Don’t worry, no one said this to me recently.  There is probably no one in my life at this point who doesn’t know that if they said anything like this around me they would get a long, unpleasant lecture.  The worst coworker I’ve ever had said this to me the first time I quit smoking, which I think was 5 years ago, maybe 6.

She also used to pat clients on the head, believed that the clients who didn’t speak any of the languages that the two of us spoke never came to the office because they didn’t need any services, that it was appropriate to deny a second serving of salad to fat clients in the subsidized lunch program we ran, continually used the wrong pronouns for a spanish speaking client who was a transwoman and the coworker insisted that using male pronouns was appropriate because of the properties of spanish itself and because the client didn’t read as seamlessly female, thought the idiom “who would buy the cow when they can get the milk for free?” was a brilliant summation of how women shouldn’t have premarital (vaginal) sex, thought that it was a great idea to have anal sex instead to keep her virginity even though she disliked it and constantly wanted to tell me all about this, asked me on a regular basis why I was gay and then revealed her own homo fantasies and come ons involving her former boss, asked me constantly about my sex life even after I was very clear about not wanting to discuss this with her, and she had recently left a cult which (among other things) wouldn’t let members date until they met their money raising quotas and where she had defrauded many of her friends out of huge amounts of money (but didn’t feel bad about taking it).  Oh, and she yelled at an elderly client’s family, who lived in another country, for checking up on their family member too often over the phone and instructed the security guards to never follow the family’s request to check on this client, which contributed to me finding the client dead after a long weekend (not that it matters, but the client I found dead was one of my favorites and after finding her I had to stay in the room with her dead body for an hour while I waited for the police to arrive and a few days later I had to identify her body at the coroner’s office.)

I’m not exaggerating about any of this.

We worked in a former storage closet that was just big enough to fit two desks and chairs with two feet of space between our backs and she talked at me all day every day.  We had no other coworkers on site and for a while, right after I got hired, we didn’t even have a boss because the non-profit we worked for had been taken over by a larger non-profit who took a long time to get around to finding us a supervisor.  And when I last saw her, she was well on her way toward graudating with a social work degree from a well known institution, which is completely terrifying.

Strangely, I think it might have been because of her that I first heard about fat activism.  She was reading some news website, and exclaimed that she couldn’t believe there were actually people who thought it was ok to be fat.  While she proceeded to voice her horror at this in what must have been a 15 minute monologue, I looked up the article and felt an overwhelming sense of hope.  I’m not completely sure if that was the first time I heard about fat activism, but it was certainly early in that development.

The only reason I told her I would be quitting smoking after new years is that I was worried I would no longer be able to contain my hatred of her if she kept talking at me all the time, so I was (nicely) requesting that she be quieter in the first few weeks.  She looked at me very earnestly, leaned forward to touch my knee, and said (as I said before), “Make sure you don’t gain weight now that you’re not smoking, because that would CLEARLY be REALLY bad.”  When, flabbergasted, I told her that I wasn’t going to discuss this with her, she told me she was just being a good social worker.  Which is even worse because it means she couldn’t differentiate me from a client and she thought that would make good social work!

I was thinking about all of this because as awful as quitting smoking feels this time, I keep telling myself that it could be so much worse.  I could have to go in to work with her tomorrow.

Last night, I was at a great party.  There was dancing, talking, and flirting with queer friends and community who I am so happy to have in my life.  And I got to wear huge false eyelashes, tons of glitter, and a crazy dress, which all make me happy.  And yet, the call of cigarettes in the middle of all of that was so huge that I had two.  I haven’t had any today.  But I’m a believer in harm reduction, so it’s not like I believe that having two cigarettes makes the last week a failure, it just means that I had two cigarettes and that makes not having the next one that much harder.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about how I started smoking.  I really became a smoker when I was 19.  I had smoked a little before, as a way to get a rush breaking the rules in boarding school, and I had smoked cloves somewhat at the beginning of college because my girlfriend at the time smoked them and I was impressionable.  But when I really became a smoker, the kind of person who feels the physical need to smoke, I was in a treatment center for depression.  Smoking takes on a special significance in a treatment center.  It happens in the short breaks between the very regimented, and usually soul sucking, activities that take up the day.  And it happened with everyone – the patients and staff – together on this little smoking porch.  The rest of the time, it felt like we were at war with the staff.  To explain what I mean by that would take up way too much time, but suffice to say the staff relished the complete control they had over our lives and how they got to define who we were (I got diagnosed as having an authority problem because I disagreed with a staff person, which is funny because “authority problem” is not a diagnosis).  But on the smoking porch, everyone relaxed a little (which doesn’t mean that what you said out there wasn’t written down in a file).  So though I wasn’t a smoker when I went in, by the time I came out 10 weeks later I had become a full on smoker.  I also smoked a brand that was oddly out of character for my demographic – camel filters.

A few years later I worked in a different kind of treatment center, one focused on AIDS services for homeless people and drug users.  I found that smoking had the same kind of effect there as a staff person as it had when I had started smoking.  The rest of the time I was this young, white, wealthy kid who had huge amounts of power over clients who were mostly much older, poor, people of color.  I’m sure some of my clients hated me and certainly most of them didn’t trust me, for reasons that I agree with.  But the smoking porch, where we all went between the regimented activities that the clients were required to attend in order to receive medical and housing services, allowed those power imbalances to be a little more relaxed (not gone, of course, I still had power over them in various ways and that doesn’t disappear).   It was the only space where I didn’t feel like I was walking around shaking a big set of keys.  It was also the only space where we were allowed to share an actual tangible thing – I could give a client a cigarette and they could give me one.  So for the two years that I worked in AIDS services, smoking became an even bigger part of my life.  (Also, I feel so egocentric using smoking as the way to talk about these larger structural things, but that’s what I’m writing about today, so I’ll just have to live with that feeling.)

But I don’t have those excuses any more.  I don’t work or live in a space where smoking brings people together.  I know almost no one who smokes.  Smoking is gross, my mouth tastes horrible, and when I buy cigarettes I’m giving money to companies that I find despicable.  Most of the time, I don’t even like how smoking feels any more (though sometimes I love it).  The most compelling argument I can make for smoking’s benefits in my life, at this point, is that it’s the easiest way to get someone alone who you’re flirting with.  But my kind of flirting isn’t really subtle anyway, so I should be able to find less subtle ways to spend time alone with someone.

And to tie this to the previous post, I’ve become obsessed with putting my body through extreme pain in the form of bikram yoga as the replacement for cigarettes.  It sort of works, because at least for those 90 minutes I’m so distracted I can’t think about smoking, and then afterward I’m so high for a few hours that smoking seems less important.  I’ve also decided that bikram is training to make me a better bottom, that it’s an expression of my queer, kinky self instead of just a kind of not-smoking virtuousness (because really, I’m not invested in staying virtuous, so that’s not going to work for very long) but that’s a whole other post.

Things I am currently obsessed with:

- The power of looking – the gaze, what it means if that’s how you’re recognized as queer?  Is that a kind of power that I want?  Is it active or passive (or something else)?  How much I look and what kind of desire is behind it?  What kind of power do I have when men stop and stare at me on the street?  What kind of power do they have (and how do I take it away from them, if only in my head!)?

-Risk society and neoliberalism and how they come together so perfectly to create self-regulation and guilt instead of allowing us to see larger power structures and demand more of them (i.e., actually demanding universal healthcare).  How utterly irresponsible I think most public health is in how it furthers our obsession with risk society.  In fact, I think deepening our risk paranoia may be most public health’s primary purpose, which I really don’t have any respect for.

-That I like putting prepositions at the end of sentences.

-Healthism.  What would our lives look like if we didn’t expect to be healthy all the time?  If we didn’t take it as a personal failing when we aren’t?

-That I don’t believe in the beautiful, I think it’s coercive, I’m attracted to people who are usually seen as unattractive, and yet I’m so fucking vain.  What’s that about?

- That a fat activist friend asked if I’d lost weight because she wanted to talk about the issues if it was purposeful, and I said no, but then weighed myself for the first time in a very long time and she’s right.  This had the odd effect of making me feel out of touch with my body and kind of mad at her for bringing it up and making me think about it, since I have a pretty strict no-comment policy on my body and weight, and yet I understand her wanting to talk about it.

- That new york city is small in such a strange way.  I keep running in to former students.  Someone I’ve known since jr high booked me for a toy party without knowing it was me and that was weird.  And yet nothing makes me happier than when I run in to people I love on the street in such a big city.

- What would queer cultural competencies look like for interpreters and are they even possible?  How do you create cultural competencies for something that defines itself as unstable?  But since all cultures are unstable, how do you create cultural competencies for anything?

-That the good side in Harry Potter doesn’t stand for anything interesting.  It stands against fascism and eugenics, and that’s clearly great, but in the end the good side is still just England, with all its bureaucracy.

- That so many of my friends are obsessed with dating and scarcity and this obsession makes me really sad.  I think we have to be whole – or not – on our own and in communities that are working to break down their own hegemonies and this scarcity fear just reinforces fucked up hierarchies.  And yet I don’t know how to break down those hierarchies.

-That I feel so alive in my body recently and that’s incredible.

-That I’m not sure I can ever move to the west coast because I think “non-violent communication” is actually unbelievably violent and horrifying, and it’s incredibly popular in radical communities in cities over there.

- That I want Sarah and I to finally write our book called, “Fat, Late, and Messy” about the moral weight put on things that are seen as disorder.  I swear this book wouldn’t just be self-serving.

-That so far turning 30 has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me.  I feel strong and fearless (more about that in a minute) in a way that feels totally unexpected.

Most of these could be full posts, and maybe/hopefully they will be some day, but mostly, in a way that feels pretty frivolous, I want to write about yoga.  Yoga!

Part II:

First, a yoga class in vermont, and then a yoga class in brooklyn.  The vermont yoga class was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever been to.  It was the day before Thanksgiving and the class was being taught by a substitute teacher.  To start class she said, “The holidays are such a frantic time!  I’ve seen people rushing around all day [note: this is in a very small town.  I don't know what people she could be talking about] so to prepare you for this stressful time we’re going to do 45 minutes of poses and then I’m going to read to you and you’ll meditate for the other half of class.”  What?  In my opinion you can’t just spring that on people.  Then, during the incredibly short portion where we actually moved, this teacher couldn’t decide who she wanted to be – part of her wanted to be reassuring and tell people they could make all sorts of modifications and part of her wanted to make my sister (who is amazing at yoga and was clearly trying not to show off) get up in front of the class and model the terrifying extreme versions of poses.  Knowing that my sister has been traumatized by this kind of calling out since 2nd grade, I felt really bad for her (I’m being serious).

But here’s the interesting part, for me, of this totally silly class: it was easy.  I mean, I know, yoga isn’t about being easy or hard because every pose benefits the body, blah blah blah.  But, stepping back in to the way we actually think, this was easy for me and I haven’t had an easy yoga class in a long time.  At first I kind of felt like I was wasting my time, but then I realized, “Wait, you mean all those times I’m struggling and feeling like I’m going to die in yoga class it’s because I’m choosing to do something hard!”  Choosing. And I can choose to do something hard, that gives me actual agency, versus just feeling like it’s all so fucking hard and my body can’t do.  In other words, knowing there was something that felt too easy made me feel more excited to do the thing that feels hard.

So then, I’m back in Brooklyn and I decide to go back to bikram yoga.  For me, like a lot of people, bikram yoga makes me want to die while I’m in it, but afterward it’s the most amazing high and that high lasts for hours (as does the redness in my face).  Anyway, I’m at bikram with this teacher who is a total hard ass.  She keeps telling me I’m not allowed to make modifications, which kind of pisses me off, and that I just have to try harder and I’ll be able to get in to all the poses.  Then at some point she comes over and tells me I am filled with fear, that she can see the fear, and that’s why I can’t do a pose.  And let me tell you, part of me wanted to tell her off.  I wanted to tell her that I’m fat, so my body doesn’t fold over on itself the way hers does.  I wanted to tell her, how dare she tell me I’m full of fear – I’m fucking fierce, that there’s no way she could know how much strength it takes to dress the way I do, to not hide my body, and still walk down the street, and yell back at the daily street harassment.  I wanted to tell her that I am fearless in getting what I want even when it’s hard.  I wanted to tell her that I am fearless especially in how I fuck – what kind of pain I can take, the way I can push myself, the way my body can open up in ways that years ago I would never have thought possible.

But you know, that’s all pretty inappropriate, and not really the point anyway.  So I decided instead to take what she said seriously and to take it at face value.  What I mean by that is, I decided not to assume that she using fear as a roundabout way of saying that the fat on my body is protection against something, and will go away once I’m no longer scared (which is what my best friend thinks was she was saying).  I decided instead to just accept the idea that in this specific way, right now, I am still scared of my body.  I mean, we’re all taught to be terrified of having a body – that if we don’t spend every minute of the day hating them and regulating them that our bodies will completely betray us and go out of control.  It’s pretty hubristic to think I would have somehow expunged all that body fear already.  Anyway, there is no triumphant ending to this story and I don’t need there to be.  It’s not like once I accepted this then suddenly my body did something totally new.  I’m just processing what it means to accept being told that this teacher can see my fear, and to think about what would need to happen – how I would need to push myself – to get past that fear.  Plus now it’s hours after the yoga class and I’m still so full of endorphins that I feel like a fucking superhero.

In the last decade of my life I have, not in any kind of order and in no way comprehensively, found fat politics, bought an apartment, moved to nyc (where I always wanted to live), graduated from college, fallen in love, learned that non-profits with great politics can still treat their workers badly, found play parties, started identifying as femme, walked up my four flights of stairs an insane number of times and I still curse them every time, found a queer community, learned that I love the internet, started using lube, found great coffee, learned that I can be in a long term monogamous relationship but I don’t like to be, started watching the wire and firefly and west wing and realized tv can be so good, grown my hair sort of long again.

I’ve been really upset about this birthday for weeks.  I’ve been worried about where I am in my life, feeling like I’m still lost, that I haven’t accomplished enough, that my apt is still a mess, I still pay my bills late, I still hate the mail, I’m still bad at keeping in touch, and then there are the newer bad qualities –  the temper and meanness this last relationship suddenly brought out of me that I didn’t even know I had, for example.  But I’m not that upset about all of that for the moment.  I’m going to bed for 4 hours, I’ll wake up and frantically clean and cook, and then I’ll have a big birthday party with people that I love.  And maybe I’ll make up a ceremony to cleanse and let go of the past and all that shame and anger.

Like everyone else with an abandoned blog, I’ve resolved to start writing here more.  In this case “more” is a pretty low bar, since I think I’ve posted twice in the last year or so.  Towards that end, I am inviting you (my 5 or 10 readers) to tell me what you would like to see me write about (I know at least one of you, Ester, has been waiting for this opportunity for years while I have obstinately resisted for no reason).   Either leave them in the comments or go to my newly set up formspring page.  I stole this idea from Fatshionista, where the use of the formspring page has lead to some pretty great posts. So go, be inquisitive and helpful.

Let me back up first and describe what kind of depression I’m talking about.  I have been seriously depressed for over ten years.  I find it terrifying (and dreadfully depressing) to say that.  It has ebbed and flowed, worsened and improved, throughout that time, but it has never gone away.  I’ve been trying for a long time to accept that it probably never will.  Of the many ways I describe my depression, one is that it feels like an actual being, that is alive, wholly separate from me, living inside my body (though I’m not sure it is contained by my body) and it is trying to destroy me by slowly taking away everything that is humanizing.  Sort of like the kinds of giant tape worms that my 9th grade biology teacher was obsessed with, but one that is a shifting amorphous shape with sharp teeth and claws sticking out.  I have no doubt that it is trying to killing me.  It is not a parasite that needs to keep its host alive so it can live.  I don’t know what it will do if it ever succeeds in killing me, but I’m sure it will celebrate this as a success.  [In case you are worried reading this, I am in treatment for this and I have many different support structures set up to make sure that when it gets really, unbearably bad, I can find a way out.  I am not currently in danger.  The more I tell people, the less danger I am in.  One of many things this post is doing is telling people.  So now, hopefully, you can go on reading the post without worrying.]

My depression seeks to cut me off from the rest of the world because it grows bigger and stronger from isolation.  When I try to tell anyone how depressed I am, that I am suicidal, my depression tightens my throat and chest, creates an instant headache, blurs my eyes, furrows my brow, and makes me gasp for breath.  It is doing all of those things as I write this.  If none of those work, it sickens my stomach and makes my mouth so dry that I gag.  If I have not given up, if I am still trying to tell anyone, it makes me cry uncontrollably so that I cannot speak intelligibly.  In other words, it is physical.  I am not describing this metaphorically – it actually does all these things to my body.  It has a physical presence that is palpable for me.  It is as if the monster that is my depression can sense that it is going to be even slightly diminished when I speak about it out loud and so it claws and scratches, kicks and punches, furiously to make sure this does not happen.  As a result of this, plus a mixture of shame, embarrassment, and a sense of futility, I rarely tell people.

When I am less depressed, I have desires for all kinds of things.  Success, security, connection, love, sex, really amazing food.  When I am less depressed I want to feel good in my body, to feel passionate about my work, to learn new things and deepen the things I already know.  When I am less depressed I want to have adventures, see friends, flirt, discover new things about the city where I live.  When I am less depressed I want to find new ways to fuck, I want to try out all of the unbelievable number of sex toys I own (from having worked for years in a sex toy shop), I want to act out fantasies, I want to find the tops who can push me to new places, I want to see how much pain I can take, I want to learn the edges of my sensations, I want to learn new things.  When I am less depressed I want to perform, I want to dress up and wear ridiculous shoes and clothes that are way too tight, I want to look like a drag queen, I want to be seen and control that gaze.  When I am less depressed I want stories to consume, in all the forms stories come in, books, tv, movies, radio, blogs, magazines, in person.  This list could go on and on.  You’re probably already guessing the next part.  When I am deeply depressed, I can’t desire any of these things.  When I am deeply depressed, I can barely muster up the desire to get out of bed.  And some days I can’t even do that.  I picture it like a pie chart, where in more normal times those hundreds of desires are all reasonably large slices, shifting in size depending on the situation.  But when I’m this depressed they all shrink way down to tiny slivers, or even just dotted lines that are the memory of a sliver and they almost never budge.  And all of that space from those formerly robust slices gets transferred over to one huge portion filling up the vast majority of the chart.  That slice is of course the depression itself, which is the anti-desire, the desire for nothing, to cease to exist, to never have any more desires.

But today I had a very small realization about all of this.  When this is my reality, even the slightest desire becomes a tiny, humanizing, anti-depression force.  Before I had this realization I thought that the desires I am able to have in this state – the desire for coffee, for example – were basically worthless because they were so puny compared to the panoply of desires I can have other times.  I was measuring it against the varied, dynamic portions of desire that I can want when I am in a semi-normal state.  But that isn’t how it should be measured.  Instead, if I see the depression as this thing that wants to let nothing, no desires, get through at all, then even one as insignificant as coffee – really good coffee from the place that is a 15 minute walk from my house where the baristas know me – is actually huge.  It has gotten through the nets that try to stop it from rising to the level of actual desire. Clearly this desire can get me out of bed, out of the house, walking, talking to another person, tasting something, and possibly give me some amount of energy, so it is actually a very good desire.  But those are not actually all required for a desire to have small anti-depressant qualities.  Almost any desire becomes a little glimmer that there is something else inside of me that still exists, something that has not yet been consumed by the giant tape worm.

What I am trying to say is that today I realized that for me the ability to desire is the opposite of depression.  (The one exception to this in my life may be the desire for cigarettes, which is about addiction even though I quit a long time ago.)  So these desires need to be – carefully – listened to, fostered, cultivated.  They are tiny little moments when my body can express something that the monster that is the depression does not want expressed.  They are humanizing and connecting.  They are of this world instead of the thing that is trying to remove me from it.  They are good.

Today in two different conversations with acquaintances about the election I heard these comments that I just can’t stop thinking about. (Clearly, since I do not walk around recording my conversations, these are not exactly quotes.  They are as close as I can get):

The mean-spirited one first, “I really thought, when I saw that the country was going to have to choose between a woman and a black person – I know this is bad but – I really thought the good outcome of this is that people would turn to a third party candidate.  I mean, when there really is no other choice, I thought people would finally look to a new party.”   What do you say to that? “Fuck you!” or “It’s always nice when sexism and racism can be instrumental in furthering your own agenda.  I know we’ve all enjoyed that in the past.  You must feel really honorable.”

The second, fabulous comment, in a different conversation, “When Obama mentioned disabled people in his speech I knew the world was changing in front of my eyes.  Look at my body.  This is a disabled body.  This is who I am.  We are never looked at without fear, we are never talked about in unsentimental terms.  But he stood up there and he named us.  And he will keep naming us.  This is a new political world, one I’m proud to participate in.”

I felt the same way about Obama including gay people in his list.  I know it’s not enough.  I’m furious about Prop 8 passing in California and taking it surprisingly personally, as if the state just voted on whether or not they hated me and all my friends specifically (I know that’s myopic, but that’s how it feels.)  Being mentioned in a victory speech doesn’t make up for having rights taken away (obviously), but it gave me hope nonetheless.

I swear I will stop writing meta-posts at some point. This is how I get used to a new idea. Next week I go to Seattle for 6 days to see my sweetie. We’ve been together for just over 5 months and this will be the first time we have had that many days in a row together. Isn’t that so strange?

1. I generally want to analyze every possible topic. I was raised by a progressive educator who believed that you can develop any skill through any entry point, so why not pick as many entry points as possible (somehow this did not include tv, which just rots your mind, in my mother’s view). She also didn’t believe in being bored – meaning, literally, that if I told her I was bored in school she told me it was my job to find a way to make it interesting. Elementary school was basically a constant oscillation for me between being academically bored and socially terrified, so I quickly learned how to pick apart and problematize everything to at least make the boredom sort of go away. This all happened in my head, since I never spoke in school as a kid. It did make me a great student, though I’m not sure it’s a very good survival tool for life and I think it helps me only slightly more than it hurts me as an interpreter. But anyway, I am shocked that I am bored by the topic of love.

2. I am, as we speak, in love with Logan, the one who asked me the question that started this post. Does saying that I find the topic of love uninteresting make it sound like I’m not really in love? I think it does, I’m worried it does. But what is there to say about it that isn’t kind of insipid and bragging? Logan and I send each other an enormous number of text messages, which my phone saves in one long file as if they are a instant messenger conversation. I hope no one ever sees this file, which now stretches over the last 5 months, but if someone did find it, I’d be less embarrassed for them to read the parts where I tell Logan in detail exactly how I want to fuck her (or be fucked) than if they read the whole days (weeks!) where the messages are just pure, saccharine, mush.

I do not think falling in love (or being in a romantic/sexual relationship) is a kind of success. I try to almost never ask friends if they are dating anyone, because I think asking is a kind of pressure (i.e.: this is valuable enough that I should ask about it) and an implication that they are not successful unless they are dating someone. (I am happy to listen if they want to talk about it though.) I am as uninterested in talking about love as I am in talking about happiness.

But the point of the title of this blog is that nothing is definite and unchanging. Maybe in a few months I will suddenly think love is fascinating and worth writing about. In the past I’ve been pretty bored by the idea of talking about how relationships work too, but my struggling and apparent resistance to being in a relationship has suddenly made that topic pretty fascinating.