to me…sort of.

Ok, here’s the other and most important part of adulting. Take responsibility for healing your hurts. Don’t do it alone, but see to it that this is an ongoing project.

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I have spent a lifetime being shamed out of my power. I have been too young, too old, too shitty at spelling, too female, too fat, too southern, or too weird to collaborate with the powers that be. I am trying to look into this a little deeper. I know I have faced actual real discrimination, but I believe the vast majority of my missing out has been a result of my own believing these internalized messages about myself. I think it’s likely that while I was feeling ashamed, people were out in the world waiting for me to show up with all my power but I couldn’t do it. To be clear, I am in no way blaming myself, just observing.

All right, I have power, it is mine, it is inside me. It would be a capital sin of the highest order to have gotten this far down the yellow brick road of systemic oppression to be able to have this view of myself and not figure out what to do next. I have to be honest, my instinct is to give my power away, but I’mma not do that.

I am going to drink a glass of water. I am going to put my feet on the ground. Im going to listen to my beating heart. I will breathe in and out. I will feel the light on my eyelids and the air on my skin. I will breathe deep and expand in sync with the entire universe. I will inhale and pull the rocky mountains, the Gulf of Mexico, the Amazon rain forest, Iceland, the Ganges and the Milky Way into me and exhale my own light back out into those spaces.

Frankly that is the easy part. It’s just breathing with pictures. The hard part, the adult part is feeling the entire energetic universal truth, and letting it witness me. That means I have to open all the way up in ways that have not felt safe before. That part is new and radical.

Do you want to know the difference between feeling safe and being safe (energy-wise)? I really think it is decision. At least, right now at this phase of my life it is. I decide that things are not what they were. I decide that I have built enough capacity to experience my own power. I decide that my own power is in no way divorced from the universe at large and I decide that I can use my light to clean up the mess without injury to myself.

Ok, so I think thats what we do. And then we organize, canvas, and for the love of everything vote.