The Weight of the Phrase "Body-Positive"

I am small in most senses of the word. I am barely five feet tall. I am a listener, rather than someone who takes control of a conversation. I am generally meek. The one aspect of my life that I am not small in is my body.

I’ve always struggled with my body weight. When I was ten, someone I loved said to me, “If you keep eating like that, you will be as big as a house.” We all know and we’ve read the articles about how damaging this is for kids. They grow up resenting themselves and we need to prevent ourselves from saying things like this to those who look up to us. But what about those of us who heard this before this big body-positivity movement? How do we fix those of us who have it ingrained in us that skinny is beautiful and anything otherwise is lazy and unhealthy?

Skinny, as we have come to learn, is not always healthy. When I was seventeen, I finally opened up to a doctor about the depression I had been struggling with for the last seven years. I was given a prescription for prozac and told that it would take two weeks to feel the effects. After that two weeks, I shed weight like it was my job. Within four months, I had lost twenty pounds. I still have a picture saved somewhere on my computer of my scale that reads ‘109.’ I was amazed. I had not changed my diet or exercise (I ate like shit and played defense on the soccer team) and yet, I was skinny! This skinny was not healthy.

I often said that I was the happiest I have ever been that summer. I had just graduated and I was stuck in limbo between my childhood and adulthood. This was freedom. I tricked myself into believing that I was fixed--that my depression was a thing of the past, and I stopped taking my medication. The happiness lasted--until it didn’t. Because the thing about depression is that it makes you feel like you can never get that low again, and it gives you a few happy moments, whether it be a day, a week, or in my case, a rare couple of months, and then it smacks you in the face.

Freshman year was a shock to my body. I was drinking without the fear of parents lurking, I was no longer involved in a sport as I had been for basically my entire life, and I was more depressed than I had ever been.

At first, I was drinking copiously and eating shitty dining hall food with no changes to my body--I thought I was invincible. I don’t know what to say happened after that. Life caught up with me. I was still drinking and eating, but it was no longer for fun. I was napping for hours in the middle of the day, and most of the time when I wasn’t asleep, I was spending most of my time in my bed. Winter was the hardest, as those with depression know, and I was struggling to keep my head above the water. I started taking my medication again--without consulting a doctor--in hopes that it would work the same way it did the first time and I would lose all the weight I had gained.

Flash forward a few years to me writing this behind a desk at my full time job. I am trying my best not to sound cheesy, but I’ve always verged on sentimentality. Needless to say, I’ve had my ups and I’ve had my downs. I’ve switched medications once, twice, maybe even three times at this point. I’ve gained weight. And It’s okay.

I hesitated before typing that because I was considering typing “and I’m okay with it,” but that’s still a battle that I’m trying to win.

Maybe it was going on long before I knew about it, but there’s no denying that we, as a society, are slowly becoming more and more body-positive. Obviously we still have a long way to go, but things have definitely changed. I have definitely changed along with them.

I share any body-positive article or video I can get my hands on, and I preach body-positivity until my lungs are blue. That’s easy. What’s not so easy is being body positive in my own life. On the outside, I am a round girl who loves her body. I’m that on the inside too, but I can’t deny that there’s a constant struggle against it.

I constantly struggle with the mirror. I struggle when my smaller friends offer to lend me clothing. I struggle when I mention not wanting to wear something because you can see my tummy and they tell me they can't, instead of telling me that showing my tummy is okay. I struggle with losing weight for me and not for the world. I struggle with thinking that someone would love me if I just lost a little weight. I struggle with walking in heels in the workplace, because I am scared the weight of my feet on the ground will disrupt others. I struggle with the thought that if I just lost ten pounds, then I would be happier and I would be able to be body positive. I struggle.

That struggle is not going to go away. As with everyone, there are some days where I absolutely love myself and think that I have never looked more bangin’. There are others where I think that I am the most disgusting piece of trash to exist on this earth simply because I didn’t exercise. Still, there are others where I preach and preach and preach body-positivity, and wonder why I am still struggling with the concept.

Body-positivity is not loving yourself every single second of the day. It is not looking in the mirror and feeling perfect and beautiful. Body-positivity is acknowledging that we’ve been raised in a society where the standards for perfection are always going to be out of reach. It’s learning to love yourself--even though some days you won’t. It’s being able to accept that not every day is going to be perfect and you are not going to feel perfect every day--and that’s okay. This is the first step. Sometimes I scold myself for not practicing what I preach, but acknowledging that it’s not always easy to love yourself makes me realize that I’ve been setting unrealistic standards for my idea of body-positivity. You can feel like shit some days and still be body-positive--the difference is that you pick yourself back up, you remember what you’ve learned and how far you’ve come, and you try again tomorrow.

The End of the World? Nah, Just an Anxiety Attack

Anxiety is scary. I struggled to find a more eloquent way to begin, but the truth of it is that anxiety is fucking scary. I understand anxiety. Most people understand anxiety. The problem is that anxiety is not a universal feeling, and not everyone feels anxiety in the same way.

When I was in high school, I took a psychology class for an elective credit. During our unit on addiction, we watched an episode of Intervention about a heroin addict. I want to point out that I’ve always hated needles--I have a permanently broken blood vessel in my face because I screamed during my pre-kindergarten shots. I had never seen a needle being used in so much detail, though. I turned away when I got shots, and for some reason, I swear TV had less needles than it does now. So for the first time, I got to watch a video of someone shooting heroin. It did not go well. I passed out in the middle of class. This is understandable, it was graphic. The kid who sat next to me passed out in the hallway and was taken to sit next to me in the nurse’s office. The problem was, this image stuck.

I came back to school resumed my daily business. A week later, my psych teacher put on a video. It was a different video and it had nothing to do with needles. Within minutes I got dizzy. I crouched by his desk and whispered “I am feeling sort of dizzy, can I wait in the hall until the video is over” and he said, “Still?”

I took a sociology course the next semester. I let my professor know that I had a “thing” about needles or blood in videos. I stayed for most videos but he would warn me if it would be graphic and I would wait in the hallway. Things got worse when I got to college. I became fearful of videos we watched in class, because I never knew if they would contain medical scenes or blood and gore. If we watched videos I would get dizzy, no matter what type of video. I began to send emails to each of my professors at the beginning of the semester. I sent so many that I had a template for them.

Professor _________,

    I wanted to e-mail you with concerns I have for the semester. While I am working to get accommodations through the office of accessibility, it does take time and I wanted to let you know what was going on before the semester progresses.

    During my senior year of high school, I passed out in class while watching an intervention episode about heroin. I had been diagnosed with depression and anxiety before this, but the incident worsened them considerably over the last four years. I am currently trying to find the best medication and therapy treatments for myself, but it's taking more time than I've anticipated. I have trouble watching any kind of video in a classroom setting--I know it sounds silly, but it gives me terrible anxiety attacks and makes me feel everything from dizziness to nausea when this happens. What I've been able to do in the past is get the information about any videos we are going to watch in class ahead of time so I can be prepared or watch them at home first. Many videos are fine for me--the biggest problem is not knowing if they're going to have blood/gore/needles ahead of time, which causes me anxiety ahead of time because I worry that they will. I know not every professor knows exactly what videos they might show in class ahead of time, and I understand that completely. During videos played in class, it is very possible that I might need to leave the room just to get some air or a drink of water. Full length movies are best for me if I can miss the movie during class and watch it in the comfort of my own home.

    Again, I am working my best to resolve this issue, but I feel that it is better to let my professors know at the beginning of the semester rather than when it happens. I am doing my best to get accommodations and will bring those in as soon as I can. In the meantime, I would appreciate if you would understand that I'm having trouble right now, and if I have to get up during class, it's not because I'm bored, but because I need to take care of myself.

Sorry if this is an inconvenience.

Most of my professors understood. Some even emailed me before classes that they would be showing videos during. A few went above and beyond. One professor constantly sat down with me and the syllabus and went through, one by one, videos that I could stay for, videos I should step out for, and videos I should stay home for. Another professor (of a film class! Good god, Erika, what were you thinking) emailed me before every class and let me know what movies I should skip class for. I am so grateful to those who have shown me accommodations, even though my anxiety over movies did make me sound silly.

Eventually, I worked with a therapist to fix this. Leaving class when a video was turned on was not doing me any good, and it was leaking into my daily life--going to the movies felt more like a chore to me. While this was a quick fix, it didn’t help in the long run. I still to this day have trouble with movies in classroom settings and sometimes otherwise. But because of people who listened to me and didn’t make fun of me when I explained my situation, I began to be able to get better.

Like I said, anxiety is scary. It would be a waste to try and explain it to those who don’t experience it. What do you mean you’re scared of needles??? Haha, hey Erika, look at this needle video! To them, it’s just a fear. I’ve asked friends who see movies before me to warn me if there’s a needle. I know it’s a lot to ask sometimes, but when there is a needle, and I haven’t been warned, it’s the scariest feeling ever. My body goes cold and my palms immediately start to sweat. I start to feel dizzy and I will myself to stay in my seat and just avert my eyes. Often times, though, I have to get up and get a fresh breath of air. When I tell them that there was a needle they didn’t warn me about, I routinely get responses like: “sorry, it was just for like two seconds!”  To me, it feels like it’s going to last forever, and it often ruins the rest of the movie for me, as I spend the remainder trying to calm myself down.

Anxiety comes in all kinds of different forms, too. I have gotten used to what anxiety and panic attacks feel like. I become breathless. My face and fingers start to tingle or go numb. My hand doesn’t look like it belongs to me. I know the routine, I’ve done it enough times that it doesn’t affect my daily life. I stay away from things that might trigger an anxiety attack--caffeine, flashing lights, gory movies. I know the drill.

The other day, I was exhausted. I have worked up to being able to have a cup of green tea in the mornings without being bothered with panic attacks. The tea didn’t work to wake me up, so I got a pepsi. I started to feel panicky, but because I knew it was the caffeine, I was able to ignore it.

Until I got a spot in my vision. This was not something I had experienced before. I tried to blink it away--it was like I had looked into a bright light, but it didn’t fade with time. I covered one eye, and then the other, trying to figure out what had caused it. I went to the restroom, and when I came back, I was hit with a wave of dizziness. I sat down and put my head between my knees, but when it didn’t go away, I stood up to tell my coworker that I thought I needed to lie down for a moment. When I opened my mouth to speak, no words came out. I was finally able to tell her I was feeling very faint, and she took me to the quiet room, where I was not able to calm down. Eventually, my roommate had to come and pick me up. My boss instructed me to go to the doctor to check it out. My dad was worried about a stroke.

When I got home and had something to eat and was able to lay down without worried about my boss getting angry, I began to calm down. I knew that it was not a stroke and it was not a heart attack. It was an anxiety attack--a kind that I had never experienced. I went to the doctor as instructed, and explained to him that I was 98% sure it was an anxiety attack. He wasn’t so sure. The EKG came back normal and I was sent home (he strongly urged me to get blood work done soon, but we’re still working up to that.) No one understood that anxiety can do that to you.

And that’s why anxiety is scary. When a person says that they have anxiety or they’re anxious about something, don’t blow them off. If they tell you that they’re anxious about a certain thing (like needles, for example) don’t disbelieve them or make fun of them. Anxiety is different for everyone, and something that is easy for someone could feel like the end of the world for someone else. I’m not saying that people with anxiety should be coddled--I believe that they should get help to work toward fixing their anxiety--but that’s not going to happen if they are constantly told to calm down or that it’s all in their head.