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Dear Forearms,

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a painting of a dark-skinned woman's arm. She wears a red bracelet on her wrist. The background is yellow.
Art by Mica Gadhia

How are you? Last I checked, you were still a little tender to the touch, but the bruises were fading. Isn’t it amazing how you heal? Is there anything more you need?

I’ve been thinking so much about pain and healing since our massage last Thursday. About how I make repetitive choices that create tension and tightness in you that I ignore until I can’t. About how I am so familiar with your tightness that I don’t even realize how constricted you are. About  how I overlook you when I’m stretching.

And mostly, I’ve been contemplating how the fastest way to release your tension was to sit with some intense discomfort as the massage therapist used a special tool to break up all the knots in your fascia. The sensation created a synesthetic crackling that reverberated in my body. And of course, it’s left you tender and bruised. And also looser. And healing.

I can’t help but compare this experience to what happens when I come against an old wound that’s ready for healing balm. The emotional pain rises sharp and swift. It hurts in its intensity, and I question why I agreed to this. But I sit with it. Teeth gritted. Body tensed. Tears flowing until I surrender. And I breathe. And breathe again. And breathe once more.

As I hold on for another breath, the pain lessens until eventually it’s transformed. I’m tender and bruised. But also lighter.

Healing sometimes comes with pain, but it’s a different kind of pain than what I’ve been holding onto. And it’s worth sitting in the acute discomfort for a while in order to find myself in a new space with a little more clarity about what I need going forward.

And for sure, there are moments of divine grace that bring healing with complete ease. I celebrate those gifts. But however the healing happens, I’m grateful for its miraculousness to create change.

Nicole C. Ayers

Sitting Pretty Review

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orange book cover of Sitting Pretty by Rebekah Taussig. Rebekah sits in her wheelchair, wearing a yellow shirt and black shorts.

I began following Rebekah on Instagram about a year ago, and I was immediately captivated with her turns of phrase. She’s a natural storyteller. When I found out she had a book coming out, I put it high on my wish list. Sitting Pretty did not disappoint.

I felt an immediate connection with Rebekah. I call her Rebekah as if we’re buddies. We’re not. But I feel like we easily could be. We’re about the same age, and memories she shared of growing up often sparked similar memories for me, such as playing house and imagining fantasy romances after watching soap operas.

She writes about living as a disabled woman in a world that often doesn’t consider her needs at all. I appreciated her honesty and her encouragement that we look at even the most uncomfortable aspects of disability, such as the complications of kindness and the way that the cost of healthcare forces people to make hard decisions.

What I most appreciated, though, was her gentle yet insistent urging that we use our imaginations and bring people with diverse bodies to our conversations to improve everyone’s experiences. Rebekah shared her experience as a teacher and how exhausting and grueling the workload and expectations often are, which is amplified for her because her campus’s accessibility makes a task as simple as grabbing lunch an ordeal.

This resonated so deeply because I left teaching because the workload and expectations weren’t sustainable for me, and for so many others, as evidenced by the teacher shortage in many areas. But as Rebekah posits, what if we imagined teaching differently? Could it look different? Could it be kinder to our teachers’ physical, mental, and emotional needs? Could it grow into a more sustainable model that doesn’t burn people out? Of course it could. We just need to imagine it and then work to create it.

Read Sitting Pretty. It will make your ponder a more accessible world long after the you finish the last essay.

Two Book Reviews: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk about Fat and One To Watch

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Book cover of What We Don't Talk about When We Talk about Fat by Aubrey Gordon, creator of Your Fat Friend. White words on red background.

Book cover of One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London. Blue background with drawing of a woman's back. The woman is wearing a pink dress and heels and is holding a diamond ring behind her back. She is surrounded by video cameras.

Over the holidays, I read two books, one nonfiction (What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk about Fat by Aubrey Gordon), one fiction (One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London), that described the experiences of women living in larger bodies. Reading these two books back-to-back amplified their messages of inclusivity and body positivity and showed with poignant clarity the problems with fat phobia.

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk about Fat

In What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon, creator of Your Fat Friend, Gordon writes a series of essays about navigating the world in her body. Her essays are both personal and academic and very readable. She writes about her experiences flying, the assumptions society at large has about her desirability, her medical-care history, and much more.

I appreciated her candor and vulnerability, and I felt like I was attending a master class in how to honor other people’s experiences without being an asshole. The chapter “On Concern and Choice” was a powerful sermon about how much harm we cause when we tell people in larger bodies that we just want them to be “healthy,” a word so loaded in this context with condescenion and righteousness that it’s a weapon.

Gordon writes, “I did not come to body positivity for self-esteem. I came to it for social justice.” And her phenomenal work makes clear why we should all look at body positivity through this lens.

One to Watch

One to Watch, Kate Stayman-London’s debut novel, invites the reader into the fictional life of Bea Shumacher, a plus-size fashion blogger. Bea is charming and smart, and she upends her life when she agrees to be the star of a reality TV show similar to The Bachelorette. Bea knows this is a brilliant career move, and she hopes to inspire women who have never seen a woman with a body similar to theirs, in the role of the romantic heroine, on TV. She’s also committed to not falling in love. Her journey is tender and funny and heartbreaking, and I was engrossed from the first page.

Read Both

When I heard echoes of Aubrey Gordon in One to Watch, I was pleasantly surprised to find that author Kate Stayman-London thanked Aubrey Gordon for her fat activism in the acknowledgments. I highly recommend both books, and if you can read them in close proximity, I think it will deepen your appreciation for both.

A Note on the Word “Fat”

Some people, like Gordon, have chosen to reclaim “fat” as a body descriptor, as an adjective for their bodies, similar to tall, brunette, or thin. You may cheer this on and encourage their empowerment. But there are also lots of folks who have been brutalized by the word and will never choose to use it. For them, that is an empowering choice. As with so many things, this is personal and individual. Let’s honor everyone’s choices. And only use “fat” to describe a body if that body is your own and you’re comfortable with the descriptor, or the person you’re describing has invited you to do so.

Mica Gadhia’s Body Love Note

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I’m so grateful to Mica Gadhia for sharing a love note to her skin tag with me, and with all of you. Learning to accept our bodies, just as they are, is community work.

If you’d love the support of this women’s circle, please send me your love note. You can always share anonymously if you wish.

Mica Gadhia
Illustrator of Love Notes to My Body

Mica’s Conversation with her skin tag

“Well, hello.”

“Hi. I’m a skin tag.”

“Why are you right there on my thigh in that weird spot? There aren’t any other skin things around you. You’re like, right there, in the middle of nowhere.”

“It’s a great place to be.”

“Hunh. I’m not sure it’s a great place for you to be.”

Mica’s Musings

My first thought is about cutting the skin tag off. I saw a kit at the store that gets rid of skin tags, so maybe I’ll go that route.
In the same moment, I think about my role in producing a book about self-love for our bodies and all of its parts. Is it self-love to not want this skin tag here? Why do I not like it? Or do I not like it because the media has told me not to like it?

So I sit.

And I think and journal about the skin tag.

And because no immediate action is clear, I choose to do nothing.

We live in peace for many months.

Then, I go to the dermatologist for a full-body check-up, and I tell the doctor about my skin tag. And this person doesn’t care one way or another about the skin tag. I ask if it needs to come off and they say, “If you want.” 

And then I’m back at the same place where it is I who has to make a choice about a new part of my body.

I don’t feel like I’ve had agency over my body for much of my life, but right now, it’s me and my skin tag, and we’re doing just fine. If I decide one day to get it taken off, I will have a ceremony and thank it for being such a great teacher to me. For now, the skin tag stays so we can walk through life together . . . in love with each other. 

Mica’s Love Note 

Dear Skin Tag, 

Thank you for coming to me and being on my leg. You were unexpected, and I had difficult feelings about you in the beginning. I may have those feelings again someday. If I do, I will definitely work hard to love you and the emotions that I experience the entire time. 

Know this, Skin Tag, I love you and what you’ve done for me. I love that you’re here and being a part of my life. Thank you for joining me on my grand adventure of love and acceptance. You’re a small but powerful journey mate. 

Love, Me

Dear Cervix

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I’ve been giving you side eye for more than a decade now. You’re an integral part of me, but I haven’t wanted much to do with you. Yet I find myself oddly grateful for you during this time of self-isolation.

Once before, because of you, I was forced to stay home for months. With the hindsight that’s only ever available years later, I know I needed to slow down, to learn how to wait, to find a different path.

I’ve been giving you side eye for more than a decade now. You’re an integral part of me, but I haven’t wanted much to do with you. Yet I find myself oddly grateful for you during this time of self-isolation. Once before, because of you, I was forced to stay home for months. With the hindsight that’s only ever available years later, I know I needed to slow down, to learn how to wait, to find a different path.

During my first pregnancy, when you began to open much too early, for no discernible reason, I felt like you failed me. Dashed were my dreams of how my pregnancy would go. Instead of bebopping around with my growing belly on full display, I got thirteen weeks of bedrest. Ninety-one days of feeling lost in my very own Bermuda triangle as I moseyed from my bed to the bathroom to the doctor’s office and back to bed.

The one exciting outing I was allowed—to my sister-in-law’s wedding—ended early with a trip to the drug store to purchase suppositories because my horrendous constipation was causing my belly to cramp and contract. Nothing went according to the plans I had carefully arranged this stage of my life around.

I relinquished so much in that mysterious waiting zone: my idyllic dreams, the pregnancy orgasms, a pain-free back, my identity as a distinct entity, separate from my baby, and eventually my teaching career.

As the days of this Covid-19 lockdown pile up, I’m experiencing déjà vu. Memories of bedrest crowd my mind.

The first few days felt like a vacation in Shocksville. I couldn’t quite comprehend the looming danger or face the particular what-ifs, and it felt pretty nice to sleep in and relax and get special attention.

The following few days were harder. All the plans I’d been making to keep my life “just so” were cancelled. I couldn’t wash my own underwear, much less decorate a nursery. There was no longer plenty of time to make long-term sub plans for my classroom babies. New disappointments arose every day as I realized more things I was missing while I hung out at home: a bachelorette trip, a baby shower, the freedom to go anywhere I wanted, whenever I wanted.

But I tried to hold it together because I was okay. There was no good reason to cry. Other people were looking to me to know how to respond to this crisis, and by golly, I could be the strong one. Even if every moment felt like a slog.

Finally, the breakdown came.

And then the surrender.

Repeat.

I learned how to exist in this new space without making too many plans. To let go of the hustle that had guided my every move for too many years to count. To unhitch from the identity I’d carved out of my profession and to get to curious about who I might be if my world was different.

That curiosity led me to pivot just a couple of short years later from a teacher to a stay-at-home mom, to an editor running my own business, to a published author.

The early days of the Covid-19 pandemic have very much mimicked my bedrest experience: the shock and incomprehension of my new circumstances, but gratitude for a break from the grind; then my futile attempt to power my way through the disappointment of all my book events being cancelled; the snotty heart-broken wails as I lay on my closet floor and grieved my loss.

I’m somewhere between the breakdown and the surrender. In that intense crucible of the waiting room—the place where what I’d planned transmutes into what the divine has planned for me.

I am so grateful to you, Cervix, for that enforced rest twelve years ago because, now that I’m so far on the other side of it, I can clearly see its purpose. There were so many gifts waiting for me that I could never have imagined if I’d stayed that version of me.

The enforced waiting room of Covid-19 is different, of course. The intensity of the waiting is amplified because the whole world is in this space. For far too many, there is loss that feels like too much to hold. Illness that takes people to the brink of death, and maybe beyond. Loss of loved ones. The shuttering of a business that was someone’s life’s work. And for many others, the fear of experiencing similar tragedies is just as hard, especially when circumstances dictate that they can’t stay home to protect themselves because they’re a healthcare worker, or the woman who can’t feed herself, or her family, if she doesn’t show up to her job.

My own lockdown is fairly comfortable. Lockdown is such a dramatic word. I’m not an inmate. I’m snugged up in my pj’s, in my safe and comfy home, trying to keep the balls in the air: the work, the caretaking, the feeding and watering of the plants, animals, and children. Sneaking in moments of breathing and meditation and Wild Soul Movement. Too much screen time. Not enough sweets. Too much booze. Not enough activity. But overall, everything that I need to ride out this pandemic in comfort.

I am so, so grateful for that, and I also recognize how many of my privileges have afforded me this level of safety. I’m also grateful to you. Thank you, Cervix, for opening too early. Had I not been placed on bedrest, I wouldn’t have the experience to lean into that reminds me I can wait. I can trust. I can just “be” in this very terrible moment.

I don’t know yet what is coming after Covid-19, or how the world and her people will be changed for good or bad or both. Or how I will be changed for good or bad or both. But once before, I have been forced into my home, made to sit still, and wait, all the while, hoping and praying for the best. So that’s what I’ll do now. Sit still and wait, all the while, hoping and praying for the best.

A closing to the letter that says: Love, Me

Artwork by Mica Gadhia

Note: This essay was first published in April 2020, a few weeks into the global COVID-19 pandemic.