Since I was in middle school I’ve dealt with depression and anxiety. I had to find ways to keep myself from going over the edge because sadly during that time I didn’t really feel like I had someone to talk to. Both of my parents are immigrants and if you know, you know. Mental health isn’t a very big thing to them because they grew up being told to get over things and that they’re fine. So they only passed on what they were taught, which is fine I can’t really blame them too much. That only meant that I had to figure it out on my own, so I indulged in music. Mostly Jhene Aiko, she brought me a sense of peace, the beats were soothing, her voice was calm and gentle so honestly she was my escape for a while. Since she helped me so much, whenever I would be sad or in my head I would play her music and it would help me get out of my head. A song by her that has helped me a lot is called W.A.Y.S. Which stands for “why aren’t you smiling”, this song would help me realize that although I’m sad and how I’m feeling is valid, there’s so much to be grateful for.
Now realizing how much music helps me, I try to listen to more upbeat music when I am feeling sad or anxious because it can completely change your mood and vibrations. Honestly, before i used to listen to sad music which would make me sadder. I feel like we’ve all done it before because sometimes you just want to listen to how you feel, but i realized that for me i need to try to get out of the mood as soon as possible before it gets worse. Don’t get me wrong though, i still very much enjoy my “sad” music because alot of the time i can relate to what they’re saying and going through and it’s nice to know that I’m not the only person that feels a specific way. Music can make you realize that we as humans are so much alike.
Music has such a huge influence on people, it can simply be someone’s escape and that’s what it was for me. Unfortunately i don’t have a nice singing voice so i couldn’t really “do” music. But i will always enjoy it, sing other songs, dance to it, just be free when music is on. Thats what it’s about right? Being free and being able to express yourself in a healthy way.
Who am I? I, I’m my thoughts, My dreams, My aspirations. I’m my name, My looks, My imagination. That’s what I see, When I stare, Into my reflection.
My reflection, Ripples in the river of life, The shallow, Shallow river of life. To the world, I am my reflection: I am only what the world sees, Only what the world decides I am. My body is but a vessel; Why must the world ignore me, But acknowledge the vessel?!
Books, merely objects Are still judged By only their covers, So who am I to demand They not judge me By only what they can see. The inside of a book Is where the value lies But most people don’t bother; It’s easier to judge From the outside
My body is a part of me, It embodies my soul My personality, But it is not all I am. I am not my scars, My disability, I am me, A completely separate entity. I, Me, Not just what you see
In class, we were learning about experience, about phenomenology. I understood that with our experiences we add in our senses (taste, touch, sight, hearing). I was honestly stumped on what I could talk about. I know that I have many different experience as a woman. But then I started to think about a specific place that made me feel safe…
As a woman, I feel the constant stress of my body. But I’m not just any woman, I am a brown woman. The pressures of having to keep my grades up or being the perfect brown daughter who lives up to her parent’s expectations. Where would I go to decompress my feelings of doubt and anxiety? Where could I go to make the world go slow for a moment of peace and quiet? The Women’s Center. A home away from home. I can imagine the structure of the room as my safe space. You enter a room filled with posters of colorful affirmations, handouts of mental health awareness. Seeing the names and faces of those who work in the center makes it all that encompassing. I am always greeted with a welcoming smile by the wonderful staff who are ready to care for you. I see a prayer room for those who have no place to go, another for mothers to feed their children. I look to my right and see the many forms of aid. Did you get your period? Take a tampon or pad. As many as you need because your body, your UTERUS, is cared for in this center. Are you sexually active? Go ahead and take some condoms for protection because no one wants any STDs. Coziness is an understatement as you walk further into their center. The round table, to sit and do work or to relax while playing with a fidget toy from the fidget bowl. The hugging of many bookshelves enriched with stories of colored women, LGBTQ+ personas finding themselves, and in those books, a voice that comforts you. A “You are not alone” “You are accepted for who you are” here and there is what you’ll find. Towards the back of the room, soft couches for you to sit down and relax your aching womanly body. My curvy body type just melting away into the cushion, holding me and letting me rest. Are you hungry? Take a bag of chips from the food shelves. No one’s going to judge how you eat or how much. You won’t be judged for being a skinny to thick body type. Every woman is welcome here at the center. I was always scared to enter this environment not knowing that it was so peaceful.
Why didn’t I take the risk of pushing that door open my freshman year? Maybe it was the fear of other women judging me because they felt it was their own space. Was it was the unknown territory that frightened me to my core? Or my shyness because of the people who worked there could see me grabbing feminine products. But now, it has become my home, my safe place for the rest of my college experience. Of course there are other places I consider my home, sometimes it’s not even places. It’s people. My boyfriend is my home, my comfort. He makes me feel imperfectly perfect. But then I begin to wonder, What about men? Where are their safe places? Do they not have a safe space because it’s uncommon? I wonder these things when I walk into the center. Of course men are welcome inside the center, but maybe men are intimidated by the space. I feel like they are intimated by those bold lettered words above the entrance of the door. Maybe they feel like they would be judged for walking in and taking their own time to decompress. I started to think about the people I met in the center, the conversations I’ve had. There was one girl, I’ll call her M, she had Nigerian parents, we had a 20 minute conversation about the freedoms being a woman in college. We talked about relationships, how her parents wanted her to date her own ethnicity. She wished her parents allowed her to do anything. But just because she was a girl, she wasn’t able to go out, even past her driveway. I honestly am happy that I had parents who trusted me even though I was young developing woman in a very dangerous world. She too had came to the center to clear her head. That was the first time in a while that I had been confident enough to start a conversation with a stranger. But being in that environment helped me bring out my extroverted side. I also think it was just the fact that I am able to talk so comfortably to women. I would encourage any woman to go there for any needs they desire. Whether it be to get a tampon or pad, or a place to relax. I hope that anyone who reads this knows that there are places to go when you are feeling down to no energy. So don’t be shy, don’t be afraid to step into that center, you won’t regret it 🙂
If Life is a marathon, Not a sprint, How come then, Everyone is going, So, so fast But I, I’m already behind, And while everyone else, Is having a great day, I toil away
My legs, Slabs beneath me, Holding me up, But barely, My lungs, Burning with every inhale, About to burst, But I cannot stop, I have to keep going, To get to the top, I can’t ever, Ever stop, I want to pause Catch my breath, But that’s not possible, Because the world won’t stop, And the non-existing finish line… Uncrossable
I see them, In the distance, So far, Way ahead of me, Doing better, Crushing this war, Me, however, A nonstarter, I struggle to keep up, Everyone is running, Sprinting, Me, however, A slow trot, Kinda like, A tortoise a lot, In a world full of hares, Speeding by, We both mosey about
I turn my head, I see the hares by me, Wait! I’m not so far behind? I’m actually, Doing kinda fine? My eyes, My mind, They… They deceive me? Why?! How can they not show me reality, When it’s right in front of me
I turn, Timidly, I ask, The hare next to me, How its going, To try and uncover, The secret of her, Great stride, And to my surprise, “I’M SO FAR BEHIND,” She bursts, Impossible. My mind told me I’M the worst! Turns out, I’m not alone, In my pain, and, This hare, Is not a hare, Just a person, And I, I’m not a tortoise
So, I uncover, Life isn’t a sprint, Or a marathon, I figure, It’s a heckin’ triathlon, Ongoing and never-ending And I, I’m not the only one, Who struggles, Because the hares aren’t hares, And my eyes, My eyes lie: I’m doing just fine, Jogging, In my own time
trigger warnings: body dysmorphia, suicide, mentions of disordered eating, illness
If you remember what your body looks like, I think you’re one of the lucky ones. If you don’t, then I’m not so glad this is what we have in common. Coming from an older West Indian family, my body was always a discussion. No matter how many soccer practices I showed up to, salads I ate, nor how well I did in P.E. class, whenever an aunt approached me it was always “You’ve gotten bigger!” Even throughout my adulthood my body has gotten bigger. I know I’m big, but I wish they knew that I didn’t need to be reminded every second of my life.
I think it’s important to note that I wasn’t always fat, but I still struggled with food and dieting at a young age. Having to deal with cholesterol issues during elementary school was the start of my long, relentless relationship with food. I remember sitting in the doctor’s office with my uncle, his eyes glazed over, listening to every word my pediatrician said. My relationship with food not only originates in this moment, but also with my family’s history of heart disease, diabetes, and many other debilitating diseases. By the time I reached high school, my uncle had a coronary angioplasty, stent insertion, triple bypass heart surgery, and several other surgeries for various kinds of cancer. He never wanted me to suffer like he did.
For as long as I can remember, my uncle micro-managed everything that graced my plate. There were even times we fought at the dinner table so he could see whatever takeout I’d brought home. The stress of bringing home any form of food that he would scrutinize started to transfer into other aspects of my life. In middle school I discovered how uncomfortable it made me feel to eat in public spaces. In high school I even went as far as to become the library aide so I could escape the daunting task of consuming food in the adolescent-filled cafeteria and tried my best to retreat back to the library every lunch break. The library was my safe haven, a place of structure for the moments where I felt the most vulnerable. This is still a habit I have today, I always look for security.
It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I started my first romantic relationship. He was beautiful, smart, and even had a piercing on one ear that was the jackpot of my teenage girl fantasies. Being with him was the first time someone told me I was pretty. For someone that had only dreamed of having a boyfriend, that meant the world to me. I naively thought that feeling would last forever. As the pandemic raged on, and quarantine forced us into our isolated nests, there became an evident strain on our relationship. Still, we continued to stay with each other. I never noticed when his demeanor changed or that I couldn’t fit into half of my jeans anymore, or even that I was getting bigger than him. I made a huge mistake. You know that horrible mistake people make when they get lost in a relationship because they already have constant bodily validation? Yeah, that one. I gained the “happy weight”, I let myself go. People hate happy weight because being fat makes you feel empty and alone after a relationship. Nobody thinks that you’re attractive anymore and it feels like now there’s this huge responsibility that you have to get back to when you were skinnier. I fucked up.
Coming out of that relationship I became extremely depressed. I moved back in with my family, back to a space I never felt secure in. Endless nights spent scrolling through Tinder, a space where your body is always being perceived, felt completely invalidating. I was a completely different person. And I didn’t feel that way because I had loved and learned valuable lessons about navigating relationships, but it was because I was fat. Everytime I looked into the mirror, a devil appeared on my shoulder pointing out every flaw on my now monstrous body. It’s like my ego had turned against me.
I didn’t want to live in my body anymore. I thought I was nothing without the comfort of another person telling me I was good enough. I can’t say that I never feel that way today, but I’ve worked on it. I’m not about to go on a spiel about how much it matters to love yourself, nor about how self-love is a journey and not a destination… but would love really be worth it if it meant that I had to be skinny, athletic, or fit any of the aesthetic qualities guys on dating apps wanted? Probably not. But I want to be better, because I know that the moments in between these feelings of doubt and despair are much more important than these superficial views of my body. Though, how I never saw myself changing is still a phenomena to me.
In the end, I’m still trying to upward spiral out of this feeling called body dysmorphia.
There have been so many times that we have allowed our body to be swept away with daily life. But, how often do we learn and establish ways to improve it?
I have failed to work with a system that prioritizes productivity over personhood.
I have chosen moving forward over suffering
I will accept myself to spite a value system that does not want acceptance – but always striving for “better”. If I internalize it, that I am always striving for “better”, then I build a comfortable place for the belief that I will never be enough, to rest upon. Instead, I will build space within myself to be less than ideal.
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 →
Nowadays, we often find ourselves letting society define what is acceptable/not acceptable, or what is beautiful/ugly, e.t.c. So a while ago I was speaking with my friend and she tells me that she wants to go for a swim, but that she can’t go because of the fact that she has a lot of stretch marks on her thighs and stomach. She is not the first person that I have come across that talks about how they feel ashamed and ugly because they have stretch marks. I have also come to realize that this thought process is often associated with women.
In my opinion, this is absolutely nonsense/absurd, just like scars I find stretch marks to be rather beautiful and I feel like it’s one of the things that defines you as a person. This to me also shows our cultural differences because in my country (Nigeria), a woman having stretch marks is actually celebrated. To Nigerians it’s a sign of wealth and healthy living. Society (mostly men) needs to do a better job in giving people the opportunity to be themselves. No one should be insulted/attacked/harassed for having stretch marks because if anything, stretch marks enhances a persons beauty.
I hate birthdays – mine, in particular. It’s just a reminder that I’m getting older – that another year of my time on this earth has passed. And you definitely don’t feel any different than the day before (my grandmother ALWAYS asks me that). Continue reading →
Unruly Bodies 