A confession regarding travel

I am torn about going to Ireland this year...I am always torn about international travel, since early in 2010 when I made a decision to reconsider it.*

I have a sense that international travel has become the new "doesn't count as consumerist" consumer good for Classy, Educated, otherwise non-acquisitive people.

But I don't think it is an unquestionably fine choice to make. And while I pass no judgment on you, it's really important to me to be consistent in practicing what I believe.

There the issue of environmental realism, for one. Flying from one continent to another uses up a lot of petroleum (see also: oil wars) and emits some truly nefarious gases.

There is the question of how I, a person who aspires to live simply and in a way that does not belie my support for economic redistribution, ought to earn and use money.

I want to practice contentment. I don't want to consume senselessly, even of things like travel that I really enjoy. I don't want to accept my entitlement to do things that, in the equitable world where we could all afford to do them, would be environmentally unfeasible for everyone to do.

Certainly what one person chooses to do has little effect on the rest of the world, but still. Impact aside, being consistent, asking the questions, makes me much happier than having everything I "want" does.

I still have not made a permanent decision about international travel, but the question and the unease will not leave me alone. (It's part of the reason why I turned down the internship in Uganda last summer.) So I take it seriously.


*I say "international" because in a USian context that's mostly synonymous with intercontinental/really long-distance. I'm not sure where I would draw the lines. 

At 22, in the company of so great a cloud of witnesses

1.
The father gets custody; the guard is not fired. 

2.
Two levels of amazement: at these things, and that it shocks me at all. Still young enough to be almost speechless at such amazing and everyday injustice! Well, we sigh about how jaded we are, but that's the giveaway. Because, to feel jaded? There's no such thing. It's a very precise catch-22.

Just like with feeling desensitized. I grew up
in San Francisco, and when I was little,
seeing panhandlers made me cry with empathy
and sorrow. When I was somewhat bigger, I was sad
instead about the fact that their suffering no longer
saddened me. Then I just stopped being sad.
Between caring and not-caring, there's
caring-that-you-no-longer-care. But if you're not
back-pedaling from there, you're moving forward:
we may make it to actually jaded.

3.
So don't be speechless. Finding words will matter. Listen:

At such amazing (language the flesh
dressing the bones of a common
frame of reference, and language the bones
themselves:
also young
enough to know I
can use this word because
this amazement as well will be shared,
not by everyone, but by some
of us) injustice...

Remember, there is this word amaze and this other one injustice, which tell us we could not do anything to make ourselves alone in seeing and knowing the referents. There exist these words, and we could not exist apart from everyone else who has said them (is saying them), or from the fact that we are all trusting these words, these bones, like the earth that we walk on.

4.

In your youngness

do not be cynical;
do not be lonely.

We are not the only ones talking about
injustice, fear, doubt or any of the things
that are filling your skull —

The words themselves are proof of
the passage of so many others
here.

It's International Women's Day, and?

And this is what a feminist looks like.
[Welcome to Feminist Coming Out Day.]

Answers

I'm interested to know what feminism means to you, because you mention it fairly often in your posts but I'm not entirely sure what kind of feminism you believe. (It seems to me that feminism can vary widely.)

short version: I believe that many of our ideas about gender are not only wrong, but used to perpetuate inequality and oppression. and that women have gotten the shorter end of the stick in most cultures for a long long time. showing my opposition to these ways of thinking and working to eradicate them from my mind are essential to my concept of justice and my own free existence.

I know this is the complete opposite of your intention, but I think your occasional posts about body image (among many other things) have gotten me frequently (and negatively) obsessing over my own. Advice?

saaad. but moving on: clarification and deets first, advice second.

obsessing over your own body image, or over your own body? (is there a difference? I kind of do believe in meta-body image; sorry if that seems a stupid question.) what have the other factors been? what about the posts had that effect?

(The Box is not in service at present, but anonymous commenting is always enabled. or email me. wie.ein.lied@gmail.com)

Answers

(to questions submitted via The Box. if you find a question interesting, drop me a comment with your own answer. I'd enjoy reading it.)

how do you trust?
how? if you believe it's worth it but it doesn't come easily, I think you have to just muscle past your doubts and pretend to yourself that you do trust whoever it is...act as though you have the feeling of trust and security, until you actually do. this is something I am working on.

What song could you listen to over and over without getting annoyed?
"To the Lighthouse" and "Signs" are the two songs I can (and do) listen to on repeat literally for hours. my trance songs.

Hey, hope I'm not disturbing you but you left a quote in one of your comments before and it really rang true with me. I believe it was "women called beautiful because they threaten no one but themselves" I really wanted to write an opinion article about it for my women's studies class, but I need to know the source of the quote to do so. Could you please let me know where this quote came from? I'd really love to look deeper into the meaning of it. Hope I don't creep you out or anything! ;) Thanks so much!

That was a paraphrase from memory. The exact quote in context:

"I had been willing to accept self-sabotage, but now I refused to sacrifice myself to a society that profited from my pain. I finally understood that my eating disorder symbolized more than personal psychodynamic trauma. Gazing in the mirror at my emaciated body, I observed a woman held up to her culture as the physical ideal because she was starving, self-obsessed and powerless, a woman called beautiful because she threatened no one except herself."

It's from an essay called "The Body Politic," by Abra Fortune Chernik, which I read in an anthology called Listen Up. I would love to hear your thoughts...I think you should email me if you have time. :) [wie.ein.lied at gmail.com]

Who knows what she would do?

"What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women's shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or  climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem so obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like?"

- Naomi Wolf
in The Beauty Myth

The details will be your own, but the joy and defiant freedom that I wish for us are exactly as voracious as this.

Truly awesome news

[click to view larger/read]

Oh, guys! Such good news!

So you remember our little sister in Haiti whom we're sponsoring with monthly payments to help keep her well-fed, healthy, and in school? Jeanima?

I haven't asked you for donations towards her July or August payments yet because her organization still hadn't updated me on her status after the January earthquake. After six months, it seemed like it was time to either ascertain that she was still alive, or stop asking you for your support.

So I called her organization...and I received confirmation that she lives in an area which was not affected by the earthquake. Not only that, but she wrote a letter to us in May which is apparently currently in a bottleneck somewhere in the translation department.

What a gorgeous start to my day that was.

yours,

Holly!

Blood sausage

This bit from Pulp Fiction on Miss Erin's Tumblr reminded me of something that annoys me.

It seems like there are a lot of people who try to encourage body positivity by saying things like, "You don't need to be skinny because lots of men prefer women who aren't!"

As if male preferences should be the deciding factor. Really.

Very nice intentions (maybe), terrible tactic.

Rita: People like it.

Phil: You are new, aren't you? People like blood sausage too. People are morons.

- Groundhog Day

Peace, Beaver

Sometimes it's not possible to know exactly what a person means without knowing where they're coming from and who they're addressing. A reminder for me to give the benefit of the doubt, which I did not do in the case of [recent blogger drama].

For those still interested in the content of the argument, I explained to Kristy Eléna that I interpreted the section of her post I quoted as saying that women have body image issues because they have not been strong enough. Kristy clarified her intent in writing that section:

"my excerpt was not meant to be a blame or to ignore the historical factors that have brought us to this point. that paragraph is meant for a very specific type of woman - one who unfortunately exists in abundance and whom i've had the bad fortune of running into far too often. the woman whose first reaction is to say something horrible and demeaning about another woman for her weight/looks but then turn around and play the 'men make women feel bad' card and 'why aren't we equal yet' and 'why am i not being respected by men.' the woman who is constantly saying 'i'm fat' but not because she actually IS struggling with a weight issue, but because she wants to put down her heavier friends. and though deep down she knows that's a really f-cked up mentality, she keeps doing it because it makes her feel better about herself, and she relies on that instead of actually looking inside and fixing whatever problem is causing it. she blames the models she sees in magazines for her problems when in reality it's HER. it's a 'tough love' paragraph for sure, but i've run out of ways to try and reason with people like that. maybe tough love is the only thing that's left."

You won't catch me writing like that, but I am writing to different people than Kristy Eléna is. Perhaps it's a needed message for some of her audience. I can't say.

I suspect we still disagree in some places, but no more ugly fighting. Yay clarity, yay agenda-free communication.

If the drama made you uneasy, my apologies, friend! It kind of made me yikes too and it's not exactly something I want to cultivate more of. Though you are quite welcome to disagree with me or one another in the comments.

I like you for bearing with me as I get wiser.

as ever,
Holly.

Men don't have body image issues, therefore women have no excuse?

Excerpted from a much longer post on fashion models and body image:

"we all struggle with insecurities and low confidence at times. and that's normal. but we should be more resilient overall, don't you think? throughout history people with extraordinary bodies have been admired. the ancient greeks carved statues of them. how many guys do you know who look like hercules? but i don't see many men complaining endlessly about their bodies, even though men in advertisements are very fit and muscular. we women want the world to treat us as equals, but in the mean time we fall short of acting like equals ourselves. i'm going to be brutally honest with you right here - when a girl starts bitching about her weight and how she hates all these 'skinny models' she loses credibility in my eyes. she comes off as not being smart enough to understand how damaging her words truly are, and that looks aren't everything. i wouldn't hire a girl who spoke that way for a job and if i was a guy i wouldn't date a girl like that unless i was planning on promptly discarding her."

Comparing men and women in this respect is just plain wrong-headed. It only takes a little sociology and history to see that for a very long time, maybe always, there has been A REALLY BIG DIFFERENCE in the ways that the female body and the male body have been treated and perceived. The female body does not mean the same thing as the male body and I'm not sure it ever has.

So all that background, but you look at the fact that women in our time have issues around their bodies more often than men do, and you want to attribute that to the women themselves? Not even a consideration of the radically different economic, religious, and social realities that have been attached to the female body for centuries?

Quite simply, you're missing the significant variable.

***

I would really like to address the writer's mention of classical art, as well as offer an overview of what I mean by "radically different economic, religious, and social realities." To do it properly would basically entail outlining a research paper, but...I do have a good amount of free time this summer. We shall see. I kind of feel I owe it to you.

Tonight I just needed to make a quick venting response, though

Sponsored children in Haiti

No news on our Jeanima yet, but here's what I heard from Compassion (her sponsoring organization) this month:

Of Compassion's 65,000 sponsored children in Haiti, 21,595 lived in the earthquake-affected area.

So far they know of 54 children in their program who have died.

So there's at least a 65%  chance that Jeanima was in a safe area, I guess.

Heartache

I went to the doctor today about a minor concern, just a little inflammation in my heel.

I was sitting next to a tweenish boy and his mother in the waiting room. My ears are a little too sharp, maybe, or too curious.

I heard her say something like, "So you feel like you have to do these exercises?" and thought, Eating disorder. But not very seriously, just my brain skipping around.

But they kept talking and it turned out I was right. These little tidbits: You made yourself throw up. Grandma told me about how you were running around the parking lot and not eating very much. She sent me a picture, I could see your face was different. Push-ups in particular? Were you surprised to find out you'd lost weight? Dr. So-and-So the head of the eating disorders unit. You're thirteen now, what about down the road, if you were giving a concert, you would pass out on stage.

Thirteen. Murmuring, long legs, young face, big feet in Converse. Going to be admitted to an eating disorders unit. When I heard that, a little part of me was running away and sitting down somewhere small and hiding my face and crying hard hard.

I still have to assemble something called "Lake part three" because that's how I am, but today I only want to say, I am sad. Not about my life, but about other things in the world. I know there are glimmers of redemption everywhere, but I am sad that our world has to be so broken. I am sad that a thirteen-year-old person has be in so much pain.

I'm not Catholic, but I'm lighting a St. Jude candle lately when I pray. Patron saint of the helpless and alone, of hopeless cases, of things almost despaired of. Ore por mi, pues estoy solo y sin ayuda...

I light it for who I sometimes am, for the kid in the waiting room, and I light it for you. I do not know who you are, but you know who you are.

Discomfort

"The passage of time has made it easy to say the holocaust in Rwanda should have been stopped with military intervention. We all say never again in comfort. It costs us nothing to be morally judgmental about the past, and it makes us feel good, too."

-Paul Rusesabagina

Of course, I can't withold context. This comes from an article of his about inaction in Darfur.

The dreaded fat talk

I'm glad I don't have close friends who complain about being "fat." I don't really know what I'd say.

There's the obvious: "No, you're skinny!" or a plainer "No, you're not."

But to me, that just sounds like accepting the terms. Like, "You're right, this would be a serious issue if you were fat, because all you're worth is your appearance and how much that lines up with current sociocultural ideals. But fortunately you're not fat! So everything's good!"

Yeah, not so much.

Been reading

I wanted to share this definition of normal eating which I read in two different places recently:

Normal eating is being able to eat when you are hungry and continue eating until you are satisfied....It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful when they are fresh. Normal eating is overeating at times: feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. It is also undereating at times and wishing you had more. Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating. Normal eating takes up some of your time and attention, but keeps its place as only one important area of your life. In short, normal eating is flexible. It varies in response to your emotions, your schedule, your hunger, and your proximity to food.

That's from Ellyn Satter, a dietician and therapist. I know some dietary restrictions aren't always a matter of choice; some people for moral or medical reasons do have to give a lot more time and attention to their eating. But I like what she says. It sounds counter-intuitive after the decades of rubbish that diet culture has taught us, but it used to be intuitive and can be again.

Interviewed

I completely forgot that this interview was going up today, until I saw it come across my reader and went, "Oh, hey, that's me. Ack."

Sarah Von interviewed me for her True Story series. It was a bit scary for me to let someone else steer a conversation about something this personal and achey (I must have emailed her four or five times with small edits to my answers) and I REALLY didn't want to write the typical eating disorder confessional.

But judging by the comments so far, it was a good idea, and it was a good exercise for me to try to tell the thing from beginning to end. Or middle, or wherever this is.

It's not everything, but it's a lot of it.

Assignment: Donate other people's money

All you do is click a button on each site, and a good cause gets revenues from the advertisers. I'm sure you know about these kinds of sites, but I thought a nice list to put them all in one place would not go amiss.

PLEASE hit me up with links to additional click-to-donate sites, and I will add them to the list.

I encourage you to make a habit of visiting these sites, and perhaps post a collection of links like this one on your own internet space. It's small money, of course, but it's not coming from your pocket and it really adds up, because there are a lot of us doing it.

• Bhookh.com
• care2
• A Click for the Forest
• Craig Research Labs
• EcologyFund.com
• die Waldseite [the Forest Site: click the STOP! button]
• The Environment Site
• FreeRice
• Hunger Fighters [will give you a safe pop-up]
• The Hunger Site et al. [tabs along the top for The Animal Rescue Site and others]
• Hungry Children
• Land Care Niagara
• Pajacyk [click the stomach]
• Por Los Chicos [click the blue "Doná" button]
• ripple 
• Semi-Arid Campaign
• Tarahumara Children's Hospital Fund
• YouthNoise

Good medicine

I thought I'd compile a list of my favorite places to find people who are talking about body image, eating disorder recovery, etc.

Internet fiend that I am, I could hardly ignore the interwebs as a potential source of good body-image medicine for myself, and having done the finding, why not share?

Also stuck a few favorite relevant books on at the end.

If you know of something that should be on this list but isn't, please drop me a comment!

Body image:

• Already Pretty
• Operation Beautiful
• REVOLUTION OF REAL WOMEN flickr pool
• rvxn
• Sociological Images 
• Weightless 
• You Are Remarkable

Eating disorder recovery:

• ED Bites
• Men Get Eating Disorders Too
• rvxn
• The Support Letter
• Voice in Recovery  
• Weightless

Recovery support: 

• MentorCONNECT: mentorship and moderated forums for eating disorder recovery
• We Bite Back: "post-pro-ana" site and forum

Blog posts:

• Empty Bellies Do Not Beget Genius 
• How Do You Embrace & Celebrate Your Body? 
• How To Practice Major Mega Supreme Body Love...Daily!
• It's All Good. No, Really. *All* of It. 
• How to Survive a Case of The Uglies 
• Another Reminder 

Books:

• 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food, by Susan Albers
• Intuitive Eating, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch 
• North of Beautiful, by Justina Chen Headley
• Traveling Mercies, by Anne Lamott
• The Beauty Myth, by  Naomi Wolf
• The Good Body, by Eve Ensler 
• Life Inside the "Thin" Cage, by Constance Rhodes
• The Diet Survivor's Handbook, by Judith Matz and Ellen Frankel
• Shannon Cutts' list of nonfiction recovery books
• Sui's list of 8 books to transform your body image and eating

And on Twitter, my list of recovery/body image tweeters.

Addendum

...to my most recent post. (I hadn't intended to stay on this subject, but your response makes me think one or two more posts would be appropriate. More soon.)

I want to clarify that you are not at fault for feeling the effects of a sexist and oppressive beauty culture.

I could not blame you if you feel terrible about yourself. No, no, friends. It is all too understandable

But it is your responsibility to take hold of what tools and help are available to you — so that you can push back against these unfair standards, so that you can claim your right to do what you want in life regardless of what you do or don't do in regards to your appearance.

Responsibility? Do I really mean that? Yes. This is where we come back to the idea that your choices in this area affect all the rest of us.

So do what you need to do to be good and fair to yourself, and in doing that, you will be good and fair to your fellow females. Retrain your thoughts. Don't indulge in self-loathing. Give yourself what you need to be strong, because as we have agreed, it is not an easy fight. Ask for support from people who love you (What does that mean? It means ask them for what you need but can't give yourself.) Give support to them when they need it. Find people who love you and themselves. Reach out for support from a therapist or counselor. Affirm your intrinsic worth and your unique gifts, and affirm the people around you in the same way.

And MOST OF ALL: do not beat yourself up for not having enough self-confidence/love/esteem.
I do this on occasion, and I know I'm not the only one. It's hilariously ironic, but also pretty counterproductive.

Though there are better places ahead for you, where you are now is okay. You are doing your best. The important thing is that you keep moving forward to claim peace and self-confidence. It's what you deserve. It's what we all deserve.

Your surrender is significant

To my fellow females:

For every one of you who capitulates to unfair standards of beauty, it is THAT MUCH HARDER for the rest of us to resist.

When you deny yourself food when you are hungry, when you call yourself names, when you spend way too much money on clothing and makeup, when you let yourself feel guilty for eating dessert, when you spend more time and money than you can afford to on bringing your appearance into line with The Man's dictates, IT AFFECTS US TOO.

It affects me. It affects my friends. It affects my younger sister and my little cousins.

Stop judging your worth by your appearance, like you're some collector's doll or a show dog. Stop doing things that you think are stupid just because it's culturally mandated. Stop accepting standards of beauty without asking where they come from, what they signify, what you think of them. Stop, stop, stop.

Don't you see, this heaviness you feel, we all feel it and for us part of the heaviness is what you have added by complying? And yes, some of your heaviness is my fault. It belongs to me too.

Your compliance is significant. Your surrender carries weight. Your capitulation is not just personal.

I am angry, yes. At myself too. (I promise there's never an imperative statement or word of advice on this blog that I don't write for myself as well as for you.)

I'm going to keep saying no to all this bullshit, even when it hurts and it's really tiring. I'm going to look my reflection in the eye even when it's all wrong, and I'm not going to say that I FEEL FAT like "fat" is an actual emotion. I'm not going to idolize sick women while calling myself a feminist. I'm going to eat as much as I need and I'm going to keep it down, and I'm going to do what I want to do even when I'm not confident in my appearance.

I don't want to come off like I'm saying I'm a saint, somehow stronger than all this and above all this. Frankly, some days I feel like I cannot deal with myself and these pressures, and please, I still struggle with disordered eating to an extent; I know what poison is like.

But I need this defiance even more. I need to know that I am not making this society any more oppressive for those of us born with two X chromosomes.

And you see, the flip side is this: if your surrender means something, then your defiance means even more.

Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal ... therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety ... As soon as the alternative appears, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does not consist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on those pillars of the system and on its unstable foundations.

- Václav Havel

So if you decide to give the finger to The Man and his beauty culture, I'll be there with you. We can stand together and wave at the horizon and tell each other when we notice one of us starting to cave, and then help hold each other up. You won't be there alone. Promise.

love and defiance,

HOLLY.


eta: make sure you read the addendum to this post