✅ You Deserve Love and Protection from Harm
Community Updates
⭐ My friend Naomi is launching the Fat Rebel Portrait Society, a snail mail art subscription, in January. Get a portrait, a write-up, and a quote sticker celebrating a featured rebel every month.
⭐ Did you know I'm in a great local book club? Our next meeting is on November 15th and we're reading Thick and Other Essays. There's still time to join – reply to this email or reach out on Instagram for more info.
⭐ See my friend Molly Z's art on display at Everybody's Coffee in Uptown. It's on display until December.
One Thing I'm Enjoying...
📚 Reading this week: Still enjoying Stag Dance by Torrey Peters. A novel and three stories from a trans writer.
📺 Watching this week: "From" on Netflix, because spooky season doesn't always end right on Halloween! It was on MGM and now Netflix has a few seasons. Harold Perrineau acts his ass off. Great relationship and family drama with a side of scares and bloody good fun!
🎶 Listening to this week: Heavy is the Crown by Anderson.Paak and Cordae. They get real about fatherhood and relationships in a fun rap collaboration that I can't get enough of.
🎉 Happy Friday, Friends!
Let’s go back in time together. Close your eyes. Actually, don’t, because you need them to read this.
Can you think of the first moment you felt ashamed of your body in motion?
Maybe it was gym class. Maybe it was on a playground. Maybe it was when you tried to find a clever way to change your clothes in the locker room so that no one would see your body. (Does anyone remember the switch-a-roo?)
For some folx, it could have been when you had a negative experience with a sport or activity you used to love. Think an injury, a time you didn’t meet your personal best, or when you started feeling like you didn’t belong on a team or in a training group. It could even be when you saw a star teammate succeed and felt shamed by a comparison.
Whatever your story is, that was the moment that movement and shame started becoming tangled up in one another.
As we know, shame is much more than a belief that your body is inherently flawed. It does include that! But it’s also a belief that those flaws make you unworthy of love and protection from harm.
Good news and bad news on that second part.
The bad news? It can be really difficult to learn that you deserve love and protection (and unlearn that you don’t) in movement contexts.
Well, in all contexts, but we’re talking about movement here!
Folx can struggle with this their entire lives. It can manifest in guilt for being in your body, fear of your body being seen, discomfort in asking for or accepting help in movement spaces, and it can even make you believe you don’t want or need physical support the way other people might.
It can make you hold your body a certain way or avoid moving a certain way. It can turn you into a “lone wolf” in movement, only moving your body alone or as an act of self-punishment, or it can trigger a lifetime of people pleasing, which can look like overexercise to achieve thinness or forgoing a movement practice to tend to the needs of others.
The good news?
That second part – the unworthiness – is the only part you need to really tackle in order to defeat that first thing (the belief that your body is inherently flawed). When you solve the second thing, “this flaw makes me unworthy of love and protection,” the first part can get easier to manage.
Let’s return to that painful memory. What’s the flaw you believe your body had in that moment?
Is that flaw a good enough reason to lose access to love and protection?
No, of course it isn’t. You are a human being in a human body, so you deserve love and protection from harm. I don’t care what that flaw is. It has no impact on how much love and protection you deserve.
I hope that if you struggle with body shame this week, this reminder helps you manage any difficult emotions that come up. I’m rooting for you.
Catch you in the next one,
Dana