The first time it happened, it was my mother. What perfect betrayal, like burning down the house where I was born. She grew tired in secret of the long, curved line of her belly, pendant in sweatpants and spreading over her lap when she sat. She hated huffing and puffing up the stairs, and she worried she’d become diabetic. So she underwent a radical form of weight loss surgery that eliminated over half of her gut — and taught me a powerful lesson in how intolerable it was to be like me.

Four kids and a minivan — nobody expected her to bother about her looks anymore. She didn’t tell anyone she was going to do it; she only told me I’d have to look after my younger siblings on the eve of the surgery. She made up her mind and didn’t want their judgments or their approval. The week before was an orgy of overeating that I recall as a conveyor belt of food. Carbonara thick as oil paint on piles of handmade noodles. Pot roast in flour-thickened gravy, potatoes enough to starve the Irish again, followed by bacon sandwiches that blurted mayonnaise from every side when she bit into them.

Even then, she barely cleared the insurance company’s weight requirement. Her doctor told her to make that last week count. Her best friend joked that she must be going in to get her tits done. She laughed and went under the knife at 4’11” and 285 pounds, nearly as wide as she was tall.

My mother was the first woman I knew who moved out of her own body.
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But what she really wanted was to not be like me anymore.

I went to support groups with her, in the year after the surgery. I didn’t go for the endless stories of these recovering fatties who had traded the feeling of being squeezed by the outside world for being strangled to thinness from within. I didn’t go for the stories of divorce so utterly rote and predictable that I struggled not to laugh. Men often marry fat women for very specific reasons. Conditions change and those men split like bananas. I went along because everyone there had once looked like me — and some of them had very nice clothes. They’d trade with one another, a 16 for a 14, a 12 for an 8. They shrunk before my eyes like icicles in spring. The tables marked 26/24/22 filled up and there was no one else to take those elastic dresses and 3X yoga pants. I showed up with a roll of garbage bags.

Why Don’t We Hear Fat Women’s #MeToo Stories?

More than once I inherited someone’s favorite outfit in its entirety, replete with the story of how it made her feel. I would wear that outfit later and remember that she wanted to stop being this so badly that she let someone cut out a large section of her intestines. She had an anchor-shaped scar across her entire abdomen. She vomited every day and shit herself at least once a week, but at least, thank god, it was all worth it because she wasn’t fat anymore.

There were other people I knew who moved out of their bodies, and I could understand why: They knew they had to go. They were being evicted anyway; blown knees and exhausted pancreas pushing them toward desperate measures. Weight loss surgery seemed a fair price if the alternative was death.

But in nearly every case, the alternative was my life.

I used to joke with people that I was my mother’s before picture, in the ubiquitous and devastating tradition of photos taken to reveal dramatic weight loss, the punchline for every ad that sells weight loss to women. Beforewe had shared a silhouette, titanic ass and olympian hips, a pear-shaped and pendulous swing we rode through the world. After I had trouble believing we were the same species, let alone iterations of the same bloodline. Long legs and short arms; freckles and the same crooked pinky finger. But disparity of scale suggested two different climates; two long-separated branches on the tree of life.

Before, my mother had dealt with the way people refuse to take fat women seriously. She had endured the infantilization and desexualization, and she was ready to trade it in. Two days after the surgery, she ignored her doctor’s orders and tried to chug a coke. I watched her stand over the kitchen sink with brown foam pouring from her nose and mouth, knowing herself chastened not by a paternalistic and fatphobic doctor for once, but by the physical reality that her new stomach was the size of a Dixie cup. A month later, I watched her black out after eating a Starburst; the sugar dumped into her bloodstream so fast that it acted like heroin when it hit her vitals. She traded the agony of perception for daily physical torment. After years of trying and failing at diets that never worked for anyone, she chose the nuclear option. She weighed her options and chose this over living a life like mine.

For me, it’s only the surgery that achieves the sharp sensation of abandonment, rejection, and betrayal. I’ve seen friends through every diet, every justification of denial, misery, and elimination. A friend or a cousin will one day lose the ability to converse about anything but carbs or sugar or whole foods or animal products. I’ll stop listening and start nodding. I know they’re trying to move out, move away. They cannot bear to be what we are anymore.

The fat people who become obsessed with counting calories and steps, the ones who try to vacate their bodies a little at a time . . . I don’t worry about them. They’ll never make it. Sooner or later they all come back.

The ones who follow in my mother’s footsteps are the ones that really leave. They get something cut up and cut out, they install new hardware to stop them from eating the world. They pack it in and they don’t return. I stay me.

I’ll be polite to my fellow fatties when they fall prey to the pressure; I understand what they’re going through. Thin people talking diets fill me up with liquid murder. I cannot abide their careful warding, hanging up knots of garlic and crossing themselves three times when they see me coming. I will not listen to their terrified superstition or their smug pseudoscience when they tell me again and again what they are willing to go through rather than become like me. When their talk rolls around to calories and their moral obligation to hate themselves, I typically spread out as wide as I can. I can expand like a jellyfish; it is a particular advantage of the very fat. I conform to the shape of my container like a water balloon. Displaying maximum width, I’ll eat anything I can get my hands on while they talk. On one notable occasion I shut down a discussion on the evils of white rice by calmly eating a trick-or-treating sized bag of mini Snickers while nodding my fat head to show I understood.

In outraged weariness of being seen as a cautionary whale, I seek out ways to weaponize my own image. I haunt thin people at the gym as the Ghost of Fatness Yet to Come. It started off as a demoralizing phenomenon; I began by refusing to shrink away from the pained glances and open hostility I receive for having the audacity to live in a fat body without making a constant apology for myself. My gym in San Francisco is a caricature of bodily obsession. Its ad campaigns are notorious, and lithe trainers cruise the floor like sharks sniffing for blood. There are no other fat people there. An orca among eels, I cast my shadow over their swimming and striving, and they look upon me in naked terror. I am the reason they get up at 5 a.m. and wear a monitor that counts their steps. I am the worst thing that can happen.

‘It’s Because You’re Fat’ — And Other Lies My Doctors Told Me

One after another, the fat people in my life have left me. Not through diet or exercise, not through the much-vaunted “lifestyle change.” They get the surgery and they cross over to the other side. Many of them have been self-accepting, even fat-positive. They came through hell to love themselves and live in their bodies without apologizing. But they’ve gotten tired of haunting the gym. They get tired of people lecturing and begging. They get tired of men at the bar shouting “man the harpoons.” They get tired of their seatmates on airplanes asking to be moved. They get tired of hearing they were too fat to fuck, or that this dress does not come in that size. They’ve done the impossible math: one set of humiliations they’re willing to trade for another. They come to agree with our thin friends; this life is the absolute worst fucking thing that can happen to a person.

I made new friends with a fat girl. She is beautiful and smart and holds an enviable position in my community. I tried several times to engage her in the casual sorority of fat girls, to talk brands and clothes and share a little eye roll at the way things are. She rebuffed me in a kind but cold way, and I didn’t know why. I thought spitefully that she might be one of them, in long recovery from the knife and not yet passing for thin. Months later, she published her own story of dysphoria in a lyrical cry that broke my heart. I adjusted. I took another step in the direction the conclusion toward which most of my life has been leading me: No matter how much they hurt, the actions of others are entirely for and about themselves. They aim those harpoons at their own hearts.

My mother did not opt for invasive surgery to leave me behind. She did it because was tired of the inescapable fight that is life in a fat body. I am not the victim here. I am only a casualty.

Yet another friend went in for the surgery, early this year. I tried to look at her life without judgment, without centering my own emotions, and figure out why she would choose this. We’re old enough now that vanity itself does not seem like enough. Maybe she’s lonely and thinks this is the answer. Maybe she wants to travel without being a spectacle and an inconvenience. Maybe she just wants to live in another body before she dies. In the end it doesn’t matter. She’s doing the thing that everyone but me will understand. It’s what they would do in her place.

The first day I knew she was home and recovering, I briefly considered having a dozen donuts delivered to her door.

But I didn’t. Because there are worse things a person can be than fat.

To read this content in Comic Sans, thanks to one of our awesome readers (That means you, Abby!!), click here.

It’s cool to hate comic sans. But it’s also problematic.

The day my sister, Jessica, discovered Comic Sans, her entire world changed. She’s dyslexic and struggled through school until she was finally diagnosed in her early twenties, enabling her to build up a personal set of tools for navigating the written world.

“For me, being able to use Comic Sans is similar to a mobility aid, or a visual aid, or a hearing aid,” she tells me while we’re both visiting our family in Maryland. “I have other ways of writing and reading, but they’re not like they are for someone who’s not dyslexic.”

The irregular shapes of the letters in Comic Sans allow her to focus on the individual parts of words. While many fonts use repeated shapes to create different letters, such as a “p” rotated to made a “q,” Comic Sans uses few repeated shapes, creating distinct letters (although it does have a mirrored “b” and “d”). Comic Sans is one of a few typefaces recommended by influential organizations like the British Dyslexia Association and the Dyslexia Association of Ireland. Using Comic Sans has made it possible for Jessica to complete a rigorous program in marine zoology at Bangor University in Wales.

The day my sister discovered Comic Sans, her entire world changed.
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Yet despite the fact that Comic Sans is recommended for those with dyslexia, the gatekeepers of graphic-design decency routinely mock those who use it as artistically stunted and uneducated.

It turns out the ongoing joke about the idiocy of Comic Sans is ableist.

Microsoft font designer Vincent Connare created Comic Sans — based on the lettering by John Costanza in the comic book The Dark Knight Returns — to be used for speech bubbles in place of the unacceptably formal Times New Roman. The font was released in 1994.

“Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface but as a solution to a problem with the often overlooked part of a computer program’s interface, the typeface used to communicate the message,” Connare says on his website. “The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way.”

Today, Comic Sans is the font everyone loves to hate. There’s a petition to ban it from Gmail and myriad stories about how terrible it is. Even Weird Al chastises people who use Comic Sans in his music video for “Tacky.” (“Got my new résumé/it’s printed in Comic Sans.”)

A Ban Comics Sans movement began in 1999 with graphic designers Holly and David Combs. In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, Holly said, “Using Comic Sans is like turning up to a black-tie event in a clown costume.” Their manifesto states, “By banding together to eradicate this font from the face of the earth we strive to ensure that future generations will be liberated from this epidemic and never suffer this scourge that is the plague of our time.” Their website sells t-shirts for anyone who wants to drop $26 to make sure their stance on this font plague is clear.

There are other websites dedicated to ridding the world of Comic Sans as well, including a Ban Comic Sans Tumblr page and ComicSansCriminal.com. The latter frustratingly has “Alternative Dyslexia Fonts” on its nav bar, as if acknowledging that attacking Comic Sans disadvantages those who are dyslexic is enough to absolve the site of its ableism. (It is not.)

The line of thinking behind these movements is “quite elitist,” Jessica says. “It’s belittling and condescending.”

The line of thinking behind anti-Comic Sans movements is elitist, belittling, and condescending.
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I asked Jessica to tell me what she’s up against. She’s been told that Comic Sans is “unprofessional. That it’s juvenile. That it’s stupid. That it basically shouldn’t be used for anything at all, unless it is a comic.”

There are fonts that have been specifically created for people with dyslexia, all of which lack the clean minimalism or elegant balance and perfect kerning favored by typography snobs. But they are crucial disability aids. Some are free, such as Lexie Readable (which calls itself “Comic Sans for grown-ups”), Open-Dyslexic, and Dyslexie. Others are for purchase or are publisher-owned and unavailable to the general public.

But for Jessica, Comic Sans is still the best. “I don’t use Open Dyslexic because it’s not as easy for me to read,” Jessica says. “It’s not my font. I was dyslexic before Open Dyslexic happened. My mind has been getting used to Comic Sans.”

Not everyone with dyslexia uses Comic Sans to help them read and write. “Other people with dyslexia find that having colored paper makes it easier,” Jessica says. “Or some people find Arial easier.”

Comic Sans and Arial are readily available because they are included by default in many operating systems and word-processing programs, and they are web-safe fonts. A pamphlet from the office of student services at my sister’s school on accommodations for dyslexic students is printed in Comic Sans on blue paper in both English and Welsh. Other common fonts suggested by the British Dyslexia Association include Century Gothic, Verdana, Calibri, and Trebuchet. (Trebuchet was also designed by Connare.)

According to my sister, the truly villainous font is the ubiquitous Times New Roman. “I don’t know anyone [dyslexic or not] who reads Times New Roman well. It’s definitely my least favorite font.” To her, the serifs turn the text into a dense blur at small sizes. My sister tells me of a particular time Times New Roman made school unnecessarily difficult for her during a tutorial on scientific data analysis and graphing software.

The truly villainous font is the ubiquitous Times New Roman.
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“The lecturer printed out these handouts in Times New Roman. Everyone’s like, ‘Oh my god. This is so easy!’ I handed him the thing back and I was like, ‘It’s not that your instructions are difficult, I cannot read them. I’ve nearly cried three times during this.’”

Since the handout was available online, she was able to modify it into a readable format.

“What I did is I eventually downloaded the handout, blew it up to 16 point font, turned the paper green, and turned it into Comic Sans.” Then the assignment became just as easy as it was for her classmates.

Sometimes people ask Jessica why she doesn’t begin in Comic Sans and then hand in her papers in Arial or Times New Roman.

“Have you ever tried to format a scientific paper when you have to get everything lined up so specifically? You’ve got all of your legends that have to go underneath your figures. 12 points in Comic Sans is not 12 points in Arial is not 12 points in Times New Roman. You can spend hours formatting your paper in Comic Sans and then turn it into 12 point Arial and it will mess up everything.”

In addition, she cannot proofread in a font that’s difficult for her to read. “You cannot fix formatting errors you cannot see!” To her, asking her to change to a font she cannot adequately use “is the epitome of ableism.” Sometimes she can ask someone in her cohort to help her spot errors, but it’s a lot to ask. “I can and have had people in my class look over my work, but you need to understand that we’re not collaborators, they’re my peers. This is an encroachment on their time.”

Asking her to change her font is asking her to take a task that is already very difficult for someone with dyslexia and demanding that she take extra steps to please the aesthetic preferences of someone for whom reading is easy.

“If you work with someone with dyslexia, maybe even if you don’t know if they’re dyslexic, if something is laid out well, if someone has gone through the time to carefully format something, please accept it in whatever color, whatever font people want to use. You never really know what is helping someone. If it’s not hurting you, then just leave it alone.”

People without dyslexia need empathy for those who need concessions to manage the disability. “You have to think about how massive this issue is for me, and you have to think about how tiny the issue is for you.”

In summary, she says:

“Get the fuck over yourself.”

When I shook Leigh’s hand, the first thing I thought was, “He seems wise.” Maybe because he looked poised next to my gracelessness. Shaking his hand was an ordeal. In one hand, I carried a folder containing the interview prompt questions and a consent form for him to sign. In the other, an old school tape recorder—and a pen and a pad, in case the tape recorder finally succumbed to old age.

The first thing I asked was whether Leigh would be okay with my recording our interview. I wanted to have an authentic conversation instead of frantically scrawling everything he said.

He paused. Then he said, “Sure, but I didn’t write any prompts for myself, so I might struggle to articulate some things.” It confirmed my initial perception of him as precise, careful to say exactly what he meant.   

I was interviewing Leigh for The Story of My Name Project, which I coordinated from 2014-2015. The project began as part of my job at FreeState Justice, a nonprofit offering free legal services to low-income LGBTQ Marylanders—including name change services. The call for participants was vague; it asked transgender or non-binary people who had gotten legal name changes if they wanted to participate in a project that celebrated their lives. If they were interested, they could email me.  

And emails came. From people who had gotten legal name changes, but also from people who hadn’t. A transgender woman who kept her birth name. A trans man who had been going by a chosen name for years, but never legally changed it. The mother of a transgender teenage boy.

Each one taught me a little more about the inherent power in claiming a name.

Leigh is transmasculine; he injects testosterone into his muscles so that his appearance will align with his gender. But when he got his name changed to Leigh, he chose the female spelling.

“The name Leigh was traditionally male, until it recently gained popularity as the female spelling of Lee—the female spelling of a gender-neutral name,” he said. “I like how that experience of gender plays out in myself, because I’m read as male almost 100% of the time, but I didn’t want to go with a name that’s unequivocally male.”

At the time we spoke, Leigh was learning not to knee-jerk reject any femininity within himself.

“I associated such negative things with my femininity: times that I had been victimized, times that I had been abused, times that I had been made to feel not good enough. But that’s not all there is to being female. Why should my femininity be something I hate or fear, something I exorcise from my being completely?… I don’t want to perform a caricature of masculinity. That isn’t me.”

Leigh named himself after a woman who was important to him when he was young, whose strength he admired. He said she had been able to help other people, even while she herself was struggling.  

I don’t want to perform a caricature of masculinity. That isn’t me.
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This name has a history of being used as both a girl’s and a boy’s name; Leigh spells it the now-female way—but when one says it out loud, the difference is undetectable. It also has personal significance. To capture such complexity in a name feels like an art.

Monica had known she was trans since she was a child in the ’50s—before there was a word for it. In the ’60s, she ran away from home. “I needed rebellion,” she said. “I never would have transitioned without rebellion. It’s how I found out there was something besides what I was taught growing up, in church and at home.”

For many years, Monica was trying to name what she’d always known on a non-verbal level. But she kept going back into hiding. She tried to be “the perfect man” in her romantic relationships. She got involved with drinking and drugs.

When she got sober, she did so in a men’s recovery house. While there, she kept hearing the name “Monica” in her head. She thought pushing it away would help her stop drinking and drugging; if she could just make it go away, all her problems would go away, too. But sobriety was what brought her out of hiding.

“What I didn’t know was that the more I worked on myself, the more I would find out about my true self,” she said. “In recovery, they talk about peeling away the layers. I was peeling away the layers.”

One night out after the recovery house, her friend made her up. When the friend asked what she thought, her answer was one word: Monica.

When you call a person’s name, you conjure them; their essence is supposed to be contained in that one word. Of the dozens of people I interviewed, no story is the same. For some, like Leigh, the process of choosing a name was more cerebral. Others tried on a few names until one felt right—a more intuitive decision. Another person, Angela, chose her name because as a kid she drew pictures of angels for her mom: “They were the one feminine memory from my pre-transition self.”

But one thing was consistent: Most people knew themselves enough to know exactly why their name fit. Stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge. Perhaps in some cases the process of choosing a name helped people understand themselves. In others, choosing a name was a chance to honor what they already knew—an articulation of self.

In Iceland, they generally use a formula to name babies. Siblings’ last names can be different based on their assigned gender. If a baby is assigned female at birth, for instance, her last name is her dad’s name, followed by the word “daughter.” Both first and last names are usually gendered. Names must only contain letters from the Icelandic alphabet.

The Icelandic Naming Committee approves or denies names, and determines whether given names not used before in Iceland are acceptable. If the naming committee allows it, transgender people—if their gender falls within the binary—can change their name to be more aligned with their gender.  

Stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge.
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In America, parents can give their kid any name. Often, they pick a name before they even meet the baby—let alone know who the baby will be. Grey, who I interviewed for the project, said, “You need something to be called when you’re born—but it’s a big deal for your parents to pick this thing that is going to be such an important part of your life and your identity. It’s a big thing for someone else to decide for you.”

I was given the name “Tyler” at birth, but I couldn’t have chosen a more perfect name. I’m non-binary, assigned female at birth, and was always put on boys’ little league teams as a kid based on the name alone. In early 2017, after years of wearing binders, I got top surgery. Hair grows on my cheeks, neck, and chest. This is from Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and “abnormally high”—according to one endocrinologist—testosterone levels.

Thirteen years ago, I stopped taking the spironolactone (anti-androgen medication) I was prescribed. I like the ritual of shaving my beard in front of the mirror. I liked when a cis male former roommate and I shared a shaving ritual. I like choosing how much facial hair I have at a given time.

I buy most shirts in the boys’ section. Usually when I go to a fancy event, I wear a suit and tie. But I like feeling pretty. I most often wear women’s pants. Occasionally I wear eyeliner, and even more occasionally, mascara. I feel like a slightly femme man, who is a woman, but not. Not all non-binary people think about or express their gender this way—there’s a huge, wonderful range.

Most strangers who aren’t aware of the nuance call me “ma’am.” Most queer strangers ask my pronouns.

“Tyler” fits. Even the cadence of my name, the way it sounds when it comes out of peoples’ mouths—like some people said during their interviews, just feels right.

Sometimes I felt guilty interviewing people who had to go through an arduous process to find a name that felt right. All I did was emerge from the womb.  

Before I entered undergrad, my school “mistakenly” roomed me with a boy. My senior year, when my school actually did begin to offer gender-neutral housing, a cis male friend and I lived together for a few months. But then residential life attempted to take it back, insisting they’d thought I was a boy because of my name. They’d been confused. I thought: “Me too.”

Transgender women are mistaken for boys at birth; they are usually given boys’ names and put on boys’ teams. The fact that something feels off about this is often informative.

Mine is the opposite story, in a way. People would always apologize for putting me with the “wrong” roommate or on the “wrong” team. But I’m not sure what the wrong team would mean.

While working on The Story of My Name Project, I got an email from a trans woman named Tyler, who had been given the name at birth and chosen to keep it. She didn’t know if her story was appropriate for the project, but when she was coming out as trans, she wished she’d seen a story about keeping a name that fit. 

Along with sharing my excitement about my connection to her story, I told her that it was very appropriate; the project had evolved to become more about the importance of having a name that fits, not solely about legal name changes. Hers fit, even if she didn’t have to change it to get there.

Sometimes I felt guilty interviewing people who had to go through an arduous process to find a name that felt right.
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I came to learn the many, layered reasons Tyler’s name resonated. Growing up, Tyler’s parents had been horribly abusive. She said they used the name Tyler as code for “be a man.” But Tyler had known and admired a girl with the name since middle school; she said she would often look at her and think, “If I were a woman, my name would still be Tyler.”

It was not up to Tyler’s abusive parents to decide what the name meant. As she put it, “The name belongs to me, and it always will.”

In Ancient Egypt, people kept their real name secret; it was believed that if someone learned your real name, they’d have power over you. A version of this belief exists in many cultures, legends, and traditions—throughout the world and throughout history.

In the story of Rumplestiltskin, Rumplestiltskin is defeated when the miller’s daughter learns his real name. In The Odyssey, Odysseus is careful not to reveal his true name to the giant, calling himself a word that means “nobody.” Later, when he does reveal his name, it plays a role in his downfall.

There is a belief in the western world, though it’s hard to pinpoint where it originated, that if you can name something, it loses power over you.

If knowing a true name is powerful, then naming yourself is giving yourself a kind of power. Not the kind of legends, where your power lies in having a leg up over someone else. The empowerment in saying, “This is me.”

Dear you,

It’s April, which means National Poetry Month, which means the weather does who knows, which means we’re out of Pisces season and into the more go-get-em Aries (thank god).

I spent March actively sitting with things that scare me. On a work trip to teach patient advocacy at a university in Las Vegas, I used my free time to confront the ways my brain creates problematic patternings that come from hurt, trauma, loss, and scarcity.

Obviously, changing the way one functions, copes, and metabolizes is not something that is done in just one month. Nor should it be. However, the last six months of my life have been full of grief, endless rain, physical pain, stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness; I was ready to work on the common denominator of myself.

So I approached it the way I approach everything: as a scholarly pursuit.

This decision to start actively sitting with wounds and things that frighten me isn’t an entirely new one; I first felt the need to move into another level of therapy and healing last May, while reading Yosa Buson on a park bench in Los Angeles. I was nearly at the end of my tour, I had lost two friends to unspeakable things (one to an accident, one to a long and painful illness), and my dream of having a book in the world had come true. I was strangely undone by the juxtaposition of those two things.

“Coolness – the sound of the bell as it leaves the bell.”

Reading this poem struck me, much like a large piece of resonant metal would, and I’ve never forgotten it. It is always the poem that starts and ends my meditation as I hear the bell chime. “If you ever find yourself wandering off in your practice,” Tara Brach once said, “Just follow the sound of the bell as long as you can.”

I started sitting with the things that scare me (abandonment, not being good enough, social anxiety, grief) because I had reached a place in my healing where it seemed possible to do so without damaging myself; through somatic therapy, talk therapy, EMDR, writing, books, and community (and yes, sometimes even medication) I’ve built a strong base.

I also started meditating because I wanted to be less afraid of dying.

While the death of my maternal grandmother seemed sudden, comparatively, the death of my paternal grandmother was a long, long goodbye. Visiting her was always a practice in sitting with death and dying. At a point, she had been dying for so long that I stopped seeing her hands as they were when I was a child; I gave manicures to nails brittle and aware of time passing.

I’m currently working on translating a collection of poems by an obscure-even-in-his-time Patagonian poet. Today, translating an epitaph on infancy, I came across this line he wrote:

“It is good to understand that we are made of memory,
that time grows without listening to us.
That there are many things we do not understand.”

I turned to a kind of spirituality known for practicing robust and sacred understandings of the rituals of loss and dying, and this was a wise instinct; despite my relatively young age, I’ve experienced more death than most I know who are in a similar station and generation and citizenship in life. It makes good sense to need something larger than our Western framework can hold — and our Western framework does poor work of containing the complex shadow lives of death, dying, aging, grieving.

The white static that happens for people who can’t bear children after they pass their child-bearing years. The solitude of a person who outlives their friends. What to do in the face of a long illness. What to do when your nicest friend is battling terminal illness way too young.

Things that helped change these confront my damaging patterns, my loss of people I love, my creeping self-doubt and bone-tiredness with grey:

• sound meditation (whatever you like, even music, but binaural beats and Tibetan singing bowls worked best for me) 
• visualization (my favorite included imagining being inside of a dirt devil of all of the things I am obligated to do, and then stepping through it to the other side, where a field — in my case, due to my upbringing, cotton — waited for me) 
• disrupting my thoughts with breath* 
• getting right with taking naps (and understanding just exactly how complicated sleep is — for example, we’re the only animals on the planet who force ourselves to get all of our sleep in one fell swoop) 
• active journaling 
• anything & everything by Tara Brach, who combines psychology with mindfulness better than most anyone I’ve seen (and whose voice sounds exactly like my therapist’s, which is comforting to me)

It’s true that your brain cannot be reprogrammed in a month. However, I just went to the same, massive writing conference I go to every year—I just returned last night. It’s 15,000 people who all extrude their loneliness and observative introversion and careful natures and breakup baggage and book deals into the bowels of convention centers at rotating cities every year. It’s a conference I need to go to for my career, and in the past it has filled me with all of the aforementioned toxins, but has also been a beautiful, overwhelming mix of seeing massive amounts of people I love all crammed into bars and coffee shops and libraries and public halls to hear just a few lines of their favorite authors. To click their tongues and shake their heads and say “damn”.

Going this year endowed with the ability to disrupt my body’s anxiety response with breath was life-saving. I felt like I imagine Kevin does in Home Alone, when he seeing the glowing red face of the furnace in the basement and yells I’M NOT AFRAID OF YOU ANYMORE!

It didn’t hurt that Portland was falling all over itself in magnolias, and the sun shone for three days straight at 70 degrees, that I had champagne in the sun with friends, that I got a few freckles and got my cheeks kissed by beloveds, that I overheard two young poets I’d never met before talking about my book in glowing ways, without knowing I could hear them. It didn’t hurt that I came home laden with books that I immediately dove into, and that this week, though it’s raining, I have Spring Break and I am only one day in and have felt so inspired that I’ve already written four new poems.

It doesn’t hurt that my life has been here, beautiful and shining, the whole time. When I need reminding, I can just follow the sound of the bell, leaving the bell.

I love you,
July

There’s this Old Testament story about a locust plague that I used to think of often, in my early twenties. Israel’s gone polytheistic on her theistic deity, and, by the time His punishment has taken full effect, the food’s gone. Wine’s dry. Lights are out. And, everything is full of dead, insect bodies.

“Yet even now!” a little known prophet by the name of Joel would recount Jah’s word to his wayward countrymen, “return to me with all your heart…and I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten” (Joel 2:25).

The years that PTSD ate up my life like a swarm of angry, green vermin, I used to imagine myself—small, in a blue dress—in Bible school, before the rape and rage and confusion, before the depression and years of drunken, tear-filled debauchery, and wish that I could hang my whole life on that, “even now.”

“The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible,” Ta-Nehisi writes to his son in his book, Between the World and Me. “That is precisely why they are so precious.”

I had been living with PTSD for the better part of 9 years when I started craving bacon and cottage cheese hard enough for my husband to start buying it in bulk. By the time I took a pregnancy test, the doctor said I was 8 weeks along — and showed me my baby like a tiny, kidney bean tucked away in the corner of my yolk sac.

At week 12, I found out that he did, in fact, have working kidneys, and I cried at the three inch, tiny human inside me, with the beating, butterfly heart. For a body that had returned to episodes of violence over and over and over again, it was the first time in my adult life that I was producing something — anything — that might be restorative, and I could feel the change. My breasts softened. My anger subsided. And, I started obsessively googling studies that showed pregnancy could improve PTSD.

Then, at week 26, when my baby was as big as a head of kale, a technician at Mt Sinai hit me — and him — with her blue gel wand, so she could see his stomach chambers. He jumped. And I froze — silent. Like so many times before.

When she left the room, my husband said, “We can tell them it’s not OK to do that without asking.”

“I will,” I said. But I wouldn’t. And I couldn’t.

Maladaptive: that’s what my therapist calls it. In studies with rats — which boast a close neurological match to humans — scientists have found that a pregnant rat will experience an almost complete rewiring of her brain circuitry before giving birth. By the time her babies are born, she’s bolder, sharper and more efficient, capturing her cricket prey at four times the speed of non-mom rats.

Even a rat addicted to cocaine can get straight in order to take care of her young. But put her in a cage with an aggressive, sexually charged older male rat, leave him to have his way with her, and she’ll come out at a loss. Her associative learning will suffer. Her stress hormones will spike. She’ll struggle to express maternal behaviors.

While our society fights for the recognition of a woman’s right to efficacy over her body, Sharon Dekel, principal investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, is developing a deeper understanding of what happens if we don’t give women that recognition. Her focus is on the potential negative consequences for a women in childbirth, and, afterward, on another demographic entirely: her children.

In a 2018 study of 685 postpartum women, her research team found that women who suffer from PTSD can have difficulty bonding with their babies — a symptom with the potential to undermine aspects of child development.  

A pregnant rat will experience an almost complete rewiring of her brain circuitry before giving birth—bolder, sharper and more efficient, she can capture her cricket prey at four times the speed of non-mom rats.
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PTSD was a mystery to us before 1975, when, 479,000 cases showed up, all at once. We’d diagnose it just five years later, in 1980, and, eventually uncover one million lifetime PTSD cases from Vietnam. Later, we’d call it a “growing epidemic.”Almost 40 years later, there are as many estimated rape and assault victims as there are veterans alive in the United States, and 94% of them show signs of PTSD.

These women are at a higher risk of developing further mental disorders as a result of birth, according to Dekel. With nearly 4 million women giving birth each year, and up to 12% of them developing postpartum (PP) PTSD, PP-PTSD may be the most substantial, silent societal cost to the American woman’s loss of efficacy that we’ve ever seen.

There’s a whole lot we can’t control. We can’t go back in time and turn the tide of America’s rape epidemic. We can’t control whether a woman is young, whether there’s real risk to her baby, or whether or not it is her first pregnancy (all factors that also drive increased risk).

But in control itself we may find a solution.

Dekel’s studies show that one deciding factor with the potential to positively or negatively override almost everything else in a woman’s situation is her perception of whether or not she feels that she maintained efficacy over the birth process.

Providers would need to consider all the factors influencing her choices to create an environment where a woman is truly in charge, according to Ruth A. Wittmann-Price, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nursing and Health at DeSales University.

In a 2004 theory entitled, “Emancipation in decision-making in women’s health care,” she purports that a woman is almost always influenced by her own empowerment and personal knowledge in a situation, the social norms that exist around her, whether or not she has opportunity for reflection and if she is operating within a flexible environment.

To develop decision science without discussion of oppression and an emancipation process in the humanistic care of women, Wittmann-Price points out, would be to deny obvious barriers to shared decision-making. And my own emancipation began with the realization that I wasn’t ready to assert myself.

In the weeks that followed, while my nursery sat full of unpacked boxes, my husband and I focused our preparation on my mental well being. In the process, I learned that my experience of assault had taught me everything I needed to know. My requests would not be honored. My consent would be assumed. The power dynamics over me would be strong. I’d feel lesser, possibly even guilty for saying what I needed. It was up to me to change that narrative, even when my brain insisted otherwise.

There are all kinds of pre-existing factors that may influence how you react to a high-stress situation, according to Jim Hopper, PhD, a nationally recognized expert on psychological trauma. It starts with what he calls the hardwired, evolutionary stuff, that can predispose reflexive responses. Then, there’s your prior learning history, your childhood, how you dealt with aggressive and dominant people growing up, socialization and habit based prior learning.

In an environment like birth, they have the power to influence everything. The day I went into labor, they were all there — the reflex, the learning history, the socialization and the knee jerk responses. But in the small, sacred space between my disorder and identity, I found enough dissonance to use my voice. Through it, I developed my three most poignant memories of that day.

The most powerful is when I met my son — perfect, and purple, with a head full of thick, black hair. I had been pushing for three hours when his head and left shoulder finally ripped through my episiotomy, and I pulled the rest of him out of me and into my arms.

I love you. I love you. I love you. And I had never felt a love like that.

The second was labor hour eight, when I called out our epidural safe word: pineapple. My husband I had developed it based on a mutual understanding that in order to try for a non-medicated birth, I’d need to yell for an epidural without actually meaning it. Under no circumstances was he to agree to giving me one, unless I said the word.

We’d tossed around other words: pumpernickel (too long), coffee (too common), and watermelon (too much red puke in my recent past). Ultimately, pineapple it was.

Pineapple: put a needle of ropivacaine hydrochloride in my god damn spine, and do it now.

I’d said my safe word three times, and requested she turn the pitocin off twice, by the time my midwife, buried in the corner in a rousing game of Tetris, slowly said, “I think we’re here to have a baby, and we don’t want to slow things down.” But I knew my brain, and my body. The pain of pitocin-induced contractions was driving me toward a place I couldn’t go again. A place where the world would go dark, and I’d be on my back, in pain, submitting to someone else again.

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By the time she reluctantly, slowly, moved across the room, and did what I asked, I’d involved advocates. My husband and doula, who had spent hours of deep conversation understanding my trauma cues, concerns and triggers, knew when to ensure I got results.

“Get her an epidural, now,” I heard him say.

“Turn the pitocin off — she’s asked you multiple times,” my Doula added.

“She can contract on her own. Let her do it.”

When I heard the beep of the machine turning off behind me, the pain I was feeling, six hours into hard contractions, didn’t improve in the least. Mentally, however, I was back in charge. And somewhere, deep inside me, I felt like the most powerful woman alive.

“But to let the baby out,” writes Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts, “you have to be willing to go to pieces.” And pushing my son out put me past the brink of what I thought was physically possible.

I was told I’d get a second wind — some kind of strength I didn’t expect, especially when I saw the top of his head. But I didn’t feel anything except panic. I was going to pass out. I needed to puke. I couldn’t find the strength to push.

I have had the power siphoned from my body like a balloon blown up and let go. I have spent years picking my way with the gullied parts of me, where it no longer exists.

But I have never been more palpably aware of the power in, and over, my body than on floor 3M at Brooklyn hospital, on my back, minutes before midnight, when my midwife told me to stop breathing.

She said it like I had no other option: breathe, or birth a baby.

You’re not working hard enough (while pulling on the inside of my labia).

It’s been too long (while checking her watch).

You just don’t seem to want this (looking at me).

Poor kid, he’s got such a headache (looking at him).

I argued—on my back—insisting I needed air. Needed more time. Needed help.

Inside, feeling like I’d failed—like I didn’t love him enough to get him out. Like all the other women in the world knew how to give birth, but not me.

Human memory is a sensory experience, writes Bessel van der Kolk, a Boston-based psychiatrist noted for his research in the area of post-traumatic stress. And when a nurse grabbed my foot, I wasn’t in the delivery room anymore.

I was 21. And, someone else had their hand on my foot. Someone else was tucking it under their arm. And, someone else was telling me to be quiet, while they had their way with me, in ways I’d been trying to forget ever since.

Sexual assault is horrific in its own right. But it should be understood in the broader context of what causes long-term trauma in the body, which typically has two things in common: loss of empowerment and loss of human connection—i.e. being treated as an object—according to Hopper.

Inside I felt like I’d failed—like I didn’t love him enough to get him out. Like all the other women in the world knew how to give birth, but not me.
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I felt both, in that moment. But I did what I wished I would have done, the first time. I yelled.

Get away from my foot, get my husband now, kind of yelling.

Don’t fucking touch me. I’ll push when I’m ready.

My bed a bailey, my partner and doula standing citadels, we enforced my requests.

I breathed.

I slept.

When I woke up, I ran my own fingers around my baby’s temporal bone, and noticed there something in my perineum that wouldn’t move — something that had it taunt and hard, like a rock, and not budging.

“Just cut me,” I said.

“You have room.”

“No I don’t. Do it.”

I had no way of seeing that my son’s hand was against his face, blocking his head from coming further than I’d pushed it, but that’s exactly how I would deliver him, an hour later, suckling his knuckles, heartbeat steady, on his path through my birth canal.

“I didn’t realize!” my midwife would call out. But somewhere, in the place that exists only between a woman and her body, I’d know that I did. And that I’d done what I wanted, midwives and naturalists, birth advocates and medical advisors be damned.

While there’s no concrete proof that my assertion of self in my birth kept me—a woman with almost all the risk factors of PP-PTSD—safe, Dekel points out that her studies show that a woman’s positive appraisal of her birth experience may have more to do with her mental health than the experience itself.

She’s encouraged by the fact that woman today are being screened for depression during pregnancy and postpartum, but notes we need to do more.

“Currently I don’t know of any program that focuses on empowering mothers or women prior to giving birth or postpartum,” she says. “There’s nothing routinely implemented to screen women at risk for developing PP-PTSD.”

Her hope is to that alongside others, her team can develop a more holistic approach to obstetrical care that integrates a better kind of team collaboration between psychiatry, psychology and OB department.

I still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, mid-flashback of myself like a rat locked in a cage, while someone else has their way with me. I struggle with confusion. I wonder about efficiency. Like many women who have been sexually assaulted, I struggled at first with feeling like breastfeeding was a hostile take-over of my body.

A single sound or stirring from my son can cut through all that. Suddenly, my confusion is gone. And, in its place, a connection that feels as natural as breathing.   

I have another flashback that comes to me, increasingly often, in that place. In it, I see my husband’s teary face, looking at me, looking at my son.

“Look what you did!” he says.

“I’m just going to stitch you up,” the midwife adds, from somewhere beneath me.

I don’t have to close my eyes to feel the warmth of my son breathing on me, after that. Or, to feel the warp and weft of the needle, putting back together parts of me I used to believe were broken for good.

After 11 years in New York City, at the age of 46, I was ready for a change. So I decided to move to the city that had fascinated me since my childhood in rural Maine: New Orleans.

In New Orleans, I imagined as I packed up my small apartment, I would live in a place with lofty ceilings, shuttered windows, slowly spinning ceiling fans, and, that precious luxury in New York, a yard. Or a porch. Or a balcony. In any case, not a fire escape.

In New York, I worked long hours as a copy editor. In New Orleans, I envisioned life, like that ceiling fan, moving at a gentler, more rhythmic pace. Instead of getting by in a city that often treated strangers with indifference, disdain, or outright hostility, I would finally feel like I had found a place to call home, a place that greeted strangers with warmth. I would host parties with my roommate and partake of everything that made New Orleans New Orleans: live jazz in small clubs, costuming on Mardi Gras day, and eating grilled shrimp po’boys from the corner store, boiled crawfish in someone’s backyard, hot beignets when friends came to town, and creamy, buttery bowls of that Southern staple, grits.

It all came to pass: a fine apartment, parties, and the food. Except the grits. I had been living in New Orleans for a little over two years before I finally ate them, in a psychiatric facility in Broussard, Louisiana.

Of course, the move from New York was challenging, and it took a year before I felt settled in New Orleans. But when I did, I felt like I had finally arrived in a place to call home. I pitied people who had to make their homes elsewhere, in staid cities or relentlessly ambitious ones. Anyplace else seemed drab in comparison.

I loved the architecture—the Creole cottages, the shotgun houses, the Garden District mansions. I loved the graveyards with their sunbaked mausoleums that contained the bones of generations of families, and the lizards that scuttled across the marble and stones. I loved the music that defied time, drifting from houses in the morning, the midafternoon, the evening. I loved how saying “hello” or “morning” to someone you passed on the sidewalk and had never seen before was just a part of being part of the city’s flow. I loved the French Quarter apartment a new friend and I found. The wraparound balcony allowed us views of both Esplanade Avenue and Burgundy Street, and I would lift one of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my bedroom to access it. I loved the strands of Mardi Gras beads that dangled from people’s porches and fences and from the trees on St. Charles Avenue; I even loved the beads of broken necklaces that lay in the street when my bike tires crushed them; they gave a satisfying pop, one last burst of color.

And perhaps most of all, I loved who I was in New Orleans. As an adolescent, I’d been so afraid of people that whenever someone knocked on our front door, I’d hide, crouching low beneath a window or wedging myself behind the chimney. When I left home, that fear released its grip ever so slightly, but I still spent decades believing I shouldn’t occupy too much space or attract too much attention because I wasn’t worthy of it.

In New Orleans I felt free to expand. Although everything in New Orleans felt new to me, I knew I hadn’t discovered any of it. New Orleans had allowed me to discover myself. I finally felt like I belonged, especially on Mardi Gras when the celebration and the liberation from the everyday courses through people, linking them all.

My second Mardi Gras, when I’d been living in New Orleans for a year and a half, I came up with a theme for my costume: Death Takes a Holiday. I strolled with friends through the Marigny and the Bywater in a green lace bra and a multicolored sarong with thin black suede gloves, a small, tattered black silk umbrella, and a black veil as my accessories, and beach-ready flip-flops. Crossing back over the railroad tracks that run parallel to Press Street, I lay down for a photo after positioning my arms, legs, and umbrella carefully. I may have resembled a colorfully attired corpse, but I had never felt so triumphantly alive.

Early one morning when I was headed to my favorite coffee shop for my daily mocha before I began work, I passed two young women, both dressed in strapless black evening gowns with elbow-length black gloves and high heels. They were still giddy from whatever evening they were just returning home from. “How are we ever going to live anywhere else?” one woman asked the other, and I understood exactly what she meant.

Broussard is 140 miles southeast of New Orleans, roughly a two-hour drive. But in respects other than geographic, it’s much further away. Broussard is part of Cajun country, something that patients from the area—which was most of them—remarked on.

“I’m a coonass,” one of the patients said with a laugh as we stood around the nurses’ station waiting for a technician to unlock the room where we ate our meals and, during recreational therapy, colored worksheets or painted ornaments. She was a woman in her early sixties who applied her makeup at the nurses’ station every morning; her Michael Kors wardrobe had drawn several comments from the techs when they were unpacking her suitcase and cataloging its contents shortly after her arrival. The only other time I had heard “coonass” spoken with pride and affection was in a roadside bar in a random little town, where a patron had introduced herself to me and my road-tripping friends from New York.

When the other patients found out I was from New Orleans, their response was “How did you wind up here?” They weren’t asking how I had wound up in a psychiatric hospital—we were all there for a mental affliction or an addiction or in some cases both. They couldn’t understand what I was doing so far from the city.

I had trouble understanding it myself. I knew the immediate series of events that had brought me here: the four-month slide into deepening depression, as the antidepressant I’d been on for the past 21 years resisted any add-on medication my psychiatrist prescribed; the decision to commit myself; the snarled plans, and the trip to the hospital emergency room. But what I couldn’t quite fathom was how my sense of myself, solid and secure, had vanished so quickly. Just six months earlier, I’d been playing pool, badly but joyfully, and dancing with strangers to live blues music at a house party. Slowly but steadily, I was consumed by depression until there was nothing left except for an unrelenting sensation of helplessness and terror, and the total absence of joy or even simple pleasure.

Depression caused me to contract, to draw inward and retreat from the larger world, which seemed to have no place for me. But the island of my depression was no secure place either—it had shrunk rapidly, leaving me without firm ground to stand on. Instead, beneath my feet was . . . emptiness, a void that made living moment to moment excruciating. I would get into bed at 3:00 p.m., with the intention of taking a brief nap, but five, 10, 18 hours later, I was still in bed, terrified and trembling, unable to move.

Depression caused me to contract, to draw inward and retreat from the larger world.
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Even if I could get out of bed, what was the point? Life had been leached of all color and texture; it was just an unending stretch of bleak terrain that I would have to drag myself across until I died, whether naturally or by my own hand. The desperation required to commit suicide, that I had in excess; the energy, though, I was unable to muster.

A “good” day had become one in which I felt a brief lift, not so much a release from depression as a temporary cessation, the hint of freedom. And those good days felt fragile, like a moth’s wings coated with a powdery substance that could be disturbed by the slightest touch.

Thirty-six hours before I entered the psychiatric facility, I went to a corner store and picked up a grilled shrimp po’boy—dressed and on French bread, of course—for dinner, and a Klondike bar for dessert. I had made plans to commit myself, so this felt like a last meal, a few of my favorite foods, before I left my current life and went someplace unknown, someplace that scared me. And though I, unlike an inmate on death row, would return from the facility, I wouldn’t come back the same as I’d left. It was a death of sorts, so I fed myself well.

I had spent the day readying myself for a week as an in-patient at a local facility with one open bed: setting up my e-mail with an out-of-office reply, notifying a few friends, packing. (What does one wear on one’s first day in a psychiatric facility? I texted a friend. A fly-as-hell pinstripe suit and wingtips, he responded.)

I felt optimistic, almost cheerful, for the first time in months. With the decision to commit myself made, I experienced a surge in energy. Spending a week in a psychiatric facility would be similar to the three years I’d spent getting my MFA in creative writing—a different objective and environment, of course, but both were about commitment. Each was an immersion in something not necessarily taken seriously or acknowledged as essential in the larger world. Mental health, writing: both were challenging to focus on and make any headway on when work deadlines had to be met, laundry done, meals made, dishes washed, the trash taken out, the cat fed.

The next morning, though, the empty bed had been filled, and the events that followed felt torturously drawn out: My roommate and I went to an emergency room, where we waited seven hours before a facility with an open bed was found; it was another five hours before a vehicle arrived to take me to the facility, and two and a half hours more before we arrived at the facility.

By then, I was a shivering wreck, just able to shuffle from the backseat of the vehicle in the hospital-provided boxy blue paper top, equally shapeless paper pants, and bright-yellow socks with traction soles to the entrance, where a tech was waiting.

Forty-eight hours after my last-meal shrimp po’boy, I was served a plastic bowl of grits. Like most of the food at the facility—the grainy reconstituted eggs, the limp white bread, the dry, puck-shaped sausages, the chilled, juiceless tomato slices—the grits bore only the most tenuous resemblance to actual food. In color and texture, they were almost indistinguishable from the oatmeal that was also served.

The food was awful, visually and nutritionally devoid of any value. Lack of color might almost have been a requirement for a food to be served at the facility; everything scooped or spooned or ladled onto our trays was some shade of beige. The occasional splotch of color—boiled beets or peas and carrots, like those that had been a staple of the Swanson’s TV dinners of my childhood—was something to be remarked on. The only other color came from the Styrofoam cups filled with startlingly vivid “juice,” which was actually Hi-C.

Yet I ate everything on my plate, forking the food into my mouth with barely a pause to chew and swallow. There was desperation in that ceaseless action—the food, however unsatisfying, was something to focus on, a brief respite from the unbearable emptiness of the rest of the day, when, except for the hour-long group therapy sessions, there was nothing to do but sleep or pace the hall from one locked door to the other or sit in the common room with the always-on TV and the plastic containers of blunted crayons and AA pamphlets.

Five days after I entered the facility, I was released with a new medication and an admonition from the sleek, prosperous-looking psychiatrist to “have more faith in yourself.” I experienced some relief at leaving the facility with its shoddily patched walls and stained bedsheets, and returning to the color and lights of New Orleans. But the relief was short-lived. My apartment had ceased to feel like a refuge; instead I was a trespasser in a space that was totally indifferent to whether or not I was there. The artwork and knickknacks I had accumulated over the years and placed on the walls and mantels to mark my new home had turned into clutter, and I couldn’t imagine ever being motivated enough to get dressed in the clothes that hung in my closet and filled my bureau drawers. The horrifying void had begun to close up, but the lead blanket of depression refused to lift.

I felt equally alien outside the apartment. The unhurried pace with which people walked and talked had delighted me just a few months before. Now it grated. Charming eccentricities struck me as affectations. I couldn’t walk through the Quarter without becoming agitated by the tourists, tour guides, buskers, and other street performers. Did there have to be so many of them? And what did they have to be so enthusiastic about? I could no longer grasp happiness as a concept, let alone as an emotion.

The horrifying void had begun to close up, but the lead blanket of depression refused to lift.
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Misery and hopelessness, those I grasped. Whereas before, I’d admired women in evening attire, now I noticed a different sort of city resident: the men and women who had come to New Orleans and bottomed out on drugs or alcohol, and who slept curled up in entryways or sprawled on the sidewalk. The man with short dreadlocks who kept up an indecipherable monologue as he sat on the bench outside the 24-hour bar whose neon sign I could see from my bedroom window, its red glow serving as a marker for both late-night bedtime and early-morning wake-up, he was trapped too.

Yet New Orleans hadn’t changed; it was the same city it had been before my breakdown. It was I who had changed, perhaps unalterably. I had entered the facility desperate for change, but this was not what I had envisioned. I was a stranger to myself now, so how could the city and its residents not feel foreign?

Every day, I woke up, forced myself out of bed, meditated, took my medication, went to intensive outpatient therapy, came home, worked, went for a walk through this alien-to-me city, noted the sidewalk and stoop sleepers, then returned home again. After I got back, I would use the toiletries from the facility, which had been handed over to me, along with the gray plastic tub they had been stored in, upon my discharge. The apple-strawberry-scented body wash/shampoo, the alcohol-free mouthwash, the body lotion that smelled cloyingly like baby powder, the travel-size tube of toothpaste—I used them all. I even used the rough-bristled hairbrush—not on my hair, though, but to scrub at the grime that had accumulated in the sealant encircling my bathroom sink.

Two months after I was discharged from the facility, Mardi Gras took place. Mardi Gras the year before had been a magical day for me, but that magic was no longer accessible, and the idea of being surrounded by people celebrating felt almost unbearable. I considered leaving town and visiting a friend in Los Angeles to avoid the event.

In the end, I stayed. Less because of any determination to try to catch some of the Mardi Gras spirit, however faint, but more because the idea of traveling was impossible to wrap my head around. My costume was haphazard, thrown together just the night before. My roommate loaned me a sequined, sleeveless navy-blue floor-length dress and tacked a cloud of mauve tulle to it at the shoulders, leaving enough tulle free that I could pull it over my head like a veil. The lavender wig was the same one I had worn last year.

The joyous mood that day seemed to link everyone. Except for me. I kept moving with my friends and with the crowd through the Bywater and the Marigny, into the French Quarter, down to the banks of the Mississippi River, although each moment was agonizing. The music and dancing and costumes that had delighted me last year now felt like sensory assault. I kept the tulle pulled over my head as though it could render me invisible.

A tall, slender man dressed as a jester scaled houses and the occasional church, where he proceeded to display his bare ass to the people below as he thrust his hips at chimneys, balconies, and facades. Most people seemed to tolerate him, occasionally cheering his repetitive motions. Everywhere the parade went, there he was; I couldn’t escape him and his lewd antics. “Oh God, he’s humping another building,” I said to my friends in desperation. What if I was dead, I wondered, and this was the last thing I had seen before I died and now I was condemned to see it again and again and again in my living death?

In the Quarter, people spilled from Fahey’s Bar onto the sidewalk. A man costumed as Ignatius J. Reilly, the hapless protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces, down to the hunting cap and thick wool scarf, was grilling hot dogs for people, no charge. I ate one, and for all I could taste it, it might as well have been filled with sawdust.

Esplanade Avenue is flanked by century-old houses whose dignity suggests ancestral superiority lies in their very foundations. My apartment was in one of those houses, though its façade belied its worn interior.

After the breakdown, I often saw the man with the dreadlocks who talked to himself roaming Esplanade. Sometimes he would disappear for a few days or even a few weeks. The first time he reappeared, his head had been shaved. Other times he returned with a cell phone or a backpack or headphones.

There were days when I walked past him as he slumped, silent, on a stoop and we made eye contact. I could see he had surfaced, however briefly, from his delusions. He was present, as torturous as that present may have felt. When our eyes met, he would acknowledge me with a quick nod of his head and then one or both of us would look away.

Lying in bed at night, waiting for the brief reprieve of sleep, I kept hearing him, his voice rising up from Esplanade as he traveled his route. Often his monologue was interrupted by a burst of three syllables: ooh ooh ooh. I listened, and recognized his disconnection from what surrounded him. Yet he was still out there, just as I was in my own home, taking one step after another, a stranger in a world rendered foreign by his brain.

Ilya Mechnikov, a scientist arguably quite ahead of his time, shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1908 for his work on human immunity. His research interest was garnered by his (not arguable) horrid experiences with diseases caused by bacterial infection. After his first wife died from tuberculosis, he attempted to take his own life with an opium overdose, but managed to live. His misery didn’t end there however. When his second wife developed typhoid fever, he wanted to die with her, and inoculated himself with a tick-borne disease. They both survived, but it made him realize the salient significance of the body’s natural immune system.

In the wake of their bodies’ perseverance, Mechnikov grew dedicated—obsessed—with research in human immunity. During the cholera epidemic in France in 1892, as part of his self-experimentation, he drank a culture of Vibrio cholera, the bacteria responsible for the disease.

He didn’t get sick, so he gave the culture to a volunteer in his lab—who didn’t contract cholera either—but a second volunteer became stricken with the disease and subsequently died. In further lab experiments, he found that some microbes stimulated the growth of cholera bacteria and some hindered it.

He thought the human gut flora was responsible for this and hypothesized that if ingesting a pathogenic culture can make you sick, then surely a good one should promote health. “With the help of science man can correct the imperfections of his nature,” he wrote.

The use of fermented foods—which in essence and most cases are cultures of “good bacteria”—has been around for centuries. Research shows written records of the health benefits of fermented milk (yogurt) and fermented milk products date as far as back as 6000 BC in ancient Hindu scripts. The Greeks made written reference to fermented food products in 100 BC, and it is reputed that Genghis Khan fed his army fermented mare’s milk because he believed it instilled bravery in them. It was not until the 20th century, though, that a Bulgarian medical student—Stamen Grigorov—discovered a lactic acid bacteria (Bacillus bulgaricus) in yogurt cultures.

Bacterial fermented foods, thought to promote digestive health, are prevalent throughout history and ubiquitous in every corner of the globe, from Eastern European sauerkraut to Korean kimchi to Japanese natto.

In current times, a growing body of research shows that maintaining a healthy gut and microbiome with diet can have a significant impact on health and well being. Further, it is contended that the right balance of gut bacteria can help stave off disease.

The Second Brain In Our Gut

A microbiologist once told me, “You are over 90% bacteria and about 10% human.” What? Really? I then looked it up and found out it was indeed true. We have 10 times more bacterial cells cohabiting our bodies than human cells. The human microbiome is collectively the 10-100 trillion microorganisms, mainly bacteria, living in our gut weighing between one to three pounds; every microbiome is specific to a particular environment (all microorganisms interacting with each other in a particular area in the body, such as the gastrointestinal tract or gut) or body part.

The microbiome also refers to the combined genetic material of the microbiota in that environment or organ. These trillions of bacteria interact and communicate with the enteric nervous system or what scientists have labeled the “second brain.”

As Michael Gershon, Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University and “father of neurogastroenterology” writes, “Once dismissed as a simple collection of relay ganglia (a cluster of nerve cell bodies), the enteric nervous system is now recognized as a complex, integrative brain in its own right.”

The enteric nervous system comprises about 500 million neurons or two-thirds the amount found in a cat. It is embedded in our gastrointestinal tract—starting at the esophagus and ending at the anus.

Together, the second brain in the gut and its microbiome have a significant effect on the brain, influencing mood, behavior, and disease. As such, the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the U.S. launched the Human Microbiome Project in order to identify and characterize the human microbiota.

The Great Brain-Gut-Microbiome Connection

Recent evidence shows that the brain interacts with the enteric system in the gut (second brain) and the gut microbiome in a bi-directional manner. It’s a three-way communication circuit called the Brain-Gut-Microbiome Axis and involves three systems—central nervous, gastrointestinal, and immune. A common example of a brain-gut interaction is that “butterflies in your stomach” feeling. Your palms are sweaty and trembling, your heart rate increases, your skin becomes pale or flushed, and you (maybe) feel like you want to throw up. This is part of the fight-or-flight physiological stress response and evidence of how our gut is related to how we feel.

So just how do the microbes in our gut influence mood? In truth, scientists are not 100% clear on how these microbes directly influence our brains, but they propose that it’s through multiple pathways. For example, it is well known that the four main chemicals associated with happiness and mood in human beings are dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. Research shows serotonin (although its function is complex as it is involved in many physiological processes) to be a mood regulator playing a major role in the treatment of depression and susceptibility to both depression and suicide.

The enteric nervous system in our gastrointestinal tract is now recognized as a complex, integrative brain in its own right.
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And guess what? About 90% of the body’s serotonin is made in the digestive tract; researchers at Caltech showed that gut microbes are integral in serotonin synthesis. Similarly, gut bacteria are implicated in the synthesis of other chemicals and neurotransmitters involved in mood regulation and disease. Further, scientific findings in the journal Behavioural Brain Works illustrated that some bacteria affect how these mood compounds are metabolized. Perhaps the most fascinating finding, however, is that some microbes can activate the vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in the body and a main line of bidirectional communication between the brain and gut.

90% of the body’s serotonin is made in the digestive tract.
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Advancements in genome sequencing technology is enabling research into the impact of the gut microbiome on disease. By mapping the genome of the gut microbiome in diseased vs. healthy humans and animals, conclusions on the role of the gut microbes in disease proliferation can—and have been—deduced. And a very interesting way to glean this information is to analyze feces.

Your poop can be very informative. One study using genetic analysis of clinically depressive folks’ poop compared to those who aren’t, found several correlations between the human fecal microbiota (representative of gut microbiota) and depression. Although they report that their findings need to be further tested in larger cohorts, their results were specific for a particular strain (sub-type of microorganism) and genus (group or class of species):

 “The Oscillibacter type strain has valeric acid as its main metabolic end product, a homolog of neurotransmitter GABA (γ-aminobutyric acid), while Alistipes has previously been shown to associated with induced stress in mice.”

“Valeric acid structurally resembles GABA, and has been shown to bind the GABAa receptor. Therefore, it is possible that bacteria involved in valeric acid production and/or metabolism could also be associated with depression.”

The work of professor Bernhard Lüscher and colleagues at Penn State University shows that enhancing the activity of GABA in the brains of depressed mice has antidepressive effects, similar to that of antidepressive drugs, bringing mice back to “normal” behavior. Noteworthy is that GABA is implicated in mood disorders and its agonists have been shown to be antidepressive and antimanic.

This includes less of a certain type of bacteria in human fecal microbiota in depressed individuals compared to healthy ones.

Your poop can be *very* informative. Studies have found several correlations between the human fecal microbiota and depression.
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What is even more interesting is that researchers at the University College Cork in Ireland showed that if you transplant the microbiome from a depressed individual to animals, these animals will exhibit the same behavior of the depressed individual. These include anhedonia (not wanting to do the things you usually take pleasure in) and anxiety-like behavior.

This study also showed that depression is associated with decreased gut microbiota richness and diversity. Further, in humans, fecal microbiota transplants—introducing healthy feces into the microbiome of a diseased person—have been successful in the treatment of gastrointestinal disease and colitis and clostridium difficile infection with an efficacy rate of almost 90%.

Auxiliary Advances

Across the globe, the International Diabetes Federation report 425 million adults (or 1 in 11 adults) with diabetes while the CDC reports 30.3 million in the U.S. (with over 100 million living with diabetes or prediabetes) and 3.4 million in Canada, according to Diabetes Canada.

Diabetes and obesity are oftentimes linked as it is well-documented that obesity has a strong correlation between insulin resistance and diabetes. In a promising and growing area of research using humans, a small clinical trial in the Netherlands showed that a fecal transplant from a lean donor can temporarily improve insulin resistance in obese men.

In another growing area of research, large differences are seen in the gut microbiomes of people with Parkinson’s disease compared with healthy individuals. Further, a study published in the journal Cell show that when fecal microbes from persons with Parkinson’s disease was transferred to mice, they exhibited more severe symptoms of the disease and the aggregation of α-synuclein in the brain. (The formation of plaques in the brain via aggregation of α-synuclein is found in persons with neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and dementia.) Meanwhile another study revealed that probiotic supplementation in patients with Alzheimer’s disease showed improved in cognitive function.

But Just How Did We Get Our Microbiome Anyway?

It has been shown that the vaginal and maternal gut microbiome changes significantly during pregnancy. Science journal PLOS|One as well as a Finnish study in Cell, respectively, showed that pregnant women exhibit lower vaginal bacteria than nonpregnant women as well as a lack of population diversity in gut microbiota.

In the International Journal of Obesity, researchers found that children exposed to prenatal antibiotics in the second or third trimester had an 84% higher risk of developing obesity compared to children who were not exposed. Further, Caesarians were linked to 46% higher risks of developing childhood obesity; your first microbe colonizers are acquired via exchanges with your mother largely during the birthing process, when you are—quite literally—slathered in vaginal bacteria.

In addition, as research shows, any disturbance to this microbe exchange such as delivery by C-section, perinatal antibiotics and formula feeding is linked to an increased risk in metabolic and immune disease. After birth, a child’s microbiome continues to grow and is changed by ingestion of the microbes in breast milk which stabilizes neonatal gut microbiome. As we grow older, our gut microbiomes can change throughout life depending on diet, environment and the drugs we may take, such as antibiotics.

So How Do We Promote A Healthy Microbiome?

There is still a lot of ongoing research on the brain-gut-microbiome connection, but it’s quite clear that the gut microbiota can have a significant impact on mood, health and disease. So here are a few ways—and foods!—that will keep your gut microbiome healthy and thriving:

1. Probiotics – research shows they can be used to maintain a healthy gut and restore the gut microbiota to health (after disruption as in the case of illness and the use of antibiotics).
2. Prebiotics foods – these cause the growth and stimulate the activity of beneficial microbes in the gut.
3. Whole grain foods/foods high in fiber – these have been shown to promote the growth of specific bacteria only digested by certain bacterial types. For example, apples and artichokes have been shown to increase Bifidobacteria (a good bacteria) in humans.
4. Fermented foods – people have been eating these foods for centuries. They have been shown to reduce the number of disease-causing bacteria in the gut and promote the growth of beneficial bacteria. It has been shown that people who eat a lot of yogurt have less of the bacteria linked to inflammation (Enterobacteriaceae).
5. Diversity in food – a diet comprising a diversity in food leads to a diverse microbiota which is considered healthy.
6. Polyphenols in red wine and grapes – these have been shown to improve specific beneficial microbiota.

No one really knows what she ate. Today, the menu boasts a Kahlua-infused chocolate cake, but 50 years ago patrons didn’t dine at El Coyote Café on Beverly Boulevard for the promise of dessert—not even a beautiful blonde two weeks from her due date.

I grew up in a household of beautiful women who never ate dessert, or much of anything at all. The grapefruit diet. The scrambled egg diet. The one Granny Smith every other day so my sisters could squeeze their long, lean, baby-powdered legs into hot pants before catching the drumstick at a Molly Hatchet concert diet. In my home, thin ruled like a sovereign dictator who continually frightened away flour, sugar and fat. No one actually took diet pills, because no ate enough to need Dexadrine to rev up their metabolism, but The Valley of the Dolls still lounged its worn, light pink cover on the coffee table next to the lukewarm, half-empty cans of Tab.

In my home, thin ruled like a sovereign dictator who continually frightened away flour, sugar and fat.
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The Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. I felt almost glamorous, holding the book in my chubby six-year-old hands. So much pink, three cut-out silhouettes of barbiturates, “dolls,”—Seconal, Nembutal—with two brunettes and one blonde filling out each hollow pill. The two brunettes didn’t do much for me, but who was that blonde in the middle, curvy enough to fixate on her chest, thin enough to wear a gold bracelet halfway up her upper arm? I could only manipulate one of the two bracelets I owned barely up my forearm, and even then only with the clumsy force of a desperate girl.

The murder of Sharon Tate is synonymous with L.A. A few summers ago when I drove past El Coyote on a very hot, late June afternoon, invited to Los Angeles to audition for the third round of a reality baking show, I recognized the red awning with the white font from true crime websites. In the minutia of morbidity surrounding the Tate murders by members of the Manson Family, no one remembers what Sharon ordered for her last meal. Rumor has it when tourists, fresh off the bus in search of lunch, ask what Sharon Tate ate, they are steered towards the most expensive menu item. Shrimp fajitas, $18.95 before tax.

1990 in a Central Oregon study hall we took turns memorizing the names Susan, Patricia, Leslie—boring good-girl names—in my Goth group, which included my boyfriend, Sky. Sky brought the book Helter Skelter to school, about the Tate/LaBianca murders. Sky and Sharon Tate shared a similar, cool alien-like beauty and a penchant for black eyeliner and hairspray.

By senior year we ruled the Gothic posse at Bend High, dubbed The Curitans by semi-freak outsiders. One thing Sky, with his rail-thin body and his architecturally arranged, dyed black hair, hated more than anything were outsiders. He taught me to shun these “posers,” who he said were trying to “starfuck” him. Me, too embarrassed to ask what he meant, wrote down the word starfucker in my notebook and spent an entire afternoon searching through the public library’s microfiche.

In a 1969 interview for Eye Magazine, Sharon Tate said, “Everything that’s realistic has some sort of ugliness to it. I’m sensitive to ugly situations.” I too, am sensitive—especially to boys like Sky who move away to art school because I don’t know if I want to get married. Back then, barely twenty, I didn’t want to get married. I just wanted to harness the power to collect men who wanted to marry me the way my grandmother collected all those plates not meant for food. Sharon Tate also said, “My whole life has been decided by fate.” She designed her own pale yellow micro-mini wedding dress. I wore a pale yellow wedding dress for my first wedding, too.

Being married for the first time, at 33, to me meant teaching myself how to do things like bake. In my late teen laziness, I had scanned the Betty Crocker Cooky Book with the thought to bake something for Sky, or for the boyfriends that followed, its red cover stained and taped back together after years of my mother or grandmother flipping open the book to wedge in random recipes clipped from magazines, recipes they never actually baked that came to represent forbidden delicacies just barely out of reach. Stained Glass Window Fruitcake. My Pink Heaven. During my first married years, I did teach myself how to bake, one cookie and cake and pie at a time. There were many kitchen disasters before each bake turned out almost edible, then actually good.

Everything that’s realistic has some sort of ugliness to it. I’m sensitive to ugly situations.
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Through all my baking experiments I was still unaware that baking—the celebrity cookbook, being a judge on a baking reality show kind—can be synonymous with starfucking. Maybe Top Chef started the trend, then Top Chef Desserts, or even cable television devoting an entire channel to food. Starting a few years ago, the media began selling the preparation of food as competition. All this competition seemed to require was a little skill in the kitchen and a few, or a lot of, tattoos. I have a few tattoos and I do love to bake. This even led me to compete, and win, Best of Show baking competition ribbons in my county fair and the next county over. My first little taste of fame.

Sharon Tate first tasted fame at the age of six months when she won the Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas pageant. It would take 16 more years for her to win the title of Miss Richland before her Army father’s transfer to Italy curtailed her goal of becoming Miss Washington, then Miss America. The psychology of beautiful women who compete against other beautiful women for prizes mirrors the psychology of wanting to be famous. Rank-ism abounds in our culture, the somebodies vs. the nobodies, the overwhelming desire to crawl up from the ordinary sludge of everybodies to the upper echelon of somebodies. Doesn’t everyone secretly want to be famous, at least in their field, whether that means becoming the next beautiful extra in a movie to subsequently launch a film career, or the best folk singer in L.A., a thwarted dream of Charles Manson that would end Sharon Tate’s dreams, too?

When I received an email encouraging me to try out for a reality baking show, I filled out the application, attached a headshot, and didn’t think I’d hear back. On a cold March morning a call from a New York area code woke me three hours early. The woman at the other end of the phone bombarded me with questions. How does one make meringue? What are the three ingredients in a basic piecrust? What is ganache? Would I be able to attend an audition in my nearest audition city in June? I slogged through the interview, second-guessing each answer. An over-achiever since kindergarten, in my sleepy haze I tried to count my wrong answers, the most glaring mistake being my inability, at 8am, to recall how to make choux pastry. Then I remembered I’ve never made the dough, most commonly recognized as the golden puff of an éclair.

On my first visit to L.A. four years earlier, I never made it to a French bakery for an éclair. I never made it to any bakery. Staying with a couple whose newfound religion of choice, veganism, and their church of choice, the farmer’s market, put a crimp in my ardor for baked goods. A tour of the Tate murder house at 10050 Cielo Drive, or at least the property where the house stood before being razed in 1994, was out of the question as the couple spent my vacation searching for the best organic grapes.

Rank-ism abounds in our culture, the somebodies vs. the nobodies, the overwhelming desire to crawl up from the ordinary sludge of everybodies to the upper echelon of somebodies.
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The couple, an aspiring journalist and an aspiring filmmaker, didn’t attempt to hide their propensity to starfuck. The aspiring filmmaker insisted on trying to meet anyone famous within his reach, from the person who did the lights at The Largo after a comedy show to a shock comic who performed a weekly gig at the clothing store Vlad the Retailer.

For a central Oregon girl with no experience interacting with famous people, I am fascinated with famous people and the people who love them. The shock comic singled me out during his show for my “pillow lips.” It’s what shock comics do, the expected sexual innuendo. But afterwards, the comic said how gracious I was to go along with his act. He asked me out to coffee the following afternoon. With my first husband by my side coffee didn’t seem like a very good idea, but what struck me was the kick in the guts delight to be acknowledged by celebrity.

At a diner after the show, the aspiring journalist of the starfucking couple told me, “He just wants to sleep with you in the back of his limo. I certainly hope you don’t think you’re special.”

Special? Los Angeles seemed nothing but special to me. That first time around the city I questioned why the entire world didn’t want to become famous. Where else but L.A. could Sharon Tate, starring in the beach comedy Don’t Make Waves, supposedly inspire Malibu Barbie?

I selected my audition outfit. Black dress, tasteful rabbit and deer forest print, a sort of Kawaii version of William von Aelst’s still-life hunting trophy paintings, and a Betsey Johnson purse shaped like an oven in my aim to be cast as “The Quirky One.” Before my invitation to audition I’d often wondered if every reality show hired the same casting director. How else could one explain the same nearly identical tropes tapping into the American zeitgeist? Strong Single Mom, Openly Gay Man, Angry Black Woman, Republican Redneck, Quirky One.

As I packed my outfit for the long car ride to L.A., I had wondered how many other quirky girls I’d have to compete against. After months of baking practice I determined an airplane ride, and the TSA, were nothing to risk passing my signature chocolate pumpkin cake past. We decided to drive the 820 miles, a portable plug-in cooler transporting my baked goods south in a heat wave, 116 degrees at a gas station stop near Stockton.

By the time we reached L.A., temperatures cooled to 112, my treats frozen for the trip unthawing in the cooler we carried to the bungalow where I could prep before the audition the way an actor preps for a movie scene.

Sharon Tate and Patty Duke became friends while filming The Valley of the Dolls. Sharon even moved into Patty Duke’s vacant Beverly Hills home. Though Sharon called 10055 Cielo Drive, where she met her demise, the “Love House,” some say Sharon preferred the Summit Ridge address but had to find another residence when Patty took the property off the market. A drive through L.A. is a drive through every imaginable twist of fate.

Would being invited to this city end in opportunity or disappointment? Did I really want to become one of those reality show “personalities,” half rooted for, half despised? Then, even if I won the show, forgotten in a day or two?

Beyond teaching myself how to bake bread my pre-audition packet included a prompt to identify my style or “brand.” Much the way Sharon Tate was destined to become the tragic blonde for eternity, my branding idea seemed obvious. The bookish woman who knew the recipe for Sylvia Plath’s tomato soup cake. But the thing was, did I actually love to bake and really want to star on competition TV?

A drive through L.A. is a drive through every imaginable twist of fate.
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Traveling over 800 miles with a cooler full of cake to a bungalow steps away from the Hollywood Walk of Fame felt like an obvious next destination. The bungalow, a renovated crack house, sat on a street lined in lemon and lime trees. Any direction I looked, I saw palm trees leaning into the sun and helicopters hovering above, the glamour and brutality of the city magnified by the sex worker applying make-up steps away from our door in a broken piece of mirror while the Primetime Emmys billboards blocked the rest of our view.

Our landlord, host of a home renovation show, greeted us in front of the hedge with an ingratiating television intimacy, a single-serving “friend” who spoke like we’ve known each other for years. His intoxicating confidence matched his tan skin, ice blue eyes, dark, slicked-back mop of hair, an honorary Baldwin brother before the bloat. He knew ahead of my check-in why I was staying at one of his four attached bungalows, knew that I’d be using the art deco, period correct kitchen for the first time since he began renting the little light pink houses to a rotation of aspiring starlets.

He and I discussed the network I’d be auditioning for while he recommended the hottest food trucks and took intermittent texts from his agent about upcoming parts. How exciting to be in the orbit of someone actively participating in the L.A. hustle. I wondered what had happened to the aspiring journalist and the aspiring filmmaker, long estranged from my life, when my landlord for the week stopped me as I turned to change in my room before heading out to the first restaurant on his list.

“You look beautiful just the way you are, kiddo. Go try Le Big Mac at Petit Trois and report back.”

And I did try the $18 burger conceived by a French food cart star turned celebrity from another cooking competition show. The longer I sat in the small strip-mall restaurant, though, the more I worried about my motivation for being in L.A. Did I really want to be known as a possible dessert cookbook author instead of, in my mind, an author author, anymore than Sharon Tate, who studied with Lee Strasberg, father of method acting, wanted her acting legacy to be suicidal showgirl Jennifer North in The Valley of the Dolls?

While the rest of Hollywood buzzed I preheated the tiny bungalow oven. Baking away from home means losing the dance of where to reach out and make contact with my flour canister or my cardamom or my stack of decorated baking cups. But I beat on, waiting for my yeast to activate, kneading until my wrists ached, baking loaf after loaf of bread until the audition-worthy loaf rose and showed itself.

Would being invited to this city end in opportunity or disappointment?
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After a short and sleepless night of gunshots mixing with the lime tree perfume out my windows, I woke ready to conquer the world of reality TV. Retro dress, fresh baked bread in the back seat and a four-layer cake balanced on my lap, air conditioner cranked in the 100 degree heat, we drove to Santa Monica, where baking dreams either burn up or come true.

Maybe everything in my life led up to this moment—the mom who gave me my very own copy of Valley of the Dolls in my Easter basket one year; the sisters who towered their model-thin bodies above me, breath smelling of wheat germ and Herbalife; my desire as I got older to use the power of sugar to turn my house into a home.

Release forms signed at the audition prevent me from divulging what goes on behind the closed doors. I can say one women in the lobby, where we sat for hours waiting our turn for an interview, quit her job to try out, how another left her daughter in an Arizona hospital after emergency surgery.

I can also say, when the show aired months later, none of those 50 women milling about the holding room made the cut, just like I didn’t make the cut—the judge who interviewed me not sold by my four-layer cake or my pretty dress or my ability to dissect the narrative arc of reality TV. I had never made puff pastry from scratch. One “no” to puff pastry and the casting director showed me the elevator to the bottom floor where all the everybodies waiting to be half-rate, low-rent television somebodies threw their rejected baked goods in a trashcan the size of a king-sized bed after their turns.

I struggled in the parking lot to change out of my dress and leave my dreams of baking stardom behind. The world of potential swirled around me, but that shiny edge of promise, after a few hours in one casting call, had already dulled a little.

I refused to cry about my rejection as my first husband and I wandered the city in search of dinner. When our meal came at an Italian restaurant known for its collection of autographed celebrity photos, I glanced to my left to a framed picture of Sharon Tate. A colored movie still of her, dressed in a patterned nightgown answering a white telephone, the infamous gold bracelet I envied in my youth gripped around the perfection of her upper arm. A single tea candle in a small glass holder diffused its light across the picture to rest softly on that bracelet until a girl almost as dangerous in her loveliness approached the table and took a photograph of us. She sold the photo, framed in gold cardboard, Sharon Tate and her gold bracelet in the background of me in the middle of an Italian restaurant in the middle of Melrose Avenue in the middle of a city with the ability to cause one to dream impossible dreams that can almost never come true.

I struggled in the parking lot to change out of my dress and leave my dreams of baking stardom behind.
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I finished my spaghetti as the girl with the camera ended her shift and sat on a barstool, drinking.  More than anything I wanted to tell her as she counted the money from her tourist mementos not to get caught up chasing fame, her symmetrical face longing to be filmed and photographed and hanged on the very wall where she worked while hundreds of people just like me passed through, and sometimes, when the light of the candle hit just right, almost looked up.

It’s been nearly two months now since the “adult content” ban went into effect on Tumblr, but a handful of key things have not changed.

On December 17, 2018, Tumblr officially outlawed all content considered to be pornography in order to comply with the SESTA/FOSTA laws—laws that are allegedly supposed to combat human trafficking, but instead just make life exponentially more difficult and dangerous for sex workers.

According to a former employee, Tumblr’s new policy was influenced by the fact it had such a massive child pornography problem that Apple removed the Tumblr app from its stores, but the machinations were were already in motion months earlier due to the fact that Verizon—the parent company that owns Tumblr—couldn’t sell ads next to all that porn.

The first thing that any Tumblr user will tell you about the result of this ban is either that there are just as many porn bots on the social media platform as ever or that there are just as many Nazis. All the porn bot creators had to do was change the language their bots used and/or tag posts with “sfw” (safe for work) to avoid the wrath of the wildly ineffective, thrown-together auto-flagging program. Meanwhile, the average Tumblr user has had to put up with posts getting flagged when they have absolutely zero sexual content, but apparently have something in them that looks like a “female-presenting nipple” to a poorly-constructed algorithm.

Many users vowed to leave Tumblr when the ban was announced, and many did. Sex workers and body positivity blogs in particular have been affected. I myself have been on Tumblr since 2012 and credit the communities there for my education in everything from white privilege to non-binary genders to fat positivity. That last issue is of special interest to me as a woman who has gone from being thin or at least “not fat” in 2012 to being solidly fat today in 2019.

Like many people, I gained weight in my 20s due to a natural change in metabolism that happens to the vast majority of humans. Today, at 210 pounds and (almost) 5’5”, I’m a size 16, which is actually the average U.S. pant size for cis women. However, I am “obese” according to my BMI and my hanging belly and double chin would have me labeled as such by any of the mainstream news networks who love to panic about the so-called “obesity epidemic” in America.

I don’t have to tell you that it’s hard to be a fat woman in this country, and increasingly in many other countries around the world. Over the years I’ve experienced a stark difference in the way I’m treated by loved ones and strangers alike, not to mention by myself. Confronting the hateful voice in my head—placed there by a profoundly fat-phobic society—has been one of the greatest challenges of my 20s.

My biggest support in this battle against self-hatred has been other fat women. If it wasn’t for Tumblr, I don’t know where I would have found such a strong community around loving and accepting the body you have, at any size. Part of learning that acceptance has been viewing fat, naked bodies.

Even before the “adult content” ban, I didn’t see much nudity on my Tumblr dashboard, pornographic or not. But most of what I saw was people sharing their naked bodies in a celebratory manner. Whether they were dim, blurry selfies or professional photo shoots, Tumblr users exposed me to naked trans bodies, naked bodies of color, naked non-binary bodies, and naked fat bodies. Sometimes all at once. All were wonderful, and all worked to support those marginalized people who were left out of magazines, ads, and even mainstream pornography.

“Look, these bodies exist too, and they’re beautiful,” said every naked nipple, no matter the gender of the person they were attached to. For me, the fat bodies were a wonderful comfort, and I hoped to some day gain the courage to display my own fat naked body, unashamed, to help other women like myself learn to love and accept themselves.

Now I can’t. And since December 17, 2018, I don’t see naked fat bodies anymore. Ever. Tumblr was the only place I saw them before that date. Where else can I find them? I certainly tried Googling “fat naked bodies” for this article, and you can imagine what I found. Pornography featuring fat women is nearly always fetishized, which is not what I’m looking for. And I don’t want to have to wade through any kind of porn site in order to see a body like mine. I miss being able to see those bodies casually, unexpectedly, on Tumblr, as though it were as normal as a video of a cat batting things off of a counter.

And it’s not just full nudity. Due to the terrible quality of Tumblr’s nipple-detecting program, any photo containing something that looks round and fleshy tends to get flagged. I don’t even see fat bodies in bras and panties anymore. It doesn’t help that many of the body-positive blogs that posted these photos left Tumblr out of protest or because they knew their blogs wouldn’t be able to function anymore.

I reached out to three fellow fat women who had fat-positive Tumblr pages or used a Tumblr blog to promote their sex work to find out how they’re doing and/or where they are now.

Satine La Belle

Satine La Belle, a sex worker who uses multiple social media platforms to sell nude photos of herself for income, has been the most affected. She abandoned her Tumblr account once the “adult content” ban went into effect because she felt like it would be a waste of time to continue, especially with how overzealous the nudity-detecting program is.

“I felt like there was no point in having another platform where I would have to risk my hard work if there was anything sexual, whether that was a nipple or just sex positive sentiments,” she said.

Nearly all of Satine La Belle’s content on Tumblr was flagged before the ban even officially went into effect, including some of the content she used for her livelihood.

“I released a nude that is normally only for purchase on Tumblr before the change for my fans. It was flagged right away and I notified Tumblr about being able to have titties out until the 17th. It was then no longer flagged for a little bit.”

Predictably, the ban has had an impact on La Belle’s ability to make money as a sex worker, and she’s had difficulty making that up on other platforms.

“It has gone alright for me, but I have found it much more difficult to find clients on Twitter then I had on Tumblr. I think it is because Tumblr was a great safe space for nudity, nude art, porn, etc. Since it was more normalized there it was easy to find clients who knew what they wanted and were ready to pay.”

Satine La Belle is on Twitter, Instagram, and DeviantArt. You can also send her some money on her Ko-fi account.

Bec Mae Scully

Bec Mae Scully is the owner of the body-positive Tumblr blog Chubby Bunnies, which was hit so hard by the ban that the entire blog is now hidden behind a content warning. Attempting to go directly to the blog lands you on a page that says “This Tumblr may contain sensitive media,” then directs you to your dashboard where you can view it on the right-hand sidebar. If you don’t have a Tumblr account, you can’t view it at all.

Chubby Bunnies boasts a couple hundred thousand followers and has been a very active account for 10 years. Since the ban went into effect, Tumblring just hasn’t been the same for Scully.

“The ban has affected my interaction with followers a great deal,” she told me. “With close to a couple of hundred thousand followers who would usually be interactive daily with submissions, likes and reblogs have now disappeared.”

The lack of interaction has saddened Scully, but it also interferes with her ability to help the people that Chubby Bunnies is reaching out to.

“As silly as it might sound to some, Tumblr in a lot of ways saved my life,” said Scully. “At least 6 beautiful souls have said that because of the blog it helped them not end their life.”

Interaction with followers isn’t the only part of Scully’s blog that was disrupted by the ban.

“I didn’t make any money off the blog, but had recently been trying to put things in place so I could make a business out of it. When the ban came through it’s put it all on hold.”

Not only that, but the ban almost utterly wiped her blog out.

“At first 99.99% [of Chubby Bunnies’ content] had been removed. Then some of the content came back, and most of it is flagged, including my profile picture which was a caricature of me with mermaid hair covering my ‘female-presenting nipples’ that they seem to have such a problem with.”

The “adult content” ban is supposed to have exceptions for artistic expression and content used to make a political statement. Unfortunately, their flagging software has been wildly unsuccessful in make these distinctions. Users have to appeal every individual post flagged in order to get actual human eyes on the post. When your flagged posts number in the thousands, it creates a problem.

Chubby Bunnies is a Tumblr-exclusive blog, but Bec Mae Scully has many beautiful photos on her Instagram account if you’re lucky enough to be friends with her.

Amisha Treat

Even a Tumblr blog that focuses on fat positivity without showing a lot of skin, like Fat Girls Doing Things, has been affected by the “adult content” ban.

“The ban has mostly been just annoying for me, there isn’t a lot of ‘adult content’ on the blog so in that regard I haven’t had a ton to deal with,” says Amisha Treat, owner of FGDT. (Fat Girls Doing Things.)  “It has however reduced the amount of interaction and submissions happening, which is very disappointing, but I get why that is happening.”

Treat also talked about her constant efforts to block porn bots and blogs, which often target body positive blogs to steal images.

“It has done nothing to reduce the number of porn blogs that follow,” Treat told me. “In fact, it has made it harder to identify which ones are [porn bots] because their icon and posts are blocked so I can’t always confirm if I should block or not.”

Although the FGDT community is still largely intact, Treat is concerned that things will get worse. Unfortunately, there are no social media platforms out there that are quite like Tumblr.

“I have had to spend time trying to find another platform in case the ban continues as is, which is proving to be very difficult in terms of finding a site that allows easy interaction and submission availability.”

Fat Girls doing things also has a Facebook page, an Instagram, and a Twitter account.

In spite of widespread dissatisfaction with the “adult content” ban, Tumblr has given no indication that they plan to change the policy, and the flagging program has not improved. I myself have had two posts recently flagged — one classical nude painting and one that contained no nudity at all. I appealed both successfully.

Unfortunately, nothing is likely to change until the reason for the ban, the SESTA/FOSTA laws, are changed or repealed. Sex workers are leading the efforts to make this happen, but due to massive and widespread whorephobia in the U.S. and abroad, few are listening despite the fact that the laws have already been credited for the assault and murder of multiple full-service sex workers.

I’m lucky the ban’s effect on me has been comparatively mild. But I think about all the young women out there who are or are becoming fat who won’t have the same community support and access to unfiltered, unfetishized images of naked fat bodies. Eating disorders and the self-hatred and depression caused by our society’s intense fat-phobia have killed many and will kill many more. The hindering of a formerly indispensable tool in the fight against the stigma and hatred of fatness is nothing short of a tragedy.