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ve never had a stranger comment on the overall size of my body my eating habits in public or my clothing in the way that people so often comment on the bodies of fat women when i do receive unsolicited advice curiosity or commentary from strangers it is usually about one of three things my pronounced limp my cane or the size of my breasts although those are stories for another post with the exception of my use of a cane i have a body that is able to fit in reasonably well when i m in public take away my cane and i might resemble what an average person might expect a young feminist to look like here too is where i depart from all of the well meaning messages in love your body campaigns my average appearance and weight are the easiest things to accept about my body but my disabilities less so my body itself is in constant pain and is usually fatigued thanks to fibromyalgia i don t like being in pain all the time in fact part of my medical treatment is dedicated to reducing this pain via the use of certain medications on the other hand being in pain has shaped my personality in a variety of ways having fibromyalgia is not empowering in the usual ways that lyb discourse demands of bodily acceptance for women oftentimes fibromyalgia is horrible but having it has also made me a fiercer advocate for equal rights for people with all types of disabilities access to proper pain management for people with chronic pain many of whom suffer from pain on a daily basis and related causes i ve also been experiencing mysterious and severe allergic reactions for over a decade these do not happen every day but when they do they are usually debilitating what qualities are we supposed to love about our bodies anyway i am grateful that after an allergic reaction my face reverts to its normal non puffy look after 12 24 hours mostly because the swelling around my eyes often does not allow me to see very clearly and is also uncomfortably itchy when it happens i appreciate the fact that during a reaction my body tries to get rid of whatever s caused that reaction but this doesn t mean that i have to love sitting on the toilet for hours while my intestines empty and as i become increasingly dehydrated lyb discourse instructs us to to love surface things about our bodies skin limbs stomachs thighs hair freckles the list goes on or what our bodies can do run jump hike exercise dance appear strong again it s a long list many bodies can do all of these things and more but what happens to the bodies that cannot do these things despite having to work around the fibromyalgia to do so i am able to exercise but if i decide to go on a two hour hike on a whim in addition to my carefully planned exercise routine of daily yoga and walking my dog that addition is going to land me in bed for a few days and i ll be in too much pain to move during that time the call to love your body and celebrate your body in those instances rings hollow to me i can t even get out of bed and you want me to sing kumbayah in celebration of my body some days i m in terrible pain even though i didn t do anything to exacerbate my existing pain levels there are a lot of things that my body cannot do because it s in near constant pain but i ll be damned if feminism even comes close to acknowledging that because it never does loving your body at such a surface level is all well and good when you can run and jump and not be bedridden for days afterward but try explaining what chronic pain feels like day in and day out to a healthy love your body supporting feminist and see how fast she screws up her face as if to say why are you telling me this feminism has traditionally been terrible at validating women who have complicated relationships with their own bodies and lyb discourse is merely a pretty pink symptom of feminism s and feminists inability to accept or even barely tolerate any experience of the body that can t be spun into new age type rhetoric having to do with loving oneself against societal odds or triumphing over the odds gender and disability oppression combine into a toxic goop here and the resulting mix can start to resemble the second wave anthem i am woman combined with supercrip during allergic reactions i hate my guts that keep me confined to bed or to the bathroom my ballooning face that begins to horribly resemble the moon in a trip to the moon my lungs that feel like they ve magically shrunken to the size of quarters for no apparent reason very often i hate my fibromyalgia ed muscle fasciae because they make me physically hurt i hate the sensation of fatigue that makes me feel like i have a tremendously heavy coat on in addition to the pain the thing that many feminists do not understand is that these feelings aren t caused by the media by fashion magazines by impossibly thin models and actresses by advertising no not even by big pharma lyb grossly oversimplifies the problem of women s self hatred reducing it to a sort of you just need to try harder pseudo new age self improvement goal that pits women as a group really middle class abled youngish white women against oppressive sexist social and cultural norms advertising and so fourth but it does not teach women to be accepting of sick bodies disabled bodies bodies that don t work perfectly much of it is merely another air thin platitude to which to aspire in order to attain self acceptance lyb discourse has even been corporatized look no further than recent special k cereal ads so bravely proclaiming no fat talk and those insipid dove soap campaigns that are supposedly so body positive for proof such a corporate vision of positive body image only offers body acceptance and self love as goals for a very specific type of body as scholar sarah heiss convincingly argues in this 2011 article from disability studies quarterly it s not so outlandish to ask whose bodies are positioned as worthy of love of self acceptance of peace in lyb discourse if you already look like the young white cis abled average sized woman for whom these messages are designed to appeal body acceptance is probably easier for you than it might be for someone who doesn t fit into one or more of those categories i am not trying to dismiss the body image struggles of women who do fit into those categories often through no fault of their own it s just that like a lot of things in mainstream liberal feminism lyb messages are made to appear inclusive without actually doing that work in any substantial way and when this appearance of inclusivity makes disabled sick and invisibly ill bodies not appear outright well after a while that s how you end up with healthy nondisabled feminists who just don t understand why disability rights are a feminist issue or who don t get why women with pain fatigue or other chronic health issues can t just love their bodies instead of letting physical or mental problems and or what the media says about disabled bodies and the bodies of disabled women affect them so much or they ask how disability pride could possibly exist since disability always creates suffering as sierra at rh reality check does in this article because shouldn t eliminating disability be a goal for a more feminist and pro choice world you can probably guess my answer to that question in their insistence on uncritically parroting and supporting lyb discourse as it currently exists some feminists inadvertently reinforce the idea that certain bodies are easier to love and conveniently many of them already fit into what the mainstream designates as worthy of acceptance and love those with complicated bodies ill bodies disabled bodies and the attendant complex relationships with their own bodies are often not so lucky tagged archive body positivity chronic pain disability essays love your body apr 23 2019 ableism cartoons disability feminism fibro nervous systems chapter 3 fibromyalgia and afterword previously chapter 1 chapter 2 image descriptions can be found under the read more tag continue reading tagged cartoons chronic pain fibromyalgia nervous systems personal mar 22 2019 cartoons feminism nervous systems chapter 2 allergies and anaphylaxis part 1 can be viewed here image descriptions can be found under the read more tag continue reading tagged allergy attacks comics disability nervous systems mar 04 2019 cartoons disability nervous systems chapter 1 cerebral palsy because disability intersections is no more i will be posting my archived work from that site here image descriptions can be found under the read more tag continue reading tagged autobiography cerebral palsy comics graphic work nervous systems nov 20 2018 uncategorized things that suck about having chronic pain or yet another ill advised essay that is too complicated for me to get published someplace else this cartoon i drew in 2009 sums it up most of the time i am very much for disability pride but the fact that i have moderate to severe chronic pain from fibromyalgia complicates what should be a ride or die sort of feeling if my personal disability pride is a string of rainbow holiday lights my pain and fatigue is the thing that knots those lights into a ball of awfulness untangling the lights takes for goddamned ever some of the lights are probably burnt out from years of use in short if i could get a new string of lights i would but for the purposes of this metaphor i have an imperfect string of lights that is always knotted in impossible configurations and thrown in a box at the back of the garage i must pause and give a shout out to leah lakshmi piepzna samarasinha as her most recent book care work dreaming disability justice provides a ton of food for thought on this very topic there are times that my day or week gets ruined by pain and fatigue and i can t do much other than wait for my body to feel better often this will happen when i am on a deadline or have to do something when it happens i ll wake up in bed in the morning and feel like i am in more pain than usual sometimes i will lie in bed and stare at the ceiling like a dingus for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half because the pain is so bad that it has either a sucked up all of my motivation to do anything about it ie taking medication or b reduced me to lying in bed and staring at the ceiling because doing anything about it would be useless continue reading jul 18 2018 2 comments disability etc wat bad sleep part 1 yes i am using images of my cute dog for this post instead of images of myself look at that bare belly just look at it i have a lifetime of questionable sleep habits these started in childhood when in the third grade i found myself unable to sleep without leaving my bedroom tv on before you leap in with you had a tv in your bedroom wtf let me assure you that it was only able to play vhs cassettes and not actual network tv my solution to insomnia at that point was simple i d pop in the disney movie cool runnings turn the volume down extremely low until i could just barely hear it and watch it until i went to sleep the weird part was that it worked for a couple of years once it stopped working when i was in the fifth grade i would regularly read until i fell asleep until my dad caught me one evening my face down in a book drool dripping onto the open pages with the light still on after that i had to figure out ways to calm myself down if i couldn t sleep and the most reliable one was what i called burrito ing where i would spread my blanket on the floor or bed lie down at one end and then roll myself into a human burrito i would roll myself in as tightly as possible which gave me an unfortunate resemblance to a butterfly pupa after this i would hop up and wiggle back into bed and usually be asleep within fifteen minutes from then on the occasional insomnia that i had was dealt with by staying in bed looking at the ceiling i stopped doing the burrito blanket roll trick when i realized that it was making me sweat buckets while i was asleep resulting in a very uncomfortable feeling when i woke up i may have also fallen out of bed a couple of times as a direct consequence of burrito rolling the pattern s of my insomnia changed when i started experiencing symptoms of fibromyalgia at 19 and was diagnosed at 20 one of the main hallmarks of fibromyalgia is that it can impact your sleep that s the polite way of saying that it will totally impact your sleep depending on its severity which can vary from patient to patient drunkenly destroy your sleep patterns with a wrecking ball then unzip its pants and energetically fuck that wreckage while we re not gonna take it by twisted sister plays way too loudly on a nearby portable stereo so my once or twice a year bouts of insomnia turned into oh once every couple of months or so when i will just be awake for no reason at all right now i have at least one bout of insomnia per month where i just cannot get to sleep often regardless of my usual level of tiredness which is very high when i thought a couple of years ago that working from home would be great for me and my bad sleep habits because one can work in one s pajamas and no outsiders would be the wiser i certainly did not mean can also emerge confused from a nausea induced nap at 1 pm on a weekday in the same crunchy sweaty pajamas that i have been wearing for the past two days because i have been in too much pain to shower working from home i honestly fetishize perfect sleep to the point that it concerns me a little once in a great while i will have a couple of hours of sleep that feels like i am floating on a fucking lavender scented cloud while lying on a cruelty free feather mattress often i will wake up and go well that was awesome but i m still tired as hell so it s time to sleep in some more it s inevitable that i will wake up from this enthusiastic nap number two disoriented and confused with my neck or shoulder bent at an unnatural angle by the time my brain in that situation goes need medication now i ve forgotten about my earlier sleep triumph and have settled back in to my normal disheveled state sometimes when i have insomnia my anxiety brain will tarzan swing in on a fucking vine no less and start yelling at me for ridiculous shit picture nick nolte doing this as my anxiety brain and screaming everything below directly into my ear and you will begin to get an idea of why i find my anxiety brain so reprehensible hey are you worrying a bunch about something that you have no control over like if editors will email you back about those pitches that you were so excited about did you check twitter today because i have news for you a bunch of people died there you can worry about that instead of your stupid problems is this being a writer thing going to work out for you seriously think about it is it i heard a noise someone s trying to break into the house spoiler alert no one is trying to break into the house who wants to read your stupid essays about whatever the fuck name one person did you know that ...
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